The Art of Silence

My daughter’s favorite book is called “It’s okay to make mistakes” by Todd Parr and in one the last pages it says. “It’s ok to be quiet, being quiet can make you a good listener”.

After our F2F at MaRs, I had a clear idea and a plan on how to put in place my Action Plan.

My plan was divided into three tasks

1. To create a system where I can share my observations with my students and they can comment on them.
2. Create PBL units for some of my courses. I want to create one PBL based unit for each of my courses for the rest of the year
3. I want to share this process with the faculty of my school and create a group of teachers interested in adapting their units.

As soon as I got back, I started working on the tasks. The first task was easy to set up as it was something I was working since the beginning of the school year.

As I started working on my second task, I used a time management tool called Toggl to track the amount of time I was spending on changing a unit for each of my courses into PBL units. I was reading blogs, posts, and links from different members of the Cohort so I could create a path to successfully shape the units into projects, and I told myself that it didn’t matter how hard or tedious the task was going to be, I was going to finish it.

This was when I added all the hours I spent on task 2 and added to a tremendous 19 hours….. in one week. That’s what I decided to become quiet, to spend more time listening to what my students were saying about the projects and to really understand how they were feeling about the project.

The journey to adapt my units to PBL ones has just started and my next steps are clear.

1. To continue working on sharing my observations and conversations with my students
2. To continue adapting my units to PBL ones.
3. To answer the following two questions:
   • How might we share what we do in our classrooms with other teachers at my school?
   • How might we help each other when creating PBL projects?

Thanks, Cohort21for all your help and support.
Here is the link to my Action Plan Slide. Embedding is not working for me today