Food for Thought:Starting to think about our future pathways for students

Dear all,

Often the litmus test to what we are doing with students emerges from student led conferencing when parents receive a guided tour of their children's learning and thinking based on their work during the year. Parents comments were extremely positive and showed their increasing acceptance and understanding of where we are taking learning at ISHCMC.

This week's food for thought links to where we want to be going with ISHCMC students in the future. We want to provide more, especially for secondary school students, choices as they move through Grades 6-12. We hope that this will take our curriculum from serving the average student to serving all students. This talk by Todd Rose identifies the need for greater variability.

Of course there are many ways to add variation to our curriculum and increase learning opportunities. The most obvious of these is the internet and the explosion of online courses. Here is a link that I was just sent by a teacher for free online courses that would be of interest to both students and yourselves. Definitely worth a look.
Finally this move to greater variation and choice for students links with providing engagement and motivation. This Mindshift article by Kathy Perez provides 20 strategies for keeping students engaged and motivated in your classroom. Some of these strategies we are already using in our classrooms but many others are quite original and interesting. Perez is a fan of brain breaks and stresses that it is the " teacher's job to to make sure there are lots of quick, effective brain breaks built into the lesson to give children a moment to recalibrate. Perez says teachers must be prepared for a diverse cross section of learners with a large toolkit of strategies for teaching in multiple modalities, with many entry points to participation and content."

Have a good Sunday,

Yours
Adrian

For those interested in the environmental discussion started by Al Gore's  TED talk, here is another short documentary that further supports Cowspiracy and Race to Extinction.....Seaspiracy