Changing The Narrative Together!

Every academic year is different as students lead their learning and use their emotional journey through everyday learning experiences. Each year, I have to shift my pedagogical practice to build a respectful, collaborative, risk-taking, caring, compassionate and empathetic community. In my previous years, I have blogged about unpacking of the Unlearning to create a community that values perspectives for knowledge building and action taking.

This is my second year in Grade 7. I continue to explore the adolescent social-emotional learning of autonomy and agency of their learning. Their learning is being impacted by using creative tasks, focusing on why learning matters and what is next. The narrative of pedagogical practices shifts as I learn from the student’s needs, their reflections and how they learn.

We began exploring what thinking errors and biases we bring during collaboration. The team's collaboration requires trusting to share intrapersonal ideas, valuing all others interpersonal ideas to build knowledge, inquire, analyze, research and build connections for next steps.  Through the metacognitive process, we built a community of trust, risk-taking, valuing all perspectives, persevering with curiosity to guide students interest and care for their learning.

The year unfolded as students reflected about their thinking errors and biases that prevented them from collaborating and valuing each others thinking. We focused on perspectives and trusting themselves to share without worrying about being judged. We also focused on contributing with respect as well as respecting others.

We needed to:

• Be active listeners
• Be collaborators with a growth mindset
• Develop communication skills
• Have positive attitudes
• Be reflective learners
• Be receptive to feedback
• Understand how we learn
• Determine learning strategies
• Believe in making a difference

On a daily basis, we collected thinking errors on sticky notes focusing on how their emotional learning to collaborate and accept feedback from others was affected. Through the ladder of inference (Rotman I-Think), the students were able to interpret their data and come up to a conclusion for their next steps.

From September to November we had many documentations and reflections. The students also had the first conversation with me that was recorded and shared with parents about their process of learning skills and how they have improved and their next steps.

Throughout the process, we began focusing on self-regulation and self-management of learning. The focus was on finding strategies about the learning process and environmental strategies to guide autonomy and agency on self-regulation and self-management.  During a professional development day, our principal Mr. Sean Kelly shared the Understanding Learning Disabilities From York Region District School Board. The flow chart became an essential guide for my students to reflect on their learning and their next steps on individual perspectives about their learning process. The students developed their individual plans by collecting data, reflecting on self-regulation and the self-management of learning success.

More reflections about individual learning strategies:

It has been an amazing journey of reflecting and learning about competencies, learning strategies and building a respective and compassionate community towards learning and caring about each other. I will share more reflections about students' transformation of learning:

The process of a compassionate interdependent classroom takes time to have students collect data and reflect on how and why they are learning. With my scheduling, I am fortunate to be able to make time for reflections with the students to determine the next steps. We already had three documented individual meetings about success and how they have been achieved and their next steps. We continue to develop on, who am I and how I learn? The students will be learning about the brain and its functions and how the prefrontal cortex continues to develop especially with peer pressure.

I have so much more to explore and learn with my students on social-emotional development. We have success by using thinking models that embrace risk-taking and competencies as well as design thinking tasks that focus on problem-solving and empathy.

Pedagogical practices are always shifting and meeting students needs with the focus on emotional and intellectual practices. It is important to take time and have students take the responsibility to collect data and reflect on their learning process and how it is affecting their actions towards intellectual and social growth.

How are we building capacity for learning? How are we changing our narrative of pedagogical practices with our students?

• Reflecting on biases and assumptions
• Are students aware of their emotional learning?
• Are they reflecting on self-regulation?
• Are they finding tools to guide their learning strategies?
• Are students being active communicators and listeners?

#Oneword Action!

Tonight on #OnEdMentors, we are talking about our #OneWordOnt for 2018, a challenge brought to use by @jacbalen! Check out the words that have come up tonight below ⬇️⬇️ What is your #OneWord ? We would love to know! pic.twitter.com/XA7AZuVGRt

— voicEd.ca (@voicEdcanada) December 29, 2017

My gratitude to VoicEd and Julie Balen for bringing this challenge on. Thanks to Sarah Lalonde for the graphic.

As I look forward to growing with my learners, who enrich my experiences on the how and the why of the learning process.

Every day, I look forward to engaging with my learners and taking actions in applying meaningful learning situations that make an impact on their thinking and lifetime skills by connecting compassion, empathy and valuing each other, also reaching to a local and a global audience for feedback.

By investing time to learn with the learners, is to take action to care, share and take risks.  Actions that the learners and I will continue to explore and learn from:

• investing time to reflect on the learning process.
• giving feedback and getting feedback
• supporting risk-taking to experience the culture of emotional learning together
• taking action to learn over time and develop the thinking together
• being mindful of everything around them
• changing and impacting someone in their daily lives
• exploring the discomfort of learning
• being grateful and positive for attending school every day
• being fearless with discomfort 
• choosing to matter
• learning not to fit in
• allowing tensions in determining next steps
• more of goal getting than just goal setting

I will continue to take action to reflect on how to be adoptable and adaptable with my learners for learning together? 

Willingness To Persevere With Learning Experiences

As educators, we grow with our students. The time we spend together reflecting, unlearning for new learning habits and thinking about the curriculum relevance and the compassion of the world around us.

I finally took the day to read 53 end of year reflections from my students. The reflections were based on:

• What does success mean to you? After your experience of learning in Grade6
• Should grading matter during the assessment for learning?
• Feedback on: reflections, peer/teacher feedback and developing growth mindset during the learning process.

The students' feedback has confirmed:

• Students needs are more important than coverage of the learning
• Understanding the why and how of learning through criteria
• Learning is full of surprising failures when persevering for the successes of the process
• Learning is based on collaborative, creative and critical thinking skills
• Learning is linking causes and factors to solving many problems
• Feedback is accepting everyone's perspective about the learning process
• Difficult thinking leads to better ideas
• There are no barriers to success
• Unexpected learning is part of the learning process
• Learning is a process and it is never finished
• Grading should only take place at the end of the process
• Being successful is not at getting good grades it is about life learning skills
• Educators need to be as curious as students' during the learning process
• Educators to also have a growth mindset like their students
• Observing and documenting students learning for next steps (reflective process on experiences)
• Interdependence and interpersonal skills for learning and valuing students' thinking for an effective learning community
• Creating passion for learning through real-world problem solving tasks
• Creativity is having fun and being engaged in owning the process of learning

A Storify of tweets that I shared about students' reflections.

There is so much to share and learn from students' voices. Throughout the year I asked for feedback that has made me a better listener, less of a talker, allowing students to be confident at owning their learning and taking risks.  It has been a blast for students to drive their own learning and " we use to worry about getting it perfect but that is not the case anymore".

What unlearning will I be persevering next year with Grade 7 students?  What resetting of change will I be achieving for students' success? How will I be continuing the guiding of proficient learning through the 6C's competencies through Integrative Thinking and Design Thinking?

Something that I need to keep up to:

Every Day Is Unique

There are so many challenging approaches to consider when we are thinking about education. For student-centered learning approaches the needs to be innovative, creative, critical thinkers, designers, deep learners, reaching  personalized learning, empathy, and many important skills are required. There are many views and experiences that educators, parents, and administrators face reaching these approaches.

How do we facilitate these purposes? How do we get students to experience these purposes?

I am by all means not an expert and my learning continues to be enriched from my students, my colleagues at school at the board, from the community whom I learn with and of course online learning.  Every day is unique for me and my students as we reflect, refocus, rethink, retry and unlearn to relearn.

My years of teaching experiences locally, nationally and internationally have guided me in making connections about the process of risk taking and learning with the students.

Many unpublished posts since September and spending October learning with many educators from the Makers Faire, EdInnovation, Ontario Makers and Mentors Innovation, many questions from participants and daily experiences with my students have energized me to write this post.

Every day is filled with unique challenges and these challenges drive our learning and our students’ learning experiences.

This year is a different experience for me. In previous years I have taught students for two or three consecutive years. Meeting my new experts this year and working together to learn compassion empathy and valuing thinking have been unique daily experiences. Learning is a process and we all know that it is not linear and it loops with many challenges that make us reflective researchers and learners.

I am following an advice from a friend by keeping my posts brief.  I just captured few slides that highlight the beginning of the year from 3 different thinking processes that I shared during EdInnovation Oct 22nd and 23rd.

The year begins by building a culture of reflectors, collaborative communicators, critical thinkers, creative learners whom together identify their intrapersonal character to connect a community of respect for themselves and others through interpersonal values of ideas.

Through many learning experiences which I will share in details from students in later posts, we continue to explore the unlearning for relearning and valuing the how and why of skills . It could be from walking into the classroom to content, concepts of learning as well as critical and creative thinking skills throughout the day. I have learned when reflecting and consolidating with the students to highlight the needs of unlearning to determine what we need to relearn. This lead to focusing on the value and the purpose of the how and why. The Backward Brain Bicycle is the video that the students always refer to when we unpack the unlearning.

This is important because our brains are always set in making judgements based on assumptions and predictions than unpacking the purpose and retrying with the focus on the mindset.  This is the learning through habits by recognising the unlearning.  It is a shift of mindset that requires for students to build new skills, to value and understand the learning process based on their individual needs.

It is a process of ongoing long-term goals of discomfort for learning growth. The students to become more comfortable with risk taking and tensions during learning. Being aware that habits of an unlearning are very important to explore and reflect upon in order to pursue the innovator's growth mindset by celebrating successes from failures. Basically, it is to continuously take the time, to improve through risk taking, reflect and identify  the unlearning, recognise and determine the effort of the unlearning for a growth of learning.

This growth also affects the classroom community culture and opens up students' minds by refocusing, reflecting and identifying their individual growth.  The insecurities and the overwhelming become part of our classroom valuable culture of empathising with each other as we all recognise individual risks. It is a long process to allow this mindset!

A growth mindset is more than just positive conversations; it is identifying the habits and developing a critical mindset of skills to unlearn for deeper learning.  It is giving students the skills to develop their learning. Giving them a voice to unpack their learning and become confident reflectors.

These quotes are so true:

“Teach students how to solve any problem, a general problem-solving approach. And teach them to do it in a community.” "That’s what’s really going to serve them as they go through life." Alan November

All students are capable of thinking and learning. We need to encourage the students to achieve a culture that learning is thinking, valuing others ideas, recognising tensions, risk taking and pausing to reflect and make habits of recognising the unlearning for relearning or learning.  

Have you risked the unlearning with your students? What unlearning have you done as an educator to achieve learning with your students?  Every child is a learner, am I giving them the time to discover and reflect on their learning? Every day is unique, what matters is, how are we recognising the uniqueness of changing our thinking and mindset? How students are recognising their mindsets in learning situations?

Design Thinking A Storyboard Of Explorations!

The innovative process is a storyboard of risk taking through problem solving and collaborative creative tensions of students' thinking. Students explore learning by collaboratively problem solving learning to question, interact, consolidation and communicate leading to an exploration of valuing ideas from classmates. The process of innovation becomes a thinking skills process of wiring creativity and building on previous knowledge leading to create new knowledge of problem solving from technology, coding to rich conversations.  Throughout the year we need to equip students with thinking tools, confidence with risk taking when using programming and reflecting on learning as well as consolidating as a whole class on our learning journeys.

The United Nations Global Goals have been the focus throughout this year. Post on Global Goals The design thinking process is a long process for students based on ideations, iterations, self reflections on skills and consolidations for determining next step. For the Global Goals the students wanted to inform the community by taking their conceptions to business centres. Due to many school events sometimes the journey is held up. The students shared their journey with only the school community.

The slides below show the process from imagining, planning, refining and  reflecting about the thinking and the tools (Hummingbird, Lego Mindstorm, Makey Makey) of designs.

Design thinking is about the students' thinking process from goal settings and reflecting about every step of the process.  Having an audience for sharing is important especially to impact the audience by the design.

The following playlist demonstrates the process of sharing with the audience from the provoking steps to the reflections from the audience.

The full playlist will play through to view individuals; place the cursor on the left of the window for individual teams' videos.

This year has been a year of training and learning with the students. I will continue to embrace the creative, critical thinking and collaborative design process the following academic year. I will apply what I have learned and I look forward to new learning with the new group of students.

For educators it is important to embrace the learning with our students accepting successes, failures, uncertainties and the perseverance of the innovative learning process. The classroom community is our blueprint for our professional learning as we reflect from our students and our larger community from the school, the board  and of course the global online educators.

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?

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