Unlocking Students' Superpowers

What stories are being told? Whose voices are being included?
Being an educator in the classroom is the most fulfilling experience as you succeed and fail with your community of learners and together you unlearn and relearn for growth. How does learning takes place and becomes so eventful, from block times to individual learning styles and many emotional peaks from students? The classroom is the living lab that co-exists by decentralizing the learning and building a community of learning and leaders.  I have been blessed and continue to work in schools with very supportive leaders to experiment with my learning.

Learning is about sparking creativity through communication and collaboration. Building a culture of thinking by allowing students take the responsibility for their learning process. Students can unlock their superpowers when they are given the chance to experience them.

These are important reflections that as educators we need to be sharing:

• How am I giving opportunities for my students to communicate and to learn from each other?
• How am I creating opportunities for students to collaborate and take ownership of their process?
• How am I leveraging digital for thinking?
• How am I allowing students to build their confidence for risk-taking, failing and reflecting?
• What opportunities am I giving to students to create knowledge together?
• How are students reflecting and dealing with the discomfort of their social-emotional learning?
• How are students building the trust to be community members?

I am going to keep this blog post short as I am behind in telling the stories of learning from the students. My stories are always based on students evidence. I am going to present two stories one from Geography and One from French on Sustainable Development Global Goals.

Why not unpack the curriculum?

The Grade 7 students took the leadership and ownership of unpacking the curriculum and creating criteria of the process.



Can students co-construct criteria independently?

The students teamed up to plan how to explore the physical pattern of a changing world by focusing on the Canadian physical regions.



Why not design compasses using Micro:bit?

Please click on the link to watch the video The students applied the math and geography by programming a compass for an amazing race of team members across Canada.



How can students connect causes and factors of Canadian physical regions?

Through the causal model, students applied their thinking and developed their competencies by finding causes and factors of natural events and human activities that apply on the physical regions. They also analyzed challenges and opportunities presented by the physical regions.




Can students reflect on Collaboration, Communication and Critical Thinking while thinking the causal model?



Can students research and develop perspectives on natural resources?

The grade 7 students analyzed aspects of extractions/harvesting of natural resources in different regions in the world and assessed ways of persevering these resources.



Can students analyze and interpret data of natural resources between Canada and the world?






Can students learn from experts online?

The Geography Grade 7 students spoke with Doctor Rich Petrone Professor of Geography & Environments Management at Waterloo University, online. Students also had a webinar with Dr. Jennifer McKellar from Partners In Research Video recording.

Sustainable Global Goals 

Can students choose and unpack the causes and complexity of each of the Sustainable Global Goals?




Can students interpret and analyze data about the Sustainable Global Goals?



How do students consult with experts on world equity problems?

A hangout with Dr. Annemieke Farenhorst about First Nations Quality of Water Video Link. In addition, they spoke with Sarah Begum, explorer and journalist with Royal Geographical, investigating the impacts of oil exploitation and deforestation on Huaorani tribe land in the Amazone Rainforest.




Meeting with Midia Hassan a biochemist and a Chemical Engineer who makes change locally and globally through many innovation hubs. Midia is also a recipient of the Queens Young Leaders award for 2018.




Can students reflect throughout the process?



Some Reflections just specific to the causal model


 Can students unpack the 6c's while explicitly unpacking their thinking?



There are many layers throughout the process from analyzing reading, researching skills, consolidations and co-constructing criteria by students as needed.

The Flow Theory is when students are engaged in meaningful tasks, take ownership, make choices and build positive relationships. The learning goals are clear; the learning is attainable and achievable by students focusing on their thinking, connecting learning and mastering their skills. The Students scaffold their own learning taking leadership by pausing and reflecting, searching and critically solving and connecting their experiences and new experiences. The students are completely taken by their concentration and focus.  This is the focus in the classroom when students are engaged, being agents and owning their process of learning.

Through Integrative Thinking, the students are immersed in conditions that allow the 6c's - collaboration, communication, critical thinking, creativity, character, and citizenship - to be explored and immersed throughout the process. When students are thinking through the causal model, Pro Pro model or the ladder of inferences, all competencies are enabled. No skills are separated when the students are collaborating, they are communicating and critically analyzing each others thinking, valuing ideas, connecting them and creating knowledge as a team. They are persevering to problem solve and are in the state of the Flow. They are very focused to connect thinking, values, benefits, and interpreting data. It is the equity of learning where all voices are accountable and all perspectives are valued. The students are agents of their own learning with perspectives shared and leveraged with the whole team and equitably achieved.

The students enable their own conversations and scaffold their own inquiries when it is needed to research and persevere to apply their thinking through the models. All voices are heard, all perspectives are accountable it becomes a collective responsibility. Learning is very dynamic and their thinking becomes very explicit and builds their confidence. The students ignite their own fire and develop a culture of learning. Where discomforted learning becomes enjoyable learning, the students are in the state of hyperfocus connecting their thinking and willing to critically think, collaborate and communicate to persevere in making thinking explicit.

As William Butler Yeats is quoted as saying, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

Learning experiences happen when students are immersed in tackling problems relevant to their real-life experiences. Building relationships while managing social-emotional learning creates a sense of belonging to the community of learning. The students feel they are important to the space of learning. They are compassionate, making differences to their own experiences and knowing that learning is reachable within themselves as experts and with an online community of experts.

How are we impacting and empowering students in deep learning?

• Who is setting the goals for learning?
• How is learning equitable?
• How are students taking full ownership and responsibility to keep interested in owning their learning?
• How to grow in experiences of valuing and trusting their learning?
• How are they developing self-trust in thinking and risk-taking?
• How are they building compassion to their learning?
• How are they reflecting on their learning?
• How are they aware of competencies and being enabled during the process of learning?
• How are students feeling accepted and their ideas are validated?
• How does their perspective matter and is understood by others? 

Looking forward to telling more stories about Grade 7 sustainable actions in their community and how their learning will make a difference and contribute to change. 

The Theory of flow from the master himself, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi A short video on Flow  Another short video on Flow by John Spencer Video

Honoring Within Learning

Building a culture of risk takers, thinkers, motivators who self-assess and self-regulate is a process that is explored from day one of school and is continuously explored throughout the year. It takes time, and the key to success is letting students explore, reflect on their own actions and determine their next steps.

Competency-based learning is when students own the process and build their learning based on multiple perspectives by valuing their own thinking and others. When students are immersed in their learning they are reflecting on the process of what, how and why of learning.  The students are dealing with their habits and developing their social and emotional learning when they are reflecting during the process. Students' reflections on competencies during the process allows the authenticity of seeing themselves as designers of their learning.  The students need to know their voices matter, communicate effectively and self- assess to take action. 

I am sharing the recent causal models From Rotman I-Think Initiative of students interpersonal experiences while focusing on the causes and the factors of real world events.  Some experiences are shared on the last post.

During the causal model, the students are builders and agents of their own learning.  During the process the students contribute their voices with confidence, they are engaged in collaborative meaningful and purposeful conversations on real world issues.  

This is the students' third experience with the process of thinking through the causal model. The students identified five of the six competencies that they would highlight during the process of the integrative thinking.  The competencies are based from the 6C's of Michael Fullen's Pedagogies For Deep Learning.

• Collaboration: Managing dynamics and applying the empathy process of listening, respecting all views and learning from others
• Critical Thinking: Collectively thinking and sharing ideas throughout complex stakes and events and their causes. Keeping on asking "what causes this/that?" linking causes and factors of the sustainable global goals
• Creativity: Asking questions that connect to the causes and factors to further inquire and challenge the thinking possibilities to world problems or issues.
• Self-regulation/Character for Deep Learning: The responsibility for learning, to stay focused on listening, questions and communicating to add knowledge
• Communication: listening and valuing ideas, building on others' ideas, reflecting and analyzing the communication as a team and considering multiple perspectives, maximizing diverse thinking, linking and analyzing my classmates' knowledge of the varied sustainable goals.

Below are slides of students focused collaborative thinking and images of the causal models

Some samples of reflections of the competencies during the integrative thinking

The students were also recording their conversations during the thinking. The recordings are evidence about their responsibilities to the interdependence of critical thinking and knowledge building. 

I have combined some audios, most were hard to listen to as you could hear the tapping of the markers while writing.

Warning when listening, turn the volume down!

While interacting and interdependently thinking about the causes and factors of global sustainability the students contribute with confidence in meaningful and purposeful conversations on real world issues.  The students become problem solvers that affect the construction of the factors and the causes to produce meaningful change and contribute to the thinking.  

The students become inclusive and they target at finding these causes and factors and be involved in asking and listening that leads to constructive knowledge of learning. The students have a clear purpose and they are aware and dependent on each other for the learning.  The students are motivated and persistent with each other to build the model. 

When students are exploring learning through the causal model they are honoring their own learning and other team members.  The learning happens among them within them respectfully sharing, questioning, analyzing, eagerly inquiring to further connect their learning.

Through this rich Integrative Thinking process, the resilience and the perseverance of responsibility to learn together is enriched, from thinking about what they know what they have learned to critically listen and share.

I continue to explore and reflect about the competencies of deep learning through Integrative Thinking with and from my learners. I reflect on how students unpack and arm themselves with the confidence of communicating, self-regulating, self-assessing, analyzing their thinking and their classmates when persevering in solving many real-world problems and allowing them to honor their thinking and others. 

What are the powerful learning experiences that we are allowing for our students to be constructors, owners, and reflectors of honoring their learning? 

What Really Matters!

The power of learning is connecting students to the real world and making every day learning realistic through problem solving.  The students need to become analytical and connect cross- disciplinary thinking to the real world based on political events, news makers to the arts and technology innovations. The key to the success is for the students to be initiated in discussions that would require gathering information, analyzing, interpreting and exploring possibilities.                             

In order for students to enrich their experiences about The Grade 6 Social Studies on Heritage and Identity, they collected data to assess contributions made by various groups to Canadian communities. The students applied the model of The Ladder of Inference ( I-Think Rotman School) for the mental process to collect data about Canadian identity, inclusiveness and multiculturalism. The data we collected were from three different sources, the retirement home open ended interviews with the residents, the CBC report about the Raptors and students own open ended interviews from their own community.

The students examined the data based on experiences and observations in the world around us. It was a very huge data especially from the retirement home. In teams students selected and interpreted based on their experiences and understanding. The interpretations lead to conclusions that became our bases for our understanding of inclusiveness and Canadian identity.

The following presentation has students’ samples from the visit to the retirement home and their interpretations from the collected data.

To continue with our understanding on multiculturalism I shared with the students  the CBC Report about the Raptors and multiculturalism.  The students collected the data from the video and interpreted it.

The students continued exploring with multiculturalism and inclusiveness by interviewing their parents, neighbours and people from their community. The following slides include examples based on the question:  Has Canada attained its goal of inclusiveness?  

The students' discussions were rich from historical facts to the present about inclusiveness that provoked many inquiries about the aboriginal treatment to the refugees and racism in today's society.

The students searched the The Canadian Encyclopedia  and inquired about the history and the presence of many cultures, the reasons for their arrival to Canada and their integration in our today’s society.

In order for the students to gather all the thinking for better understanding of many elements in the Canadian identity, we then focused on the causes and effects. From gathering so much data and inquiries about the past and the present and making their thinking more explicit and giving the opportunity for teams to share their thinking as they have explored many complex issues on inclusiveness, identity and multiculturalism. The students (in teams) shared their understanding about Canadian identity by developing a causal model ( I-Think Rotman School).

The students explored my maps to house their inquiry and thinking process on diversity, inclusion and multiculturalism. I will only share an example of the map. The students screencastified the causal models explaining their thinking. Please scroll through the layers of the maps to view the ladder of inference including the Causal Model and the videos. A screencastify of a student explaining the causal model 1  Screencastify of the causal model #2

There is so much to share and I need to improve on blogging often instead of sharing the full process with just the one post.

Through the Integrative Thinking the students have experienced effective collaboration to learn to leverage each other’s ideas by being deep flexible thinkers and problem solvers. This process from data collection to gathering thinking of causes and effects has given the students tools to challenge their thinking and deepen their learning. The complexity has become explicit based on their interpretation and allowing opportunities to expand their learning.

As educators we have to always think, how are we equipping our students to become effective collaborators with strategies to think and problem solve?

Creative Complexities!

Giving students learning opportunities to grow and experiment with the learning process of complex ideas is the architecture of the why and how of problem solving. Our thinking is always provoked through current events from scientific inventions, social entrepreneurial to international, national and local political issues,

 Many events from September began unveiling from the United Nations Global Goals to world issues and national elections. I continue to explore and learn with my students by applying the thinking models from the Rotman School I think Initiative.: the Ladder of Inference, Visual Alphabet, Open Ended Conversations, Pro- Pro model, System Thinking and Causal Model. Keeping in mind the academic commitments to all curriculum concepts, we engage through cross disciplinary and many tools, we began exploring the thinking process through the causal model.

The students and I began exploring the causal model by referring to our classroom experiences of speaking French; Grade 6 students are motivated to be bilingual...

We continue to learn together and experiment. Thanks to Nogah Kornberg (from Rotman School) who has been my learning partner after school and even late nights for consulting about the thinking process since September. We also had an opportunity of working with Nogah live through Google Hangout on the causal model with a group of students.

Below are samples of the causal model on terrorism:

The focus of the Grade 6 Social Studies is Canada's Interactions with the Global Community. The concept of  disciplinary thinking across subjects are causes and consequences of politics. The students began their inquiry by using the arts to search and learn more about their chosen global goal UN Sustainable Global Goals. We were fortunate to follow the development on twitter and had a chance to speak online with the COP21 Youth delegation about indigenous representation of Canada.  

Through the arts, the thinking process was to focus on visual literacy to portray the facts and communicate the purpose of the goal: to see, to describe, to analyze and to interpret through the elements and the principles of visual arts. The visual literacy enabled students to research and understand the facts in relation to the developed and developing countries. 

Students individually built a causal model to continue exploring the causes of their goal from developing and developed countries.  

To construct knowledge of the Global Goals students combined the goals while creating team causal models. Each causal began with a statement: the consumption of resources, problems of poverty from around the world, living in poverty, to stop poverty by 2030. 

I tried capturing some students' conversations during the causal model discussions of the Global Goals. 

This architecture of learning through the causal model developed the critical thinking and communication skills of the students.

Critical thinking: interpreting, analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating information while making meaningful connections to the issues and the facts of the goals, and collaborative meaningful knowledge construction. 

The students' communication skills were also developing during the discussions by connecting the facts of the goals during the group causal model: explaining clearly, considering multiple and diverse thinking, communicating in detail in order to understand contexts. While communicating the students were analyzing, synthesizing their thinking together building on what they know and new meaning together through these discussions. The process of communication was not based on judgement of each others perspectives, rather it was based on unpacking thinking from each other.

Below are some audios captured by students connecting the causes of their goals. As we continue exploring with the causal model we will be recording the conversations during the designing process of the model. 

Coding was part of the process by using Scratch to create the targets for sustainability by 2030 .

The students also implemented green screen to capture the full process about the sustainability of each goal.

Technology integration is used to amplify the thinking process and demonstrate learning in multiple ways, valuing and empowering the pedagogical process.

Through designing thinking, students' motivation is authentic in breaking down the thinking process. The students are advocating, innovating and problem solving throughout the causal model. They take ownership of scaffolding complex skills. The 6 C's of New Pedagogy for Deep Learning Competencies are amplified throughout the process: Communication, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Character, Creativity and Citizenship,

I should have blogged while we unpacked the learning together. The students have reflected and documented the process that I will be sharing with their permission in the New Year. Since we already know that learning is messy and embracing the process by reflecting and iterating with the students then we don't shy away from complexity and maximize our learning together.

As we learn we continue to reflect on the process of learning,we ask ourselves:

• Are students creating their own questions for the passion of learning?
• Are students focusing on thinking?
• Are students taking control of their thinking?
• How are students reasoning complex problems?