As we move forward into another great year of Cohort 21 I have been really enjoying looking at all these fantastic posts about their Urgent vs. Important. I found it important for me to consider what I find Urgent or Important this year as well. As I am off on parental leave this year I don’t have as many urgent things as a lot of you do in the classroom. I

know the feeling of juggling a million things and trying to sort out what can wait and what must be done. That being said I have some goals I want to work towards this year that I want to put out there to hold myself accountable.

My first goal is to do more work on applicable coding. I find that a lot of material currently out there is great but much more ‘gamified’ and not actual coding. I understand that a lot of that is to do with teachers not being programmers but I would love to do more work on finding approachable and usable lessons on coding language such as python, html and css.

My second goal is to continue my work on learning more about resilience, failing and helping students be more comfortable with making mistakes. To that end I am reading ‘The Right Kind of Wrong – The Science of Failing Well’ by Amy Edmonson. She is a psychologist who has focused on research on how to create group dynamics where making mistakes is encouraged and responded to positively. I am really excited to learn from this book and share with you all!

I look forward to seeing you all at our second F2F!

Robin

As we sit here and reflect on our journey through the year. I am continuously grateful for the opportunities I have been given with Cohort 21 to meet, discuss and learn from other educators who approach the field with such passion.

To finish up the year I would like to use some of the question prompts to reflect on my HMW question.

How might we design a learning skills and work habits assessment around failure and resiliency?

What was the “Why?” behind your action?. What motivated you to engage in this action? Paint a picture for us here.

My HMW is the culmination of years of work with Cohort 21 in which I initially wanted to encourage my students to make more mistakes in math. This has grown to focus more on opportunities for failing and learning.

In my mind, resiliency has just as much importance to me as other learning skills and work habits such as collaboration and independent work.

I have slowly been incorporating this into assessment and have seen such wonderful results from my students in both their engagement and confidence that I feel it’s imperative to put more of a focus on it and create more opportunities to discuss it as a life skill and help my students grow.

As mentioned in my last post I do have a long term plan to try and make this happen. I am so excited to dive in to this and see what comes out of it.

Thank you again for such a great year!

It has been a fun past few months in which my How Might We has grown and changed from my first year with Cohort 21. Where I have started with wanting to create opportunities for mistakes in math has led to me diving deeper in to my new question. I realize I cannot accomplish this question this year as I am currently off on parental leave, but I am having fun looking forward towards my next goal.

How might we design a learning skills and work habits assessment around failure and resiliency?

Below is my plan for when I am back in the classroom. The main challenge now is to keep my enthusiasm until I am back!

As we head into our second F2F and people begin to reflect on what is urgent and important, I thought I would take some time to reflect on my journey so far, both as a participant and coach in Cohort 21.

What makes this next F2F so much fun, but also so intimidating, is that you take the time to try and hone in on a question. You take the time to consider what you want to focus on and the journey you want to take this year. This in itself can feel quite massive. Trying to find a direction, a way to work towards a solution to a problem you see as an educator.

When I started Cohort in 2019 I felt I had a simple direction; I wanted to become a stronger math teacher. I wanted to create more opportunities for students to become engaged in math and feel comfortable trying new things. With that being said, my ‘How might we‘ still felt massive. I am also happy to say that I have still not reached the end of my question. Simply because my initial ‘How might we’ led to another question, and another and another and another. Several years later my research is now on something completely different. It has taken me several years to come to my current ‘How Might We’, and I know it will lead me to new and important questions.

The point of Cohort is not to come to the end with a concrete answer, it is to create opportunities for constant reflection and growth. It can be uncomfortable but also some of the most exciting and motivating thing you can do as an educator and professional. My time in Cohort has given me such a fantastic and varied ‘teacher tool box’. I have become more responsive and much more comfortable in my own skin as an educator.

As we come together this Saturday please try not to feel overwhelmed, but know that you are going into a space where you can explore problems of any size, and that you will be surrounded by people that are just as curious and motivated as you are. It’s going to be a great day and I can’t wait to see you all there!

As I’m sitting here working with @lbettencourt over zoom all i can think of is the 8 million things I need to do currently, from checking student process journals to prepping home demos for science lessons. While I’m doing this, an itching in the back of my mind is constantly saying ‘what about the blog?…. what about your research goal?’ A lot of the time that little itch gets drowned out by other more important things (sorry Cohort 21), but as I look at the calendar and realize that next week is our final F2F I have panicked and realized I didn’t get to even half of the things I wanted to do this year.

Yes I pivoted well, and yes I tried new things, but for the life of me I can’t remember what they are right now. I know I did things and some bombed and some worked great, but again, I have no idea what they are, at this point I can’t remember. I swear I did things, but I cannot tell you what they are. I know I have a huge list of things I want to do, but I’m having a hard time starting them.

All i can do right now is look forward and know that this feeling will not last forever, and remember that if I am feeling this way, my students are probably feeling worse. I also want to try and change my perspective, and look at my looming list with positivity instead of guilt. I want to keep growing and I have a direction, and that in itself is something. So I think I will write a bit more about it and remember these goals as I move forward towards the last few weeks of school. Hopefully after some rest and time to recuperate I will get to this list and come back with excitement to share. To that end here are my goals that I want to reach in the future.

Goals

1. To learn to code on Unity and present cool video game design opportunities for my students
2. To find new ways to incorporate 3D printing into my math and science lessons
3. To work on finding more fun and exciting resources for a maker space and to present these to my peers in an approachable way
4. To continue to find more virtual messy STEM and share it out.
5. Working on a new way to present learner portfolios that are interactive (credit to @lbettencourt)

This is my direction, although I feel like I lost a year, I will continue to look forward and work towards these. I might not achieve them any time soon, but thinking about them gets me excited and I need to hold on to that. I hope you are all still safe and getting through, please know I’m thinking of you.

Robin

It’s only been about 36 hours since the term ended and I wanted to take a minute to put some ideas down to help me go through everything that has happened this term and to help myself get in to a mind space that can help me re-centre and enjoy the holiday. As I was reading this morning I came across the concepts if detachment and how it can often look like calm, but it really isn’t. Basically for a lot of people and teens, it’s the removing of any individuality or responsibility from the current situation. It’s looking at your phone and playing a game so you don’t have to think. It’s playing a video game for hours so you don’t have to face reality. Though it might feel like it, this is not being calm and it’s not restorative. This term felt like a marathon and I wondered why I was getting more and more tired. What this came down to was that I wasn’t really allowing myself to calm down, I was only trying to escape the situations that were stressing me out. I was getting home and detaching myself from the world.

Now that the term is over and I am home, I realized I was beginning to calm down. I took a moment to reflect on this and realized I wasn’t calming down because I was away from work, I was calming down because I was making time to do things that helped me be back in the mindful present. That was allowing me to feel more connected and safe. Things I wasn’t making time for during the last month of term. For me this was things like baking, or talking more with friends, taking up knitting and working on other crafts. Doing these things don’t allow me to dissociate, they forced me to be present in a positive way and that in itself restored my calmness.

I’ve seen a lot of great posts from other peers like @Mathy_Panda , @SciencewithmsLu and @SirMrMoore all about this and I know it’s been brought up a lot, but I hope you all take some time to reflect this holiday and make sure you aren’t just dissociating or detaching yourself from the world around you and are instead taking time to do things you enjoy. Thank you all for continuing to post this term, the connection this season has been so key for me and thank you!

Wherever you are I hope you are resting and happy holidays and a joyous New Year!

After looking through my list of resources I wanted to review and share and considering some questions I got from peers, I thought the next thing I would write about is different coding and video game design software that I love to use in my classroom.

I know a lot of Math/Science teachers are feeling anxious about teaching coding, especially if it’s something that is completely new to you or you have not done before. To that end I wanted to share two of my favourites over the next two posts and explain the different ways you can use them in your class.

Before I get in to that I want to explain why I love teaching coding and video game design and why I think it is so great to have in the classroom.

• It teaches resiliency.
  • When you code, NOTHING works on the first try. Often students will have to try things multiple times before things work. They will get frustrated and learn how to push through it. They will learn that mistakes are a part of the process and how to move forward. If anyone ever wants to tell a bad coding joke in their class here is my favourite “99 problems with code on the wall, 99 problems with code! Take one down, pass it around, 126 problems with code on the wall!”
• The feedback is instant.
  • If something doesn’t work you will know right away. There is not waiting or worry. You are not waiting for feedback from a teacher or peer. You will also know right away if something does work!
• It teaches students how to break tasks down.
  • Computers are not mind readers, they will not infer. You need to be completely clear on your code and break down every step of the process. This is a very useful life skill to have!

That being said, here is my favourite way to teach basic coding to students. It’s a fantastic software called Code Combat.

Code Combat is a site where you can teach students Python, Java or C++.

In it, students can pick their own avatar and fight through dungeons using code. The levels get increasingly more complex and are surprisingly fun. I have had lots of students develop quite an addiction to solving the problems!

The other thing that makes Code Combat great? It has built in assessments! Here is a sample grade book they have that allows you to keep track of student work.

It also creates fun certificates with the student’s avatar to show when they have completed a list of tasks that you can print out and give to your students.

The levels themselves can get wonderfully complex for your kids that need enrichment but also are user friendly enough for any beginner.

So, if you are panicking about how to broach coding in your Math or Science class this is one resource I highly recommend trying out. It’s free and is very user friendly for teachers.

For my next post I will be showing a more complex software that allows students to design their own video games.

Please let me know if you have any questions and I hope that you can have fun and get messy in your class with this!

After leaving our second F2F I left feeling completely motivated and excited about what I was going to research, it hit the mark for our school’s focus and was something I think will absolutely help my students and is related to the feedback they gave me. But now I feel like I’m staring up at this big tall wall and I’m a bit nervous to start picking it up.

My question is “How might we shift teaching methods in math towards differentiation and risk-taking to encourage student buy-in and creativity?”

My question in itself is something that could be used to simply innovate my classroom, but I feel it’s something I should push through our whole Middle School. After looking through the feedback from our Middle School students, and discussions with our High School teachers I know that risk-taking in math is something that’s severely lacking. We have great content in our lessons, but not much opportunity for differentiation and making mistakes.

After looking through the resources and feedback from my peers I’ve been so excited to go through the suggestions and connect with the people that were recommended.

What I would like to do is not reinventing the wheel, and it’s not groundbreaking, but it’s new to me and new to our Middle School. I feel that this is the stage in my research where I will really have to force myself to write and blog, because as our coaches said at the F2F, your perspective and ideas could be exactly what someone else needs to hear. There are a lot of amazing math teachers out there that are already doing this and I’m excited to learn how to do what they are doing.

To that end here is my plan so far explained with stick figures

First I’ll be looking through our next math unit and finding or designing an open-ended task, then with my students we will co-construct a rubric of what en excellent math response looks like. Through this I’m hoping to encourage students to realize that I am interested more in the process of problem solving and critical thinking and not the answer. I’m also hoping that since they are a part of the process of designing the rubric they will have more buy-in and be more aware of what they are being asked to do.

After they complete the task I will assess and write feedback on the rubric, we will then sit down and conference about how they did. During that conference we will decide together how the student did and what to work on moving forward.

From there I will then conference with the class and ask about how they felt this went. Did it help them feel more confident in taking risks to solve the problems? Did it help them build interest in the math itself? Were my strong kids as engaged as my students that consider themselves bad at math?

I also think this will be almost another starting point for me and I know I should slow down but all I can think of is the snowball effect of my question and how it will spurn on more questions and more ideas. Is anyone else finding this?

I look forward to sharing more and hearing more from everyone in the Cedar group.

@edaigle @lmitchell @mbrims @jbairos