(Crossposted to my senior classes’ blog.)
Each week, for the Student Blogging Challenge, there are four steps:
You’ll be able to read the week’s blog post at this website and follow the instructions for the week. I’ll also post a link to the current task here on our class blog, along with any clarifications I have for you.
Student Blogging Challenge 2018
As discussed in the last post, I frequently call our classroom a learning community instead of a classroom. Learning is not an individual pursuit. We learn best by building on the knowledge of those who have come before us, by asking questions and sharing ideas with those around us, and by working collectively to challenge each of us individually. Learning is individual in that we each are at different stages in our learning and have different strategies that work best for us. However, even with that, we require the assistance and presence of other people to explore and verify our individual understanding.
If learning is better collectively, however, then how much more extensive could it be if we extended our community beyond the walls of our classroom? This is the advantage of using technology in our learning: when we blog, when we share our learning on social media, when we create videos and podcasts – all of these things allow us not only to share our learning with a wider, authentic audience but also reach out to others to develop our understanding and skills to the next level.
The Student Blogging Challenge will allow us to connect with people all over the world while we develop our writing skills and our learning. We’ll have the opportunity to explore digital citizenship, communication, and critical and creative thinking with a variety of different learning experiences. The challenge starts on October 7, and we hope you’ll join us!
The goal of pretty much any teacher is to encourage learning in her students, though teachers may disagree about what type of learning and how it should be encouraged in their students. Personally, I believe that no learning can occur without an environment of community and connection. I’m not saying that everyone needs to be best friends with everyone else, but I strongly believe that we can’t learn unless we feel safe, unless we feel like we can take risks and be wrong without someone judging or making fun of us.
This is why I spend so much time at the beginning of the year trying to build a sense of understanding and respect between us all – and I include myself in this. I am a part of the learning community of our classroom as much as my students. I was reading a book by Dr. Brene Brown called Daring Greatly, and she talks about how when people are at a distance, it’s easy to judge them or stereotype them, but when we come closer, when we get to know people, that prejudice falls away. Once we get to know people, once we try to understand them, we are much less likely to bully or hurt them. It’s not that we necessarily want to be great friends with them, but we can understand why they do the things we do and have more patience.
Most of the time, I feel like I do a pretty good job creating a sense of community in the classroom – helping students feel safe enough to take the risk of being wrong when they share ideas, opening up space where students will reach out to help each other rather than sit back and watch them struggle, making it possible for students to guide their own learning without a fear of failure, etc. Sometimes, though, something happens in the class that makes me wonder if the sense of community that I have been seeing actually wasn’t that. I wonder if the part of the class that I don’t see or hear includes the safety that I so want for my students.
Honestly, I don’t know that there is any way for me to find this out for certain. All I can do is ask my students: Do you feel safe enough in this classroom (with me? with your peers?) to be willing to take risks and try new things?
In short, is our environment a learning community, or a classroom?
“We must surround our students with an intellectual life into which they might grow.” – Ron Ritchhart, Creating Cultures of Thinking
I just finished my most recent silent reading book – the one above – and one of the things I really noticed as I was reading it was that because the focus in silent reading is, of course, on reading, I was rarely having a chance to stop and reflect formally on what I was reading. It’s not that I didn’t think about it; of course I did. But some of the ideas, some of the challenges that Ritchhart issues to teachers in the book required written responses (at least for me, a person who processes ideas and thinks through writing), and because it was silent reading, I didn’t feel that I could stop and write about my thoughts.
One of the reasons I do silent reading with my class is because I believe we all can use a break in the day, and I want students to have choice and joy in reading what they want. However, I also plan silent reading into the day because I want to show my students that I am a reader. As the quote above states, I want them to see that reading is part of having an intellectual life. This is why I am really resistant to stopping to write more than brief notes in the text (I almost always read nonfiction books that allow me to develop my teaching and learning in a classroom setting): I want them to see me reading, and I feel like stopping to write might make them … I don’t know. Stop valuing reading? Think that I’m “getting away” with something that I won’t allow them? I’m not entirely sure what I think, to be honest.
But maybe taking the time to reflect while I’m reading isn’t such a bad thing. If I want to demonstrate my intellectual life, maybe I need to honour all aspects of it rather than isolate reading from other thinking activities. After all, reflection is a huge part of the “intellectual life” with which I want my students to engage. That quote is why I’m writing my reflection here, where my students can see and respond to it, instead of in my journal. It occurred to me in the process of reading the book that sharing my reflecting process with my students might help them develop their reflection skills as well.
Ultimately, I want my students to see me as a learner foremost, and a teacher secondarily. They have to share their learning process with me … I wonder if sharing my learning process with them would help build the safety and relationships within the classroom so that they feel more comfortable doing so.
Have you ever played Exit Room games? You’re locked in a room, and you have to solve various puzzles and find clues to escape before the time is up. This can be a useful strategy in education as well, and Breakout EDU has capitalized on it by creating a version you can use in the classroom.
We have been playing these games at various points throughout the year, and I have found that they are useful both in terms of developing the Core Competencies of the BC curriculum and giving students a chance to engage with curricular content. My grade eights have the most experience with both of these types of games, having played several of them, and I’ve asked them to comment below so that teachers can read their feedback and thoughts around the games.
I’ve asked them to talk about the following areas:
To my students: thank you for providing your honest feedback!
We’re starting to write blogs regularly in our class right now, and I wanted to provide some examples of various different types of entries you could do. Blogging, as you will read on this page, is about prompting conversation. It is an interaction between you and your audience in a way that Writers’ Workshop can’t be, because with a blog, your audience can respond and make comments or ask questions.
So here are some examples of different types of blog posts written by past students. All of them have areas of strength and areas for growth, but they can provide ideas for you as you are beginning your first blogs. After you read the page above, check these out – and feel free to take a wander through other bloggers from previous classes, or from our Writing class blog.
Grade Eight Posts
Brooklyn on Self-Assessment
Jaxon on why Chefs should be paid more
Luke on the NFL Playoffs
Owen on whether music affects us
Hannah talks about the street on which she grew up
Looking for examples of excellent bloggers? Check out these ones from previous writing classes here at LTS!
Grade 9
Grade 10
Fiona
Christina
Kendra
Ireland
Grade 11 & 12
After analysing the best visual literacy comments from the past several assignments, our class has come up with success criteria. Each group’s criteria is posted in the comments below; our consolidated criteria are in this post.
Learning Intentions
Success Criteria
Block D
From this point on, when you’ve posted your visual literacy comment, you need to self-assess it according to this criteria – either by posting your self-assessment as a comment to your V.L. one, or by writing down your self-assessment and handing it in, if you’re not comfortable with other people seeing it. Use the following template and write a comment assessing yourself on each of the required criteria:
1. (detailed description)
2. (what’s going on)
3. (confusions or questions)
4. (spelling and grammar)
Block A
From this point on, when you’ve posted your visual literacy comment, you need to self-assess it according to this criteria – either by posting your self-assessment as a comment to your V.L. one, or by writing down your self-assessment and handing it in, if you’re not comfortable with other people seeing it. Use the following template and write a comment assessing yourself on each of the required criteria:
1. (detailed description)
2. (what’s going on)
3. (connections)
[and, if done]
4. (research)
I’m going to be going to a workshop with other teachers on self-assessment, reflection and the Core Competencies tomorrow, and I was wondering if you would give me some feedback about our use of these things in our classroom (think the learning map and your portfolios; self-assessing your work; our Friday reflections; the Core Competency self-assessment you did with your block D teacher; etc.).
Thanks in advance for your help!
This week’s visual literacy post is a little different. In honour of Martin Luther King Day (in the States), we are going to watch his “I Have a Dream” speech. You can find more information out about him here, and here. If you are interested in authentic artefacts (things actually written or created by Martin Luther King Jr.), check out this slightly more challenging website.
In your comment, I want you to consider the following question: Do you have to be disobedient if you want justice? Consider the speech, but also consider the things happening in the world today – the Black Lives movement, the arguments about cultural appropriation, the conflicts in the United States around race and religion. What do you think?
One of my students today asked what she should reflect on, because she’d already reflected on the medieval inquiry last week, and that was the only “new” learning we’d done. (She phrased it differently, though.) I asked if it would help to read a learning reflection I wrote today, she shrugged, and so I wrote about something that’s been on my mind the last week.