Why collaboration matters!

As I embark to be part of the  #28daysofwriting with Tom Barrett who has always been an inspiration for learning in my online learning Twitter community, my focus will be reflecting on pedagogical and daily inspirations from my students.

In class we always develop a positive approach for learning from each other. We reflect on our learning skills and determine our next steps. Last week I recorded short vines about students analyzing their science reading about "Les éléments nutritifs". The students, together analyzed a text for understanding in order to learn the importance of nutrients on the function of the human body (Gr 5 Science Curriculum) on healthy eating habits. Students shared their background knowledge on daily nutritions and referred to the Canada's Food Guide for further inquiry.

For reading students are provided with opportunities to analyze and think together rather than relying on the teacher or Google translate. It is a collaborative thinking  community, building on each others' knowledge, understanding, and strategies developed by the students . The students annotate the text while reading, highlighting Mots amis, inferencing unfamiliar words and connecting to their background knowledge.

The purpose of our collaborative community is to overcome challenges, learn together by giving everyone a voice and building on each others' learning. Students question, connect, share and build their confidence in learning a second language. Students persevere, take risks by caring and persist on finding meaning together.

With positive engagements of building confidence, students' accomplishments become team based, and collaborative skills become comfortable leading to conditions for thriving together. Students learn interdependence of decisions by ensuring each others strength and building new learning to the benefit of all.

This week students will follow up by reflecting on their skills when watching the video and sharing their point of view on healthy eating habits. We need to keep in mind by asking, what opportunities are we allowing for learners to learn form each other? How students can become their own self-directed learners?

Still learning!

How can I reach my students and the parents at the end of the process?

As we know learning is messy and assessment is the core of the process that loops backwards and forwards and develops the pedagogy and next steps of learning. Grit is something that you don't teach, students experience grit through rich tasks and giving them time to reflect on their learning skills by focusing on next steps. A reflection becomes an inspiration for learning through sharing and learning from each other. Therefore, reflections are the core of the learning process. It is the looping of the forward and the backward and bridging the learning. My students are asked to reflect on Google calendars and document their challenges and their new learning. I posted about the process last June. Reflection Post

After 4 years of monitoring and learning the reflective process with my students and its effect on their learning process, reflections have changed from a requirement to an inspiration for learning.  Reflections became the perseverance for the next steps in the learning community.

 Teachers in Ontario are responsible for providing grades at two reporting periods. The focus of the assessment is the process based on the overall expectations from the curriculum that the students unpack through many learning tasks. The process becomes a collection of evidence that have been reflected upon by the students with each other and with me, based on the co-constructed criteria and its details (mechanism) that determines the assessment of learning. This takes a long time! As it is not just a coverage it is unpacking the metacognition throughout the process giving time to reflect, to determine learning goals and to apply the feedback as well as allowing autonomy to flourish among the students and adapt to this process.

Documented feedback and applications of feedback are gathered through audios for oral evidence, screen capturing of online learning, written evidence, evidence of thinking through organizers and conversations in class. Learning is seamless with technology by connecting and providing evidence throughout the process. Learning is enjoyable, completed with perseverance based on clear expectations and interactions with the students and the teacher.

Communicating throughout the process is key to learning for the students and tracking the progression, where assessment becomes a community based on purposeful learning. There is always room for learning and improving with the assessment process and the evaluation. By honoring students roles and relationships at individual levels with their learning and building relationship with students to parents and to me, I have invited the parents to the evaluation. Parents and students should be able to comment on the evaluation. Last year's success motivated me to continue and  this year I am incorporating  the co-constructed criteria and audio for commenting on the skills by using keizena.

This post will focus on my own learning of sharing the evaluation with the parents. Students are responsible at home to unpack the steps and the process through the evidence based on the criteria on the eportfolio. I still have so much more to achieve in my learning and I will continue to share. This is how technology has allowed for the evaluation process to become seamless. I took a screen capture of it due to privacy and respect to the students than adding live links.

A picture of a comment from a student about her Social Studies Journey.

I am still learning and this is what is working for me at the moment. I am trying out many tools for documenting feedback. With Hapara the process has been much easier for me to track and for the students to take ownership as well.  I will still use my two days of professional  development to arrange learning fairs with the parents in my classroom. The students and I will be thinking about how it might look like . I will continue to share my learning and would love to hear about your learning too.

I continue to persevere and learn with my students about autonomy, assessment and documenting. I always think about: How am I communicating to the students the evaluation?  How am I and the students communicating about the assessment process and next steps? How am I speaking to the evidence? How students are taking autonomy of their learning and identifying their next steps? How can assessment and evaluation become a community?

Thoughts on perseverance!

This year I wanted to take risks with the students by implementing tinkering and making. We have made the Scribble Bot (Blog) and now the automata by focusing on the learning skills and analyzing students choice of design to represent the main idea of the Grade 5 and 6 Social Studies.

 During the making process students are enthusiastic, persistent, engaged and articulate their creative thinking process. The positive mentality of perseverance and persistence depended on each others learning and thinking of the how and why of the function of the automata mechanics. Students stayed engaged and pursued learning together. Students became resourceful and imaginative in building a learning community valuing each others' thinking outcomes.

By taking risks with the students and developing our learning together, we gather resourceful thinking environments in which failing has a purpose for achieving.

Through many learning tasks students are engaged and motivated. Through the making with materials from scratch and designing, autonomy and ownership seem to prevail and be captured by a culture of cultivation by the students who are the makers, who are being meaningful and challenging their thinking with the making. The progression of thinking skills of self-regulation, problem solving. designing and retrying flow and flourish.

By observing and coaching through feedback, I made time for consolidations and reflections which provoked creative thinking skills that students unpacked allowing life long skills of getting through tough obstacles for creating.

The assessment is very rich since it is the actual process of making and documenting the learning. What counts is being able to analyze, pursue their own designing and naturally share, question and learn from each other. Students were constantly analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating, creating and recreating to achieve the automata function. The process is about the learning: How was the student thriving? Did the student have a sense of meaning in what he/she was doing? What role did they play in sharing? The students were thriving: by wondering, challenging their thinking and reflecting on the co-constructed criteria that explained the automata making process.

My learning thrived as well just as the students, I persevered the challenges of opening the maker education with my students. Like any tasks in class, reading, writing, blogging, Math, we need to give the opportunity for open discussions, inviting peer feedback, reflecting and transforming thinking for students to become resourceful, imaginative and creative.

My Self reflective questions during learning tasks:

How am I inviting the students to take risks?
How am I inviting curiosity?
How am I building a community for persistence and resourceful learning?

Evidence of the process: 

Padlet with the criteria and samples from Tinkering and Makers Ed sites:

Created with Padlet

Reflections

An audio reflection

Videos of explaining the process using Explain Everything App.

I would like to thank @maker_junior Alison Adnani for always inspiring me, for the Makerspace G+ Community and The Tinkering Studio Team for learning from them too, 

Coding For Success!

Anyone can do it and anybody can be successful at it!

Coding is creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and communication, it is valuable with interpersonal skills. I introduced coding on the first week of December to my students. I provoked the students' thinking by having each team link to an animation and play while seeing the inside. Students immediately figured out the how of coding. We began co-constructing a criteria and identifying the variety of coding for the script. On the classroom site I shared many coding articles informing parents about the importance of computing language. Once students knew about http://code.org/learn that same evening students were completing the Hour of Code certificate and exploring game designing and sharing them online on the classroom Padlet for coding.

In class immediate collaboration began, guiding each other through the how of coding and sharing new discoveries. Once the coding skills were established, it took students two days to become familiar with the computing language. Students began a project showing their learning about  Social Studies curriculum describing the causes and effects of interactions between European and First Nation for Grade 5 and for Grade 6 Canadian identity by various groups historical and contemporary communities.

Why was coding very successful?

• Peer programming, thinking together 
• Perseverance, resilience and persistence 
• Self- Confidence
• Problem solving
• Sharing thinking 
• Application of new knowledge
• Peer collaborating to improve results
• Explaining their reasoning
• Analyzing 
• Application of feedback
• Reflecting and improving their learning process
• Identifying and assessing ideas for creative application
• Deep discussions and decisions ensuring team strengths
• Collective responsibility for individual expertise 
• Expression of point of view allowing teams to move forward
• Encouraging each others' innovation

Essential skills were highlighted and practiced. Students were getting further ahead by restarting and rediscovering learning by overcoming any setbacks. They were problem solving and caring for each other.

I was activating and giving students the chance to build their self-confidence at learning and I was observing and asking students as they code about the how and what if of coding language. The engagement blossomed and shined and students became tech leaders at improving their thinking, It was a mindset of  learners and creators by unpacking a canvas of many skills.

An example of a certificate and Flappy bird Game

Through Our Learning Connections Fair my colleagues Patricia Fiorino who teaches Kindergarten and Natalie MacDonald who teaches Grade one also spoke about Kodable, Daisy Dinosaur and Scratch Junior. I am sharing the Scratch presentation that has links to the padlets for both classes and also students' reflections and explaining the coding. A group of students also created a site and an Incorporation  for others to try their games and leave feedback.  During the Hour Of Code week my students guided the Grade ones through an online coding Scratch animations.

Gr 1 @NatalieMacDona5 Gr 5 Ss @StGabeSchool #hourofcode guiding gr1 on @scratchteam #ocsb https://t.co/bDKWQYA0MK
— Rola Tibshirani (@rolat) December 11, 2014

Please share your learning from your students when they start coding and unpacking skills.  How successful will your students be at coding?

Google Drawing And Documenting Learning

We have used many tools for capturing the thinking process and documenting our learning, from Audio Boom , explain everything and other IOS apps as well as GAPPS. In this post, I chose to share documentation of learning through Google Drawing. The students have been applying Google Drawing for explaining their thinking and learning since September. The students document their learning process by uploading it on the eportofolios. We have used Google Drawing with Keizena, attaching a link for the criteria on the drawing, checking for comprehension of a text, and screencasting for evidence of applying feedback.

Google drawing with Keizena: Many layers of sharing and documenting.

1- By commenting, this student explained her favorite photo taken during the Terry Fox walk in September at Kanata's Beaver Pond.

2- The student added a link to the same image, explaining her 2 other photos about the Beaver Pond in relation to the same image. At the top of this image the student's initials LC and next the link. 

3-The link leads to  the Google Drawing that explains what is in common of the 3 photos.

4- Students also added their voices to the Google drawing and teacher's  feedback was also recorded.

Google Drawing and success criteria attached on the Drawing. 

A student explained First Nation People adaptation to the environment. When the title (Les Algonquins) is clicked  the  document of the success criteria that is attached will be viewed for feedback.  The students made a copy of the original document of the criteria, shared and attached it to the drawing.

Google Drawing and assessment for reading comprehension

The students  either labeled the events or ordered the boxes after reading a text for a comprehension self assessment. 

We were very fortunate to have the WW1 supply Line Kit from the War Museum. The students created a Google Drawing explaining their feelings about the war by using the strategy CSI ( Color, Symbol and image). One of our focuses was to improve the French grammar, after feedback from the teacher, the students recorded the evidence of the feedback by using the extension screencastify or snagit.

The following video was uploaded on student's YouTube account:

The video explaining how feedback was applied

Another video explaining how feedback was applied was uploaded on my YouTube account using my laptop as some students had difficulties connecting on the Chromebook with the extension.

Students connected  many skills when applying technology for documenting learning: 

•  Responsibility and ownership of learning for providing evidence of the co-constructed criteria of tasks and learning goals, 
•  The responsibility of planing, monitoring, assessing by peer, teacher and self-assessment,  promoting students' control of their own learning by being mindful, intentional and self-directed. 
• Relating skills to self -regulation of the metacognitive process by promoting problem solving, trying and retrying,  applying many strategies, clarification of expectations, reflective questioning for their own perspective of designing learning. 
• Collaboration for sharing, articulating their own learning .
• Organization plays a big part of this process as students document their learning and upload to their eportfolios.

We will continue building skills focusing on the learning process with many tools for metacognitive purpose and making learning visible by the students for their classmates, their parents and for a global audience. Some self-reflective questioning that guides me while planning are:

• Were the expectations clear?
• Did I set a positive environment of trying and retrying by consolidating with my students?
• Did I provide the time for learners questioning about the process?
• Did I ensure learners were motivated? (Provocation so important)
• Did I provide the resources for scaffolding and feedback?

When students become passionate about History!

How will we ensure that learning goes beyond the classroom?

How do we ensure students get engaged in history?

How  do we ensure that the learning is rich and deep enough that every students finds passion of learning?

Strong provocations hook students to passionate learning and critical thinking. Capturing students passion through experiences that leads to interactions, questioning and discussions of historical events. We began our historical analyzation by Exploring the The Giant Floor Map of 1812 from The Canadian National Geographic.  In a previous post on unpacking what is history and Geography? Since early October up to now students are still referring to their experiences of the War of 182 and are familiar with the concept of events and timelines. Building knowledge of the first inhabitants in Canada and how they have arrived and adapted to the arrival of the Europeens.  From a living library with aboriginal artifacts to the Blanket exercise with my English partner Ms Brambles. Visiting the virtual museum and building individual passion by exploring aboriginal peoples needs. Now we are immersed in the learning of WWI through WW1 Kit form the War Museum. Students have gone home and independently continued searching and sharing their excitement about history through building of lego. iMovies, Powtoon, Google presentations. Students are excited about reading and synthesizing the historical aspects, causes, effects and perspectives. Students are applying their historical knowledge through conversations with respect to the facts from long ago that shaped our lives today.

The passion for learning is stretching students thinking and learning by slowing down to allow them ownership of explorations, discussions. Passion for learning is living the moment for quality rather than quantity of learning,  allowing the curiosity to flow and build a learning community of new concepts through many provocations and thinking skills.

Why A Learning Community?

After spending two weeks on building collaborative skills, the accountability of learning, designing and reflecting on the learning process. Self-regulation became a focus during the learning process while collaborating. How do I stay accountable during distractions? How do I commit to compromise during team discussions? How do I build and learn from my teams' thinking? What is designing a project? Why create and explain my learning?

Students were given opportunities to reflect and fortify the thinking skills when designing and creating a task. Students reflected on the importance of learning outcomes when creating and found that creating is more than just assembling items or objects together.

The students pointed that throughout the process of building the scribble bot, they were:

• Thinking
• Trying and retrying.
• Problem solving
• Confirming learning and discovering new learning
• Referring to criteria for expectations
• Covering learning concepts: French Science Social Studies Arts Math
• Collaborating
• Learning from the team
• Having conversations
• Reflecting, and adjusting
• Improving, through many attempts, there was lots of growth
• Accepting, feedback- from team members
• Compromising on ideas  
• Stopping. thinking and deciding

Students in teams unpacking the learning process of projects.

QR codes of the projects were posted and students were able to give feedback to classmates. They unpacked what is reflection, what is feedback and constructive criticism. These conversations lead into fixed mindset and growth mindset that we will continue unpacking by focusing on habits.

Students also shared their expertise on technology for the project. I did not teach them the how to of the tools they developed the skills to be successful and creative with the tools. (ShowMe, iMovie, Google presentation, Thinglink, Fotobabble, 30hands pro)

After 3 weeks, I am starting to see students understand that thinking is not just something you keep to yourself. It is what you can share, reflect, reapply, create, explain. Learning is a community full of feedback and new learning. The trust during learning with no judgement, increased risk taking for achieving and succeeding. We focused on the success and the improvements during tasks.With the open ended tasks students became problem solvers, designers (all scribble bots were different). They understood concepts of structures, electricity and developing French language through team conversations and explaining. We worked with our needs and built our learning community!

My goal is to make students confident, and think of school as a learning environment where they lead their learning, make mistakes for growth and design their thinking.

How are you encouraging growth, self-confidence, self regulation and collaboration?

The eportfolios for housing the tasks and reflecting about the process of learning.

All About Learning Experiences!

Yes I have not tackled the curriculum content yet!  I am still creating learning situations for students to unpack, why collaborate? How to collaborate? What is a task? What is thinking? and What is creating?

These learning experiences are life long skills that would embed in any content and any situations at school and outside school. They are skills and habits that students need to be immersed in and for themselves to develop react and reflect.

Yes of course there are moments that are chaotic, unexpected, as it should be! Teachers need to know the real meaning of scaffolding during all learning experiences, when to stop the whole class and react to the situation, reflect and readjust. These situations become the co-constructed expectations for building a community of risk takers, amplifying students' voices , students becoming accountable, reflectors and owners of learning from these experiences.

Many learning situations throughout the year are successful and unsuccessful, how are we taking the responsibility of owning the learning and reflecting?

During week two we consolidated on the criteria of collaboration. On a daily basis and even throughout the tasks we are determining individual goals on the collaborative criteria, stopping, reflecting and resetting goals. Last week post explains collaborative tasks.

The best moment was when students began discovering that learning is a community. In groups they were writing questions to promote french oral conversations about daily needs. Students come with a backpack of knowledge, we need to give them a chance to share it and learn from each other. In groups they shared their questions and already learned from each other the verbs, the format of questioning. I gave them time to share and add their new learning in their French notebooks.

Meaningful learning experiences are, when students are given opportunities to take ownership, reflect, share learning and apply it. A meaningful learning community is a community of respect for opinions, respect for sharing thinking, questioning, adapting when reflecting. 

This week we also explored what is creating and explaining based on last week's project on the scribble bot. Students' described what is creating, how to explain about the scribble bot and how to capture learning by using some tech tools. Lots of thinking, unpacking of learning that students will continue reflecting on, creating, explaining, sharing learning and skills on using tech tools. Lots ahead!

Some pictures of week two of students' experiences at learning.

What will be your students' learning experiences this coming week? We have lots ahead to revisit and reflect. I would love to hear about your experiences with your students!

Thank you for the feedback from last week's post and so exciting to have teachers try the sticky notes needs in class. As promised I will share our next steps. Students categorized the items and wrote questions about their needs since we are French language learners class. A group also took ownership of finding the cost of the items as we are learning to be a caring community . I had the students reflect on this video: 

With students' permission I am sharing a couple of projects on explaining:

Gr 5/6 students using Google presentation and iMovie to explain the Scribble Bot

A link to 30 hands about the Scribble Bot: 30 Hands Pro  Another video: Sharing learning

The What, Why And How Of Fun On The First Week!

Exciting faces and laughs are a reminder of how lucky we are to be teachers and be able to work with students who become our new family in our learning shelter. 

I find it important to build this community of family as soon as the new members step in with so many wonders about their new home. It is important to immediately make this new home a happy and comfortable environment, Yes even on day one! Letting them connect and feel the ownership, the belonging, making decisions, having all voices recognized, the inventors, the wonders, the responsible and the joy of being together and respecting each other.   

The only instruction that I shared with the students were, where to line up outside for coming and leaving to and from school and how to change classrooms from French to English. I let them discover their needs as the day developed and had them make their decisions on where, how, when of daily routines and with whom to sit. Students discovered cupboards, closets, dug through school bags and around the classroom labeling in French their classroom needs. There was laughter and team collaboration. We will continue this activity by adding on questions for our needs. Some even labelled me as a need and Liam labelled himself being important for his team. Why was it fun? because it was unusual! It was a different first day, it was them moving, deciding, gathering together! 

Met my students through crumpled papers guessing names and selfies shared on Padlet of what makes them happy. 

The goals of the week where to let students explore through tasks to unpack skills of collaboration and self-regulation. Giving them opportunities to learn from and with each other on the first week. To have them feel the sense of accountability and the need to explain their thinking in second language. The videos below capture our tasks.

 Audioboo was introduced to capture voices of collaboration, voices of joy, attempting and sometimes succeeding, as well as communicating in a second language. We co-constructed the criteria on collaboration and the actions required to improve the French language. 

Throughout the tasks I was scaffolding students' attention to become the observers of their actions and reflect on team work.

listen to ‘Equipe 3 JKPB’ on Audioboo


Questions to focus on while I continue to establish the happy and comfortable environment:

Have I established the purpose of  the classroom environment?
Have I established the connections between the students and me?
Have I incorporated risk taking and ownership?
Have I thought of fun and  realistic tasks?
How will I  downgrade my control and promote autonomy?

Twitter is also my learning classroom. I am sharing a couple of tweets that I came across Saturday morning that reflect my thinking.

“@pernilleripp: A great learning environment has room for all people to learn, including the teacher #satchat” #cdnedchat #ocsb
— Rola Tibshirani (@rolat) September 6, 2014

“@shaunyk: My visual notes from @shareski excellent keynote on planning for joy #gafesummit pic.twitter.com/nfzO1szGS8” #joy #cdnedchat
— Rola Tibshirani (@rolat) September 6, 2014

Propelling Curiosity!

 It is important to provoke students' learning for curriculum inquiries in many exciting and innovative ways. It could be artifacts, videos, current event news, objects, interviews, wordles, pictures and even from a story book.  As teachers we always have to bring reality into the the inquiry process to connect real life experiences into everyday learning.

There are multiple ways of  propelling curriculum curiosity in class and inviting students to spark and ignite in questions that they never seem wanting to stop learning, sharing and collaborating that conversations become an ongoing vehicle of exploring and developing ownership of learning.  It is so exciting to see students push each others thinking and learning by questioning, seeking, pursuing, confirming, convincing, comparing their ongoing development of thinking and reflecting in depth on their learning.

Of course along the way students co-construct criteria not only for the purpose of reading, writing and speaking, also for the learning skills. These foci of strategies that overlap and extend thinking as well as learning skills (responsibility, self-regulation, collaboration, independence, organization and initiative) that loop and promote metacognition and reflection on learning. Reflecting (at the end and the beginning of the day) on learning, is what drives our thinking throughout the process and determines next steps and learning goals. It is explained in this post on Metacognitive Discussions.

The focus of this post, is to share some examples that created opportunities for thinking and provoking curiosity leading students in ownership of learning.  During this process, I become a mentor, a listener, an observer and an activator while students developed their curiosities. Students' questions always lead the inquiry process. Provoking focuses on students' questions, which is a very important step in letting them engage and take leadership and ownership of the process. The process is carried on with categorizing of the the questions then comparing them to the overall expectations of the curriculum.

These questions are a routine in activating conversations:

1- What do think is going on? Background knowledge

2- What makes you think this? Students support background knowledge and share the how and the why of their knowledge before searching to confirm and proceed to new learning. It is very import to give students this opportunity of building on each other's background knowledge and engage in conversations to pursue thinking and inquiries.  I love this stage as it solidifies their dependence of learning from each other then it provokes more thinking and further questioning actions and new inquiries through discussions. This is a very important step to takeby encourage listening, speaking and respecting other opinions and knowledge for further clarification of concepts.

 3- What would you wonder about? (After their discussions). What new learning are you wondering about? Throughout the year students develop searching skills, annotation for reading and choose ways to share new learning.

It takes time to immerse students in skills by providing exciting learning opportunities.We spend time building skills at the beginning of the year which become the core for our success and reflecting on these actions during the process to improve accountability.

There is so Much to share I will post some and every year I keep focusing on getting better at capturing the process through blogging. Some of the process captured on the Classroom Blog by the students  We focus on French daily that typing the process in English lags a little.

I seek the subject related examples off the news and social media.  Some examples of Science and Social Studies for provoking curriculum inquiries:

Science

Astonishingly-lifelike-bionic-man--complete-synthetic-blood-organs--

Teen dies from seizures

Sniffing out disease: diabetes-alert dogs are on the rise

 Blog Post of Earth Day Activities

Gr 6 

calls-for-more-traps-as-black-bear-sightings-in-gta-on-the-rise-

Vimeo on Biodiversity

Ottawa's Great Forest  Before our walk to Beaver Pond

newfoundland-labrador/seal-product-ban-upheld-on-ethical-grounds-

canada/north/northerners-slam-wto-seal-products-decision-

Social Studies:
Gr 6
infographics-on-nelson-mandela  classroom Blog post about Mandela

snowden-docs-show-u-s-spied-during-G20-in-toronto-

it-wouldn-t-be-b-c-without-em-harper-jokes-about-vancouver-protesters

http://www.statsilk.com/maps/world-stats-open-data

If the-world-of-100 villages

-ottawa-canadiens-sotchi-mise-en-garde.

Nestle 'to act over child labour in cocoa industry' For Gr 5 on refugee and citizenship

Indian's exploited child cotton workers For Gr 5 on refugee and citizenship

etats-unis-malala-yousafzai-inspire- Gr 6 & 5

Created with Padlet

Gr 5
-confederation-line Ottawa’s world-class light rail

Justin-trudeau-removes-senators-from-liberal-caucus-

Comment organiser une cérémonie de citoyenneté

Created with Padlet

Created with Padlet

Created with Padlet

An example of students contribution after deconstructing the curriculum expectations:

Created with Padlet

Created with Padlet

Created with Padlet

Provoking learning does matter for curriculum inquiries. Students become so engaged with daily issues that themselves will continue searching and sharing realistic examples in everyday life experiences. What will you do to provoke your students curiosity this coming year? 

Metacognitive discussions on determining learning goals!

I am sharing the process of metacognitive learning by determining individual learning goals and classroom learning goals.  This process is the base of a valuable connective platform of reflective conversational classroom community encouraging thinking, communication in learning and being clear about what students have accomplished and what needs to be accomplished.

On a daily basis students are given opportunities to engage in reflections in their learning and determining their next steps. The individual goals are shared with their teams, this collaborative thinking promotes questioning, ownership of learning, clarification of any content misconceptions and students converse about their goal setting of inquiry learning and next steps. This process makes learning transparent and it solidifies the classroom as a learning culture based on what individuals have learned and will reach. 

Using one chrome book per team students share their daily documented learning on Google Calenders that is embedded in their sites. As mentioned in previous posts Google is our Learning Platform for all activities. 

This connection also takes place face to face and digitally by inviting their colleagues to reply on next steps during learning tasks. They embrace each others' learning by having students voice on how to meet goals and share learning skills and strategies.  This creates a nurturing social, transparent and intellectual culture of learners committed by caring about each other's learning. 

The following are samples of connective learning:

Teams gather to listen, react and learn about reflective learning goals. 

Student on site sharing her reflective learning.

Students' reflections on Google Calender

We have le "professeur du jour" determining our whole group goals.

Not all reflections are digital some students to choose to write them on a daily basis 

I wished I had Google glasses as I always miss capturing many rich students ownership moment. I might invest in a pair this summer! 

All this learning is also articulated in French not only they are reflecting on their learning that is written in French also enriching their oral French through conversations. Students take risks in a second language and respect all entry levels of learning. Through this process as parents and students admit not only they have learned skills, strategies and content from each other, it has also improved their oral and written French. Through rich conversations on goal setting students take full ownership of learning during their tasks.  I will soon be posting more examples of oral rich conversations learning tasks. 

 We need to provide students with these reflective opportunities online, in writing and  face to face to constantly expose perspective of learning through an engaging community.