#TheEndoftheBeginning

To Do: Blog.

I was so proud myself after our last F2F. I woke up on the Saturday morning after the F2F, with a few new reflections rattling around in my brain. Instead of just thinking about them, I grabbed my computer and started to blog, pressed publish (it wasn’t so bad) and continued on with my day feeling rather accomplished. And now we are here. It’s April and I haven’t blogged since.

So, here goes:

My Action Plan

Seems simple, right? It feels like my action plan has grown a life of its own. It has become more complex, with mini-action plans being created as I continue to think about and explore. I can see why #TheEndoftheBeginning caught on.

What have I learned?

It might not seem like a lot, but small actions do add up: 

Throughout the majority of the year, I felt as though I wasn’t making enough headway on my action plan. However, looking back on the changes in my teaching since September, it is clear that my action plan was subconsciously informing the way I thought about my teaching and how I approached the classroom. The end result was a culminating task in CGC1D that looks are redesigning a park in Port Hope. The town has received a grant to redesign the park to accommodate it’s older citizens. Student’s are currently in the research phase of the project and soon they will be creating a proposal for the park that they will present to Leslie Rosenblade, the Parks and Facilities Manager of Port Hope.

One HMW question leads to many more: 

I have so many more questions ready to be put through the design thinking process and explored. Some connect to my current HMW question and I think will help me get closer to answering it. A big question that came out of my current HMW question is HMW provide effect scaffolding so that every student feels supported in their learning. This is something I am beginning to research and look forward to digging deeper into it next year.

Show students you are a learner too: 

I have to give credit to @marsenault for this lesson. I met Mike when I worked at Lakefield College School, I didn’t get to know him too well in the year I was there, but always enjoyed his company. We both attended Derek and Brent’s mini-cohort at LCS, and I was impressed with Mike’s willingness to learn new tools (like twitter), his critical eye, and the questions he asked. Mike was a learner and for that, I respected him immensely. We spoke at the January F2F briefly, and of course, he asked me great questions about my action plan. We got caught off during our conversation and I asked him if he’d mind speaking to me more about my action plan. He agreed and a couple weeks later he chatted with me for about an hour on the phone. His questions and words regarding my action plan were incredibly helpful, but what resonated with me most was Mike’s anecdote about being the lead learner in his classroom. He told me he wants his students to know that he is constantly learning, whether it be bringing in a new article that connects with class content or like a few years ago, learning twitter. It’s not that I didn’t value, or like to show students that I too was learning with them, but the idea of being the lead learner in the classroom, for me, has more weight to it. This is a type of role modeling that shows students it is okay to not know something, to try something new, to fail, to try again and to celebrate small successes.

What’s Next?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Cohort Experience in a Nutshell

I planned to write more, but it’s 10:21 the night before the last F2F! Hopefully this post is better late than never. Looking forward to tomorrow… T-10 hours.