![\"Calvin](\"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/miriamjohn\/files\/2016\/03\/Calvin-and-Hobbes.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nOk, maybe I’m not quite a Ms. Wormwood but trying to make a change sometimes seems like I’m trying to climb Mount Everest in stilettos…On the other hand, sometimes, like when I’m at a Face 2 Face session, I feel like it just might be possible! A while ago I came across this article<\/a> that challenged me to think again about learning and motivation. I wanted to\u00a0make the curriculum more relevant to my students\u00a0so that they are excited and motivated to learn. Knowing that other teachers are wrestling with the same issues, helps me to feel like just maybe I might be able to actually do something meaningful…and so, to action!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Now I’m finally getting around to writing this blog post (yes, I’m a procrastinator). The good news is that at this point in the year, I\u2019ve been able to begin to try out some of my ideas. Serendipity comes into it a lot though, and the amazing energy that the kids bring to the equation. Now we\u2019re here, fully immersed in the Action Plan action. We used\u00a0the book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret<\/a> as a jumping off point into all kinds of things. I chose it for a class read aloud\u00a0and it magically fired imaginations, as great books tend to do. The kids got excited about automatons and clockwork and gears and old movies and we explored all of those things together.<\/p>\n Just before Christmas holidays, we headed off to the Distillery District for a pulleys and gears scavenger hunt. Now we are playing with Lego and wind-up toys, investigating and building clockwork, and building small devices with pulleys and gears. I thought a lot about how I could take something from my students’\u00a0own immediate experience and something from the Science curriculum on\u00a0pulleys\u00a0and gears and put it all together into a motivating and exciting design challenge. (Phew!)<\/p>\n My classroom is in what is essentially the attic of an old house. I, and my students, have to climb three flights of stairs multiple times a day. It’s great for keeping fit, for example, my app tells me that yesterday I climbed 29 flights of stairs\u00a0(hence the Mount Everest in stilettos feeling). In September, the kids moaned and groaned a lot about the stairs and it even sparked a great math problem about how many steps they climbed on average each day.<\/p>\n It came to me that I could ask the kids to use pulleys and gears to solve their problem of too many stairs to climb. Could they create\u00a0a device that would eliminate the need to climb the stairs? What it evolved into was something even more interesting. How could we make our classroom more accessible to people who have mobility issues? Could we use pulleys and gears to solve this problem?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The kids are so excited about this! They LOVED the design challenge process. I kept hearing excited sounds of approval\u00a0when it was on the schedule. They have come up with all sorts of ideas, most of which sound like a lot more fun than stairs but which I doubt would meet\u00a0code. Still, we are having fun, and we are learning (much more than just about pulleys and gears), which is the goal here.<\/p>\n Here’s where the serendipity comes in…at some point during this process\u00a0I realized that I had no idea how to build a device that would meet our challenge! Oh oh… I just prayed that the kids would figure something out without me. Sure enough, one day, after all of our thinking and discussion and drawing, I put out the lego and blocks and some pulleys and gears and we went to it. At first, everyone was kind of lost, they didn’t know where to start. I started to panic. All of a sudden one kid tried something out and it worked! Other kids jumped in with suggestions and started trying out their own ideas and soon enough, everyone had built a device that met the criteria. Best of all, we all\u00a0bounced ideas off each other, tried things that didn’t work, came up with a new idea, tried that, and kept trying until we got to something that we liked. We used different materials, different designs, different systems, all to meet the same goal. Now this is not to say that there we not moments of frustration, anger, feelings of defeat, all of those things were part of the process (especially when the lego kept breaking or the gears wouldn’t turn). But the kids were able to push through that to create something of their own. <\/p>\n Now we get to show off all of our creativity and hard work at our Doors Open<\/em> night this week. It’s been such a rewarding and satisfying experience for me. Rarely do I get to see my group of “struggling” and often reluctant learners so enthusiastically engaged in the learning process. And for the kids, well I think that they have learned so much more than I could have possibly predicted and far more than the curriculum mandates they learn.<\/p>\n And I have a new challenge to work on…how to keep this kind of learning going!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo!<\/p>\n It has been awhile since our last F2F but it was\u00a0good to have time to talk with my fellow C21-ers and to participate in all of the engaging sessions our fearless leaders have prepared for us. I always feel empowered after a Face 2 Face! Hearing what others\u00a0are working on inspires me and having their … Continue reading “A dream is a wish your heart makes…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":118,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-plan","category-classroom-reflections","category-face-2-face-sessions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/miriamjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/miriamjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/miriamjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/miriamjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/118"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/miriamjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/miriamjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/miriamjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/miriamjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/miriamjohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"