Last week I set the goal of engaging my students in the following ways: 

• Peer work
  
  Technology
  
  PBL (long-term goal- not yet accoplished)
  
  Love what I do and share the passion
  
  Movement (not accomplished)
  
  Use Visuals
  
  Student Choice
  
  Student Ownership
  
  Mix it up – different activities
  
  Have fun as the teacher
  
  
  

Though I did not complete all ten, here are some of the pleasant surprises and hiccups that came along with checking these goals off my list this week.

Pleasant Surprises

(Student Choice) My students worked extremely well together to complete their culminating projects for the Global Read Aloud book ‘Out of my Mind’. I had students engaged creating me various projects; songs about overcoming disability, research projects on Cerebral Palsy, a biography on a girl with Down Syndrome, and comic strips highlighting key events in the novel. Each students followed the expectations, using cues from their planning sheets and the rubric that was provided.

(Student Ownership) The students had some really good suggestions when I asked them to complete their Stop, Start and Continue Feedback slips. Here are some suggestions I will be using to help creating next week’s goals.

        Start working with us individually during Math time

I will say I have proficiently provided one-on-one time during Language Arts to discuss literacy, but not enough time on literacy. I will take students who are struggling aside to reinforce numeracy strategies, but I have not extended this to all of my students in Math class.

        Continue giving us more projects

This encourages me to pursue Project Based Learning. Although the project this weekend was for learning assessment, I was really impressed by their level of engagement.

        Start giving us more P.E

Students just love their phys. Ed. time. Though I cannot give them more time for this subject area due to curriculum hour allocation, I will try to integrate more physical activity and game activities in to my other subject areas.

        Continue to read us more books

This I feel is getting to know the specific interests of each class. As a class, they were extremely receptive to the Global Read Aloud. Even though this is now completed, I think I will look to the Rocky Mountain Book Award list to find great books to share with my class.

Hiccups

(Student Choice) When planning the project, I did not consider Bloom’s Taxonomy. I found that during the students’ working process, I was facilitating students to vary the project based when the work the student was providing was not at the level I felt they were ready to perform. In retrospect, I would have integrated more of Bloom’s taxonomy into the planning process to help decrease the redirection I provided to students once they had begun.

(Visual) I set out to represent our ‘Right to Left’ Addition and Subtraction strategies in a skit format. I feel like explaining the skit would not be effective, but in the end I do not think it helped the students to understand the concept better. Therefore, I will continue to look for effective interactive ways to represent math strategies for my students.

In closing, here are the goals I have set for myself for the next two weeks. This week my Leadership class is delivering the school’s first Cultural Fair – so I am giving myself more time to get these goals accomplished.

1.      Provide more one-on-one time with all students in Mathematics to help reinforce strategies and introduce new strategies when needed

2.      Initiate a Project Based Learning Project. Consider Bloom’s Taxonomy during the planning process

3.      Integrate more physical activity and games in to other subject areas

4.      Choose another great book to read to the class.

5.      In addition to goal 4, find related books to feature as book talks to encourage individual reading

6.      Integrate effective interactive and visual ways to represent math strategies

At times, I feel the quotidian demands of my role as teacher compromise my enthusiasm to try new ideas and inspire love of learning. Demands like dealing with student conflict, classroom management, and assessment get my mind set on work-pilot mode and I lose that passion of making learning fun. This week I have given myself the goal using each one of these 10 tips for student engagement to help truly engage and inspire my students.  Here is the ‘Kids speak out on Student Engagement’ article link published by Edutopia:  

 http://www.edutopia.org/blog/student-engagement-stories-heather-wolpert-gawron?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=blog-kids-speak-out-question

Here are some of the ways I plan to implement these strategies this week:

1. Peer work

I have embraced collaborative student work in the physical space of my classroom. I have replaced desks with tables and left an open space in the center for class and group collaboration. This week I stepped back and asked myself “Am I allowing my students to take advantage of this space?”

I found the answer was not enough. After a few adjustments to my arrangements, I am ready to embrace Monday with a new perspective embracing more peer work. Digging back into the bag of tricks with which my university professors sent me off into the work field, I have rediscovered such strategies as ‘Think, Pair, Share’.  I will also let me students work on formative assessments with each other and embrace chatter as potential learning, rather than distraction from learning.

2. Technology

I feel like I have made good progress with using technology in my classroom this year. I have my students using Padlet as a fast and effective way to post reflections to questions. I recently have tried 100 Word Challenge in conjunction with KidBlog to get my students creative writing. This week I am going to take things further and try a Skype session with another class. I have been participating in Global Read Aloud these last 5 weeks, and my students are in love with the book. During the Skype session we will be discussing the book ‘Out of My Mind’ by Sharon Draper. In order to get my students to practice behaviour during a Skype session – and provide myself an opportunity to work out the process of Skyping class to class – we will be having a practice Skype with our principal.

3. PBL

PBL is one of my TPGPs for this year. I will not be tackling it this week, but I will be integrating PBL in my teaching throughout the year.

4. Love what I do and share the passion

My passion for teaching is certainly related to my passion for all student learning and passion to create positive change in the world. Learning is the door to embracing life and enjoying our short role in the amazing production of humanity. The more we know, the more amazing the world becomes, and the more we realize our individual gifts are needed to better our world. My students deserve all of this – to be in awe of life and feel needed.

So I dug a little deeper to search for some of my personal passions to help ignite love of learning in my class. I have always been an avid reader. I love books, and more specifically, I love young adult fiction. As a result, I will inject my enthusiasm for teaching and learning through book talks. I have recently begun the book ‘Wonder’ by R. J. Palacio, which has similar themes to ‘Out of My Mind’, in addition to it being a wonderful book. So, I will be delivering a book talk about ‘Wonder’ to my students to help encourage love of reading.

5. Movement

Get them moving. I often do math aerobics when my students have been in their seats too long. I write a basic multiplication sentence on the whiteboard. The first person to correctly answer gets to choose an activity the students must do, such as jumping jacks, in the quantity of the product.

This week I will integrate physical activity in my literacy lesson. I will have balls with words we have currently brought up in class, such as the word envious. A student will throw said ball at the class. If the student who is hit by the ball can come up with a synonym and an antonym for the word on the ball, they get to be the thrower. This idea was inspired by the ‘Mix it Up’ portion of the Edutopia article.

6. Visual

This week to make things more visual, I will be integrating a teacher led skit in my math lessons to demonstrate the strategy of borrowing in subtraction.

7. Student Choice

Seeing as we are at the end of the novel ‘Out of my Mind’, it is time for a culminating assessment! I will allow my students to choose from a list of options for this activity. I have used Gardner’s theory on multiple intelligences to guide the choices I provide so that all types of learners may engage with this culminating assessment. Here is a list of the options I will provide:

·         Act out a key scene from the book

·         Create a poster encouraging understanding for others’ disabilities

·         Write a journal entry from the main character’s perspective

·         Stage an interview between a news reporter and the main character

·         Create a comic strip in the day in the life of the main character

8. Student Ownership

I admit that I should be better at this. I, as many teachers do, want to be at the helm of my classroom. If I am not directing the flow of my classroom, I feel I am not doing my job to facilitate learning. Perhaps it is time that I challenge myself to structure the activities to encourage more student ownership.

This week I will ask myself "How would I feel if I were this student?" when considering student interaction with their learning.  

I will also try better to ask my students for a ’Start, Stop and Continue’ feedback sheet after lessons.

9. Mix it up

I feel the aforementioned activities all meet this goal.

10. Have fun as the teacher

My students’ laughter and insights can be infectious. So can my focus on ‘getting the job done’, and perhaps that is not for the best. When the last 5 minutes of the day arrives, do I allow my students to inquire more, or do I stop them to make sure they have their agendas filled out? More often than not, I choose the agenda. I need to combine these two things. I need to take the best of what my students love and the best of my focus on teaching, and bring them together. This week I will smile more and allow the students to embrace moments of personal inquiry and response. Not only do I want to have my students embrace these moments, I want to create opportunities to let these moments happen more often.  

Jessica Marcotte
@jmarcotte85

Learning as a life style

One of my focuses this year is to encourage my students to see that learning is a lifestyle, not an institution. Even in the early years of their learning careers, students can groan at the mention of the world ‘learning’. They associate the word with lecture, notes and tests – even when it had been a small part of their learning process. They do not perceive the thrill of making new connections in the brain or the rush of experiencing new things – though they do appreciate these things in the moment.

I want to change that. I want to give ‘learning’ a new reputation inside and outside of my classroom.

So first, I started asking myself why I love learning, and why I love being a student. When I started to think about it, learning was categorized in two parts; what I learned in school, and what I learned outside of school. When I think back to learning in school, I remember a haze a tests, assignments, teachers and isolated subjects on a paper schedule. When I think back to learning outside of school, there is and bank of countless memories to which I have many emotional connections.

Learning means living better, living means learning better

It is this bank of memories that make me love learning. Outside of school, I was learning while being a part of the real world – not separate to it like in the classroom. Many of my real word experience came from my year-long exchange in Mons, Belgium. I remember my first day on my exchange and having my head pounding at the inundation of new French words I did not understand. Around my third month in Belgium, I remember sitting down at the dinner table with my host family and understanding the conversation my host family was having. It astonished me that what I had missed all along was not academic banter on astrophysics - but complaints about the quality of McDonald’s. I remember having a conversation with a priest while I was touring with a Swahili choir through France. These memories are all benchmarks of my language learning that year, benchmarks of which I had complete ownership. No parents watching that I did homework, no teachers giving me tests – regardless, I was still learning. And I loved it.

I realize now that I would never have made it through that part of my life successfully (though it was accompanied by many failures) without my base education. This brought me to the question, why is real-life, experiential learning often so separate from the learning that happens within the classroom walls?

When I returned to formal education as a university student, I stumbled upon a realization. My experiences from my travels helped me connect to the materials I was learning at university, and what I was learning at university was helping me understand the lessons I have missed during my travels. This included many abstract life lessons, but I will give a concrete example. My newly formed connections to the French language helped me engage in the classroom. While the professor modelled common place conversations, I remember having similar real conversations with Belgian store clerks and friends during my exchange. I was able to branch out my learning by connecting to the new vocabulary and verb tenses presented in class. In addition to this, I had many new ‘eureka’ moments when I realized ‘That’s what that person was trying to tell me’.

This synthesis of life-experience and formal education was amazing. It made my learning personally relevant and gave me motivation to continue. That’s why I say “Learning means living better, living means learning better”. This is why I started the ‘Edventure Passport’ program. I have hopes that while my students explore their community they may gain experiences to bring to the classroom. When students add personal experiences to their background knowledge, the probability of learning can increase exponentially.

I must admit that at the beginning of my teaching career I was not focused on digital literacy. Many friends even commented "You are too young to not care about technology". At the time, I felt that technology in the classroom was just a way to add bells and whistles to a classroom to make education look blingy.

Needless to say, I do not believe this anymore.

I see now that the digital world is just as relevant and, well, real, as the 'real world' to many people. Once I opened my eyes to the fact my students are immersed in this world, I saw an abundance of potential in their interests and passion for the digital world into the classroom.

Since I have embrassed the digital world in my teaching, my students have been extremely receptive. I have integrated 'Global Read Aloud' in to my Language Arts class. My students love the book and love communicating their ideas digitally. I have also begun to us twitter as a formative assessment method. Students write exit slips or interesting facts they have learned in tweets to share on our classroom twitter. My students love it! To some out there, this may seem like baby steps, but I am motivated to keep moving forward.

But my students' engagement has not been the best part - though it has been great. I have been the one who has benefitted the most from this new found interest in the digital world. Not only have I put myself back into the shoes of 'student' - learning new things nearly everyday - but I have been exploring a brand new world of oppurtunity as an educator.

As a student of the digital world, I have experienced the excitement I want my students to feel in my classroom. When I integrate my new found digital skills into the classroom, it elicits the responds I want from my students.

As a teacher, so many amazing ideas, reflections and networking oppurtunities have emerged while using my twitter. I am shocked that something of which  I used to be so critical, has become so essential to my professional growth.

In closing, I encourage those still hesitant of technology integration to jump in, you might just be amazed. For those who have a broader and deeper understanding of the digital world, please, keep sharing your powerful ideas!

Jessica Marcotte
@jmarcotte85