Happy New Year, everyone! Well, the fall term seems to have slowly evaporated into winter. I’m looking forward to our next Face 2 Face session this month. Seeing as winter is a great time for reflection and thinking, I thought I would take this opportunity to consider the ways in which my thinking has evolved surrounding my #cohort21 #actionplan since our last meeting.
From my perspective, the term “ownership” is one of those concepts that exists in a completely ubiquitous sense in our day to day lives. We own things, we own thoughts, we own emotions, etc. Ownership can also be equated with “power” and the ways in which we build and maintain control in our lives. When I purchase a tangible item, I exert my power over that item and experience a sense of satisfaction, as this product is, after all, “all mine.” I feel that in our visually saturated and commercialized world, it is this process of “achieving power through ownership” that subliminally occupies the minds of many; even if we don’t actually consciously realize it in the moment. So why not exploit this sense of ownership for the betterment of education and the enjoyment of learning?
How can we promote enhanced ownership for students in their learning process and OF their learning itself (I can’t help but question whether these are one in the same)? How can we, as educators, foster the same sense of satisfaction that we experience when purchasing a new pair of shoes when facilitating our students progress through an inquiry-based unit?
Where I have arrived is that they need to “buy in” and it is our responsibility to “sell” it to them. Very much in the same way that advertisers “package” products to consumers through the study of demographics, assessing metrics and designing advertisements aimed at “hooking” an audiences attention, I feel that these processes can be paralleled in our curriculum design and delivery. While our “profit” is not rooted in any sort of financial “bottom line,” we are in the business of maximizing the number of “buyers” in our classrooms. Our dividends, rather than being quantifiable on a balance sheet, are more qualitative in the sense that success can be measured by HOW students USE our products and where they take them long after they have left our classrooms.
So where do we start? Well, it is time to study your demographic. Or, in other, more “curriculumized” terms: “assessment FOR learning.” Student-teacher conferences. Discussions. Observations. Conversations. However, rather than simply noting/documenting these as a means of “satisfying” pre-established expectations, we should be USING this valuable data as a means of informing our curriculum design and pedagogical practice. One of my favourite questions to include in my course introduction Pear Deck is “what should I know about how you prefer to learn?” Here I often receive honest, practical information from students that is so very applicable to my day to day teaching practice
. I feel that this process, the process of “studying our demographic” as a means of actually informing our teaching is the first step towards providing “ownership” for students in our classrooms.
Thoughts? More from me soon.