Category: Action Plan

What I Saw The Students Actually “Do”: I am a (new) big fan of the “know, do, reflect” model of assessment that came up during the Assessment panel discussion in the Deeper Learning MOOC. Bob Lenz’s model, I think, could be a new way for me to understand how I can structure my assessment tasks … Continue reading “The Great Debates of Grade 7 (part two)”

Background: Be it resolved that teaching students how to make deep connections between disciplines, in a limited amount of time, is a ridiculously challenging experience. Thank goodness for March break (and the warm sun of Florida) to digest and make sense of this learning experience. A few weeks ago, I posted about one of the … Continue reading “The Great Debates of Grade 7 (part one)”

  Tagging on to my reflections about mindsets from the DLMooc work, I wanted to share an experience I had as a teacher this past week. Every winter, the Grade 7 class spends three days north of Toronto in the forest, making peace with winter. This was my first time on this particular trip and … Continue reading “Growth Mindset in Action (literally)”

This week, the DLMOOC was focusing on mindsets. While I have read Carol Dwek’s book and have experimented modestly with incorporating the idea of growth mindsets into how my projects are designed, I really appreciated the honest grapplings during the lens into the classroom dilemma. Matt Biller and Kevin Denton from Polaris Expeditionary Learning School. … Continue reading “Reflections on Feb. 27th Lens into the Classroom: Mindsets”

There is an obvious emerging trend in all of the project work I’ve seen with the High Tech High Deeper Learning Course: most projects have an audience outside of the classroom. While I have had some success with this in my own project planning, I am realizing that it is a an area of “deeper” … Continue reading “Is authenticity the key to engagement?”

I want your feedback on my students’ work. Here are two samples of how two of my students attempted to connect their chosen artifacts to The Book Thief. This, I should explain, is a learning task that helps students begin to see how two (seemingly) different topics can be connected together. The next step is … Continue reading “Sample student work from Matrix of Connections”

It might take only a 4 second conversation with me to discover that I am preposterously passionate about personalized learning. Reading through Littky’s and Allen’s article about the MET school, an institution constructed on the bedrock of personalization, made me equally excited and jealous of the structures that are in place in this school that … Continue reading “Responding to one student at a time”

This week in the DLMooc, we are focusing on students in the adult world. Like Tim Flanagan, I wasn’t completely convinced that this week had a huge connection to my world as a Middle School English teacher, and so I wasn’t entirely on top of my viewing and reading and posting this week. But I’ve … Continue reading “Deeper Learning Mooc: Internships and students in the adult world”

I think it is far too easy to jump on some form of bandwagon and not bother to look around and assess how this bandwagon is actually running, and whether this particular wagon is fitting your needs or not. In other words, I want to share some of my current day woes about this foray … Continue reading “One cost of personalization”