joeteft

November 30, 2017

Is independence killing community?

5618982173_7988e7c33c_b — Some rights reserved by JameEz Photogr

I led a PD yesterday on inquiry. When I’m working with a new group of people I usually start off by asking, do you know who this man is?

glenmills11

Usually the answer is no. They figure he has something to do with track. The answer is Glen Mills, Usain Bolt’s coach. I start off this way because I want people to see you don’t have to be the best to teach the best. You have to be a good coach, you have to teach well, you have to want the best for someone else.

I ended off this particular PD with the idea “Do you want to be the best teacher or do you want to have the best learners?”

With teachers promoting themselves or their style (myself included) I wonder how that effects students? Like how does my being a Google Certified Educator benefit my students (other than having some useful skills, does that actual designation mean anything)? How does me collecting badges help my students? When I focus on myself, how does that effect the community?

If we believe that knowing is situationally constructed and socially constructed where is there value outside of a community?

I fully understand that people join these communities (Google Certified Educator, etc.) For reasons that might be different, they may want to join a passionate community to push the boundaries of what we can do. I’m just not convinced everyone joins for communal reasons.

When I relate this to my environmental thinking, it seems like very often we are selfish (surprise right) and that leads to environmental instability and change. Because we take what we want without thinking too much about how that effects the larger community (human or otherwise).

This week has been just focused on these thoughts. What do I implicitly and explicitly teach about independence and community and how can I focus on making my learners more community oriented. I think I’d rather work with someone for them to be the best rather than being the best myself.

November 21, 2017

What is making?

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Talking to people like @rangerridely and @deir75 from the previous post (and over the years) we’ve wondered a lot about what making actually is, and how do we use these ideas in class.

As a digital literacy coach I’ve thought a lot about the idea of creation (and of course you need content to create) but the whole idea where students choose what they make. Recently, especially during some of our more science based units, it seems like some teachers thing their students have to make something with “maker space parts”. I’ve been trying to work this out for myself, but I think making something, regardless of the unit could be making anything.

A couple of years ago (or it seems like that anyway) I went to a workshop put on by The Nerdy Teacher. It was really interesting as he was an English teacher using the maker space idea. He came from a place where he didn’t want twenty odd dioramas showing the same scene from a book. So he opened it up, and got submissions from street lamps to boats. He didn’t assess the product (or at least that’s what I remember him saying) he assessed the thinking behind the product and what that thing was important.

So I’ve been wondering if we take that point of view, how can we apply this to our new energy unit. Do students really need to make something out of “maker space bits”? Could we make an art project about what we think this new energy world might look like? Could we make a movie about the perils of using non-renewable resources? Could we turn vegan and make ourselves new?

Any other ideas?

November 16, 2017

Creating as learning

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of personalised learning and how to set it up so different people learn differently. If we can encourage curiosity and provide engaging contexts we can have students pursuing their own goals.

Our next unit is about how our changing understanding of energy effects living things. I think this a pretty great unit for students to start exploring their own interests. We are asking them (for at least three times every week) to work on a problem they see connected to our central idea. At first we had some issues if we needed to provide different problems for students to explore, however, after some talking to colleagues we agreed that we would let students pick their own problems.

We used forms to ask students what they thought a problem might be, we lumped the big ideas surrounding each problem together and a teacher will take a group with related problems together. Students can decide to work in either groups or on their own to pursue this idea.

It starts on Monday, really looking forward to it. Any ideas for things they might be able to create?

November 7, 2017

Tracking Learning

35549206345_396e424b56_b — All rights reserved by TheGraffitiHunters

This kind of comes from the last post about personalising learning. Some of the teachers and I have been using google forms for tracking student learning (specifically related to outcomes or standards), tracking anecdotal notes between classes, or just taking notes or images about how students are learning so we can adapt and work with them as best as possible.

The next step (for me I think anyway) is how can we put this in the hands of the learner. How can we set goals with the students so they can track their learning and see their growth. If we can make that growth visible and something to work towards, can we also start linking in other things?

I think I’m going to start with forms, have students set up a goal and then they can track it on something like Marzano’s four point rubric. original-858397-3

If they can use this to track their learning over time, they can look at specific learning goals and see how they’ve progressed and changed.

Any other thoughts?

October 30, 2017

Learning Communities

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I’ve been thinking a lot about learning lately. Most of the time I hope teachers do, but the lsat week it’s been right at the forefront of my thinking.

My school has been talking more about personalised learning lately, and what that might mean at our school. At first I was really worried about this, not because I don’t believe in it, but as a digital literacy coach I could sense some anxiety from my colleagues. How do we really create personalised learning? What does that mean, and how do we get to it?

This year, so far, the iTime experiment has been going really well. Students are creating apps, making a siren, creating websites, making a stand for my ukulele, making some cars and many other things. It’s interesting to see what the students have chosen to learn more about. The hardest thing for us (as a learning community so far) is how do we authentically assess this. We have a form which allows us to identify how we want to be assessed and how we think we are doing in regards to that and our project. But it seems forced at the end, because it just doesn’t seem like it fits at that time. Next week I think I will have some conversations with them as they head towards self/peer assessment using these forms.

I think a lot of it goes back to the idea of time though, and how the idea of limited time, or a rushed curriculum can hinder someone’s ability to be really creative, or take risks. I wonder how we as teachers, especially in a “competitive, international” environment can really make a move on this without a fear of repercussions.

Anyway, if you’re doing personlised learning, how do you do it? What area your tips?

October 24, 2017

Change my view

Screen Shot 2017-10-24 at 9.42.38 AM — taken from: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2016/10/09/yanss-086-change-my-view/

I recently took to twitter about this. I’ve been listening to this “You are not so smart” podcast and most of them are really great this one really got me thinking.

There is a community of people on reddit who willingly want their points of view changed. Last year I went to a conference where we talked about bad ideas and how to turn them into good ideas. My idea was bad decision or opposite decision app. This podcast goes along the same idea.

My biggest wondering after this podcast was, how do we get people to the point where they want to change their view. How can was as teachers get students to understand that their beliefs are theirs because of the things they know and the experiences they have had but they aren’t always “right”.

Another thing my wife and I really enjoyed was the ideas about how to changes someone’s mind who wants it changed. Previously they did a number of backfire effect episodes where they talked about how to change people’s minds who don’t want to change their minds.

I think the idea of brining people together who are open minded and wanting to change how and what they think can be really powerful. I want to get started created something like this.

October 4, 2017

Empowered Learners

12486466643_d68ec19161_b — Some rights reserved by Ken Whytock

Our school has adopted the ISTE standards for teachers and students. I talked to a colleague yesterday about the idea of empowered learner. We’ve focused on this from a digital literacy point of view, and as a teacher, I try to focus on this in my class as well.

As DLCs, we’ve tried to change how our PD works. We wanted the choice to come from teachers rather than from administration. We believe that everyone basically knows what they are good at, and should have some understanding of where to go. A member of our team has created a list of basic competencies we expect all teachers to have. It is up to them to go through the list and see if they know or don’t know what is needed (if they don’t know we have videos provided through Lynda to help them, or we are around to help people to address specific needs.

Not all teachers like this model, we are preparing something for the people who are beyond the core competencies and have already received their google, apple teacher or whatever. We are planning on doing a blogging group. We are focused on this as an empowered learning opportunity, we are co-learning, we all lead, we all follow, we all learn together. I’m really looking forward to this aspect for my own personal learning.

Finally (for now I guess) in the classroom my students are being constantly encouraged to take control of their own learning. Today we did a simcity 2000 activity. I wanted to focus on two things. My explicit lesson was how do we build a city, my implicit lesson was how do we problem solve. Students didn’t read how to play and were very bothered, they got frustrated, couldn’t build power plants and had a hard time working on any thing, their cities never were constructed. I called them to the learning area and we discussed some of the problems we faced. So then I asked, “So, what did you do to solve these problems?”. They all asked me to solve their problems for them. We brought up again what it meant to be a learner, and how we learn best. Even using the internet for a game they couldn’t think of using it to solve their problems. I explained to them how I worked through the same problems on my own. It took some time, but so much of learning does. In the end, my students have a better understanding of how to start solving problems, and next time our cities will hopefully be much more interesting.

By embracing the empowered learning standard we’ve had some great opportunities to authentically learn, and work with our students and colleagues.

September 26, 2017

Getting into habits

12628662713_be6899e0b4_b — Some rights reserved by -Curly-

Coming off of PD last weekend, it was put on by our school, and honestly probably the best our school has put on. The main take away for me is that we always need to be practicing to get better for our kids.

But, I guess, practice can get boring. I’ve been doing iTime for a year or so now, before when I was a classroom teacher I did it every week. For me, I guess it’s more routine than practice now, so I don’t really see teaching life without it. I was talking to a colleague about iTime being a good practice session for the Exhibition. Students have a chance to practice being independent, setting their own assessment criteria, guiding their own learning, and following a passion. However my colleague was worried about time, more specifically how long and boring the “practice time” could be.

It’s great to see different perspectives, we had a good conversation and I think we both learned a lot. The plus side for me is that with that conversation and the PD, over half my grade six team is now keen to do iTime.

September 19, 2017January 29, 2018

Designing cities

We’ve been working on what makes a city and how do people and nature impact a city’s design.

All of my students created some sort of presentation, because it was open to what they could use I got a lot of different types of submissions. One of my students had the rubric embedded into his project so he could show exactly how he was addressing each aspect. One used Explain Everything to create a more interactive presentation, and Milind used a slide show based approach to illustrate his creation.

My learning from this is that I feel like I got better quality presentations because I didn’t tell them what to use, by giving them freedom I learned a lot more about my students’ preferred styles.

More than that the presentations were different which made it more exciting for me to see every presentation. Which made me more engaged with their learning and more excited to provide multiple forms of feedback.