As April gets ready to depart, so too does the school year. The snow (yes, there is still snow in Muskoka) is beginning to melt away almost as fast as the few remaining days in this school year. I have done so much thinking in recent weeks that I have failed to document and so I will try my best to retroactively recreate it here.

Back in January, my action plan started ambiguously enough:

But I soon realized that there are so many more fundamental questions at the root of my teaching and learning. With that in mind, I ended up both simplifying and complicating my original vision, ultimately arriving at the following:

“How can I create opportunities for students to personalize their learning?”

The simple answer I was told, and investigated, and had reinforced, was “they will personalize it themselves”. Okay. Well, that was easy!

But surely, I can do more.

Borrowing an idea from Garth Nichols, I started focusing in on the possibility of offering a variety of lenses to my students. We can go our own ways to explore a text, idea, or concept, through lenses and then come back together to create a larger, richer understanding of the topic. This sounds simple enough, but it raises lots of interesting questions that aren’t so easy to address.

• How can I try and create a variety of lenses and opportunities in a given text/unit/concept, but ensure that they have equal rigour and opportunity for success?
• How can I help students find the best options for them?
• Do I have time to design and create this wide variety of plans?
• How can I ensure that students are meeting the scope and sequence of the school’s/province’s English program, while allowing them multiple paths?

For now, I’m starting small. I’m designing a unit plan for the graphic novel Maus that allows students to examine the text through the lens of a graphic novel, a work of history, or as a memoir. 

I also like to dream big. Maybe a grade 12 course that is tailored to the English skills that they need for their post-secondary education? Maybe they can select a “major” or remain “undeclared”, and their reading, writing, and presenting tasks are tailored to suit their needs. Do future university physics students need to read Shakespeare in grade 12? How can I best prepare these students, while still doing my subject and curriculum justice? 

The questions continue. The blog posts will continue. I’m very happy to have been accepted to the Klingenstein Summer Institute. I’m excited to continue to grow my PLC and to build more bridges between people, ideas, and institutions. 

It’s important to note that none of this, these questions, these ideas, the application to Klingenstein, the mentoring, this blog, etc. would have been possible without my membership in Cohort 21. I’m incredibly grateful to Garth and Justin for their beautiful brain child, and  to all the wonderful facilitators, participants, mentors, and colleagues I’ve had the opportunity to engage with. I’m also grateful to my school for allowing me the opportunity to reach out from our little island up north to build bridges and make connections for myself, my peers, my school, and my students.