Written by The restful holiday break always manages to soften the reality of the January schedule. Ski season begins, GII ramps up, and oh yeah there’s final assessments and the beginning of a new semester in the classroom.
Unfortunately, this means missing January 20th’s face to face at MaRS and not receiving all the wonderful feedback from fellow cohorts in person. So, instead these blog posts and checking TweetDeck will be my way of tapping into our wonderful sense of collaboration and innovation!
Recently, I’ve had some success in the classroom around addressing my HMW question. In some ad-hoc interviews with students I discovered (not unsurprisingly) that their best memories when it came to effective engagement came when outside of school in new and unfamiliar territory. Thinking about how to leverage this led me to craft an assessment for my entire Grade 10 Civics students to visit a local civic meeting and get involved in the political process at the municipal level.
The students brought back some phenomenal learning about the challenges and opportunities available to them even as “only” teenagers. Using conversational assessment helped students to focus on the experience and led to many articulating a story about their experiences drawing on the interesting settings, characters, and ‘plot’ of the meeting – students who normally would be bogged down in the details taking extensive notes mentioned that this style of assessment freed them to sit, listen, and take in the process and emboldened many to become active participants. Reflecting on changes for future iterations, I’m going to provide a longer timeline for completion of the experiential portion; many comments from students said they chose meetings based on time/proximity rather than personal interest and hopefully with greater options they’ll be more able to visit a meeting that aligns with their passions.
I’m going to be on the lookout for similar stories of educators trying to discover what ideas they’ve tested that engage students in the learning process tomorrow online; looking forward to it!
Gordon, your commitment to your students and to trying new things is commendable. I think of particular note is the idea that technology is a tool to use, not the curriculum itself. If you aren’t following George Couros, you should as you will find what he has to say useful on this journey you are on.
Great concepts here. I’d love to work with you on developed some deep and integrated project-based options for our students. Currently, I’m at NAIS and finding out some excellent pieces that could lend some ideas and insights in this space…
This is a fun way to get at civic engagement and empower youth to be active citizens in society. Missing the 3rd Face to Face at MaRS is a big hit to the feedback loop but it’s definitely something you can access through reaching out to facilitators and it’s great that @gnichols is there with you.
I would be more than happy to meet with you via hangout to offer any feedback on your action plan and to group someone people together to offer another tuning protocol if that’s of interest.
Looking forward to seeing your next steps and where you will take this!