Learning is Change

When does gamifying your classroom lead to unintended outcomes:

I can get behind a lot of the different types of items you have outlined here, and I am absolutely amazed at the level to which you have gone to explore the practice and share that exploration. The one that I am having the most trouble with, however, is the “tipping point”. While I agree that many students do end up looking at their final grade and looking for a quick fix, I am not convinced that they should be able to exchange something for the grade rather than demonstrating mastery in the content area. How would you answer to someone who would say you are allowing grades to be changed for a modern-day version of “bringing in kleenex” to the classroom for extra credit?

Again, I really love the ways in which you are encouraging students to own their learning and work together to achieve common outcomes. I also think the transparency with which you can share “how your classroom works” makes it easy for kids to navigate. I just wonder if they are simply playing a different “game of school” now and whether or not this allows them to learn the broader scope of intrinsic motivation for learning. What do you think?

Gamify Your Class Level IV: The Item Shop | Teched Up Teacher.

I truly believe that podcasts can transform your practice. Weird, but true.

I think you have hit upon something fundamental for the ways in which we both consume and create within the stream of information that is seemingly all around us. Authenticity isn’t found within the conveyance of information, but rather within the voices and stories we use to convey that information. By tackling education from a scenario perspective, you are creating an authentic interaction for each person who takes part in the process. You are creating an entry point as well as a way for those in the audience to give back.

It is my sincere hope that many others follow. As someone who has been podcasting off and on for the better part of 8 years, the best parts of my learning have been in moments of true authenticity. It is only when I have a real audience and a real purpose for my work that I feel empowered to speak and to truly listen. Thank you for inspiring us to continue in this practice. It is well worth our time and efforts.

via Digital Learning: Not Just For Kids – Joe Mazza.

Inquiring minds… They want to know… always:

I don’t know that it can be said better than this:

” The only constant we have in our profession is a captive, open, interested audience. It is up to you to decide what you do with that audience. Create goals for your own new learning that focus on growth and continuing to learn more about your craft and profession. Share the triumphs and struggles of your learning experiences with your students. Model how to be inquisitive- if you don’t know something, look it up. Take risks personally and professionally and include students in the process when appropriate.”

When we model the process of inquiry for our students and for one another, we are showing that learning is not isolated to the few years that we are in school. We are showing that it is powerful, no matter what the context.

I had a conversation today with a colleague about the fact that we do not have opportunities to access professional development for all of the different roles within our district. While I agree that we can do a better job, I was taken aback by the sentiment that you need others to take you by the hand into learning. I think in a lot of ways, I am still like your daughter. I still ask why. I still try to find new pieces of learning every chance I get. We don’t need someone else to lay it out for us; we just need to keep on asking questions.

I’m glad you see this inquiry in your children, both biological and educational. Let us continue to pursue it, together.

via learn.share.grow.: The Most Important Lesson.

Decisions that are made as close to the classroom as possible are ones that are most aligned with creating great leadership within schools:

Although I am struggling a bit with all of the war/bomb-related metaphors here, I think your point is sound. We can empower teachers and create a chain reaction that leads to leaders in each of our classrooms. It does not require that a single school leader be a dictator in order to ensure that students succeed. Rather, the places that we see distributed leadership are the ones that we see better outcomes.

I think you are right to align this to project-based learning, but I would go further to ask the question of “who owns the learning” in the classroom? If it is the children, then the alignment is there and they are the ones leading the classroom. So too, we should ask “who owns the teaching” in the school? If it is the teachers, then we can all move together. If, on the other hand, that the learning is owned by the teacher and the teaching is owned by the school leader (or the district leadership) then we are misaligned and the classrooms and leadership will be ineffective.

I believe you are advocating for putting the teaching in the hands of teachers and the learning in the hands of students. This is spot on.

via The Paradox of Power: How empowering others increases a leader’s strength | The Underdog’s Advocate.

I love a good critique now and then, but I want to build something too. How can we make our schools what we want them to be?

This is one of the more coherent pieces I have read about the CCSS. It lays out a specific issue that you have with the overall scope of the standards themselves, but then also looks at how they have been used by others and implemented by school districts.

I do worry, however, about going to any extreme within discussing these standards or their implementation. I too struggle with an overly narrow emphasis, but I like the ways in which you can do deep because of it. I too struggle with a text-only approach, but I understand that this is meant to combat the many assignments that are tangentially related to the text (diaramas, webquests, etc.). I too struggle with an obsession with only the outcomes, but I feel as though equity can be lost when we don’t look at objective outcomes for our kids.

I believe that there is a compelling alternative to be had for implementing standards in this way, but it will only exist if we create it. I think you are right to call attention to what you believe is misguided, but I also want to propose what we should do instead. Is there a model or a set of standards that you believe would be better? Are there other ways of analyzing text that you see as more valid and that have led to better understanding? How can we get to a place where we are helping one another to create the future rather than just looking at the present in despair?

via Challenging the Cold War Pedagogy of Common Core | Creative by Nature.

We cannot simply expect finished products. We must honor and value the process of creating them too.

Modeling within professional development what we want to see in classrooms should be standard practice, and yet it is often not. Specifically, we tend to put teachers directly into fixed mindsets by denying that they have expertise worth sharing and broadly proclaiming that what they are doing is wrong and needs to be “fixed.”

I really appreciate your methodical approach to creating a growth mindset for teachers and leaders, particularly in “exposing and celebrating the process.” This aspect of teacher and leader development is so hidden that we expect every lesson to simply come out of a teacher’s head fully formed. We expect leaders to make all the right moves and not rely upon others for helping them to tackle all of the needs of a school. By making the process (and all teaching and leading processes) transparent, we are allowing for many more points of collaboration and shared creation.

via The Growth Mindset & Professional Development: Six Tips for Instructional Leaders | Mattson’s Musings.

Tolerance is not enough:

When I was in high school, we had a “diversity day” every year. During this day, we had many different speakers come and talk about their different viewpoints. The effort was to ensure that we did not get stuck in our little bubble (which was formidable because I graduated with only 125 other kids).

The unfortunate part of this event (and much of my k-12 experience) is that we did not talk about why Diversity itself is important. No one stood up and made the case for why Diversity and advocating for it was a shared value that we should all aspire to. We didn’t talk about the social science of group think and we didn’t go into the benefits of a diverse problem solvers.

I believe the fear of change that you describe is not knowing the direct benefit that diverse cultural representation can have on your life. It is only when we experience it and see its value that we can truly embrace the change and stop simply “tolerating” it.

via Working in Education through the Language Lens: I don’t tolerate “tolerance”!.

Debugging is about more than just programming and algorithms:

I really love your approach to teaching kids algorithms and getting them to stick with their plans long enough to see their first implementations before changing them. I think the skill of understanding WHY something didn’t work is the most important part of this process. I wonder how we might get kids to “debug” more of their work.

I see this as being highly applicable to other areas of their learning lives. They should be able to “debug” their writing assignments and understand the reasons why their arguments (or sentences) aren’t working the way they want them to. They should be able to “debug” their math problems and see why the numbers don’t add up. These are skills that we can count on for pretty much anything that requires you to understand a mistake and problem solve a solution. How can we encourage this kind of meta-cognition (which is really what it is) in other ways?

Teaching Coding without a Computer ~ Mrs.Wideen’s Blog.