Dear all,
For some reason
February is generally considered a tough month for teachers and I’m glad to say
that we have sailed smoothly through to March and are truly accelerating
towards the end of the year. Grade 12 Mocks, the Personal Project Fair and the
launch of the PYP Exhibition have passed smoothly and we can look ahead to the
Spring Break in March to give us that final chance to energize before the end
of the year.
Over the weekend
please take a look at the Principles of Learning that I have posted for your
comments. This is your chance to have a final say in how they will look. Take the chance to say something, as this humorous video encourages.
I hope that you feel comfortable with the vision they will create for
our learning and teaching. Once these are finalized it will become a
collaborative goal for next year to thoroughly unpack these Principles and show
what they mean to teachers, students and parents.
Here is the onedrive link if you'd like to add your comments:
This week’s Food
for Thought is linked to learning and talks about creating a culture of
learning in your classrooms.
Have a good
weekend,
Yours as always,
Adrian
Food for Thought reading:
“Learning is a culture.
It starts as a culture with the students as
human beings needing to understand their environment. And it ends as a culture
with students taking what we give them and using it in those physical and
digital environments they call home.
Even the practices that promote or undermine
the learning process itself are first and foremost human and cultural
artifacts. Literacy, curiosity, self-efficacy, ambition and other important
agents of learning are born in the native environments of students' homes.
Further, learning is ongoing, perishable and
alive -- just like culture.
Creating Culture
But what about your classroom? Can you
promote a certain culture there strategically, or does it just happen, the
seemingly random product of the student roster assignments mixed with your
personality as a teacher? More to the point, what exactly is a culture
of learning -- and can you create one yourself?
The short answer is that a culture of
learning is a collection of thinking habits, beliefs about self, and
collaborative workflows that result in sustained critical learning.
Or that's how I think of it, anyway.
Can you cause this to happen? Of course you
can. Almost anything can be learned -- and unlearned. It is simply a matter of
identifying desired characteristics and then using the Gradual
Release of Responsibility Model,
intentionally letting it happen.
"Intentionally letting" may seem
like an oxymoron. Well, it is. The idea is to create the conditions conducive
to some result -- here, a culture of learning -- and then get out of the way.
You can't cause curiosity, enthusiasm or affection, but you can let them
happen. Intentionally.
Use the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model
1. Show Them
·
Model the thinking habits, beliefs about
self, and collaborative workflows that result in sustained critical learning.
·
Demonstrate the think-alouds, reflective
writing, metacognitive conversations and other human practices and habits that
lead to learning, and then reflect again on their impact. How were they
successful? Where did they fall short? What might you do next time?
2. Help Them
The next step of the Gradual Release of
Responsibility Model is to help students do on their own what you just showed
them how to do. Put them in groups. Have them publish their thinking in a
podcast. Give them soft cushions to land on when they fail. Offer strategies,
coaching and general support to:
·
Help them publish their thinking -- the right
bits at the right time for the right audience.
·
Help them self-assess their performance.
·
Help them create their own standards for
their own work.
·
Help them revisit old ideas, old writing and
old projects. (This should actually be a requirement.
3. Let Them
The final stage of promoting a culture of
learning in your classroom is to simply get out of the way. Give them only just
enough for them to take off on their own:
·
A topic
·
A community
·
A project idea
·
An app
·
A problem worth solving
Then let them show what they can do and if
they just sit there like bumps on a log, go back to step #1.
Sustainability
If we consider the definition of culture as
the customs and beliefs of a community of human beings, then the fact that
culture both precedes and proceeds from learning makes sense. There is an ecology
to the learning process that can't be extracted, unpacked or tightly sequenced
to fit into some edu-box the way you hoped it might.
I mean, you can squeeze it into a box,
but at the risk of losing the kind of sustainable culture of learning that's
been the whole point of all this. ”
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/promoting-a-culture-of-learning-terry-heick
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