One of the exciting initiatives this year at school is the expectation to go outside everyday. We’ve been working together to think about what kinds of things we can do that doesn’t involve a whole lot of planning for teachers who aren’t comfortable to start getting outside.
My contribution was writing. One of the things we can do anywhere is write, and so I’ve created a quick video about my students writing outside. As you can see, some write along, some in groups, it’s just a way to get outside and start developing a sense of place (even if it’s not intentional).
After about two years, I’m finally a part of a blog sharing program (hooray right?). Anyway, we can select from a number of different prompts and then we respond to how it’s going. I chose What is your watch #teachermyth because I think like a lot of us, we have things that don’t work, but we keep around just in case they start to work at some point. The purpose of objects can change, and that can also change our workflow, so, I guess we all need to look a little closer into what’s actually being used effectively in our and our students’ learning.
For me, and I’m not sure how to say this as a digital literacy coach, I’m not sure blogging for students is hitting the same purpose as it was. When it was new and exciting, lots of my classes had exchanges with different schools from all over. Now it seems more like just a reflection exercise. Blogging isn’t just boring (for students anyway) anymore, I think we have lost the point of transformative learning. On the SAMR model, it might just be augmentation, I guess the point of this is that we really have to get to what is it’s current purpose.
I also wonder about most technology being a watch. Are we still using it to redefine and transform education or are we looking for easy substitutes or to fill in time or to make our lives easier?
Regardless I guess, I was excited by the chance to reflect on what I’m doing in class. I think this article made me think of how and what I teach a little differently.
Often I think about what I am implicitly teaching my students. I wonder if I’m acting appropriately in front of them, if I am speaking about all people mindfully, if I’m always showing respect to the environment around me. I believe that implicit actions outweigh the benefits of explicit teaching.
Last week I went to see Craig Smith speak about creative music making. I went because I was interested in making music, I learned a lot more about teaching than I thought I would have before setting out that night. While he did talk about skoog, music making, coding and giving everyone a choice I learned more about how to be honest in a class.
I’ve worked with a lot of learning support teachers, and many more regular classroom teachers. Part of my thesis was on how people act based on their values (often they don’t seem to be aligned in the classroom or regarding curriculum). I felt like I could tell a lot about what Craig believed just by how he interacted with his audience.
From all the presentations I’ve been too, I never had the sense that the person presenting actually respected and valued everyone, but Craig was different. In all his mannerisms, his speaking and how he handled everything he just showed a ton of respect. I came to learn about music making, but left thinking about so much more.
As a classroom, our idea of flexible seating is evolving. The students are still (so it seems) a little bit unused to the idea of agency and are still waiting for teachers to control how things move.
So, we’ve suggest a couple of things, and our classroom has switched the tables around three or four times, but I’m hoping that they soon start taking ownership of why and how the tables move.
For our first unit we are looking at humans and nature interact and how that impacts our environment.
We’ve been looking closely at Singapore, because we live here, and how the planning of the city has impacted nature, but also how nature has impacted where we choose to live, and how we choose to live.
So far it’s been really interesting, students have been using Google Earth to look at where cities are mostly located and why they may be located there, big surprise water is an important factor. Looking through field trips and museum walks we’ve started to think a little more like city planners.
Looking forward to the next couple weeks to really uncover what and how people interact with the environment.
This is our first week back, and the adventure begins.
This is also my first year in a classroom in five years. I’m pretty excited about it, as a Digital Literacy Coach I worked a lot in classrooms and with classroom teacher, but I haven’t actually been guiding a class for sometime.
So my first week back I decided I wanted to be a flexible classroom. I want the students to be able to decided how and when to sit a certain way. This gives my students a little more agency and just establishes us as co-creators of a classroom which is pretty exciting.
Not too much to report after just a day, but I wanted to start getting in the habit of writing.
I do a lot of things in my off time, even though I really like doing nothing. One of the things I’m doing this year is captaining/coaching a frisbee team. We have a great coach we work with, and he was talking about stages of a great ultimate player, and I thought this applied a lot to learning too.
I wonder how often we are stuck in the conscious incompetent stage. Without a learning coach or someone explicitly helping us become conscious and competent, how can we easily navigate our own life long learning.
Part of the job I think I am good at is listening and helping shape consciousness and direct people towards competence. When we can understand what we need to do to get better, I think it’s much easier for us to make that progress, it’s when we don’t understand that we feel frustrated.
As a beginner things can be liberating because we don’t even know what we’re doing wrong, everything is just kind of fun, but as we get through the process things can become more difficult.
I think we can apply this easily to many aspects of our learning, but I like how this image shows the disappointment. Once we start becoming more conscious we enter into this “trough of disillusionment”.
So how can we remain optimistic about the future like we are when we are unconscious and still promote and develop consciousness?
We’ve been working on getting a home set up for our tadpoles, last week students researched what tadpoles needed to survive and this week they started putting the habitats together. This is pretty great for us because when we went back outside, the water is all gone, so no home for our little friends.
As a learning journey the students loved it, they learned a lot about tadpoles (and it’s still on going) and they are totally motivated to make the most out of their habitats, pretty exciting times.
We were walking in the outdoor discovery center the other day, and it looked like a lot of our problems (litter, dying plants, chalk) had disappeared, or been taken care of. So we started looking for new things we could solve.
It had been raining a lot, so there were lots of puddles (it’s been a really strange rainy season here in Singapore). Anyway, the learners found tadpoles. So currently we are wondering how we can make the tadpoles environment a little more secure. It was an interesting day.
Joe Teft 