Which Steps Will You Take?

I have been out of the blogging scene since last August. I have lots to share since September from my learning with the students to professional participation within the professional community. 

Every year the steps of change in my teaching practices are trial and error that are critical to the students learning process. Giving the students the rein to self manage and be self-aware of how they are learning is the key to progress in the learning process.

Their lives are blended with emotions on a daily basis, from happiness to sadness, disappointments, boredom, anxiety, enthusiasm, and even tranquility. Sometimes they are feeling oppressed and compliant and sometimes they are liberated and leading their own learning. Bringing awareness of social-emotional learning throughout the learning process it develops students' leadership for self-management and self-awareness.

Learning is a human process what we say and how we act is important. The actions that the students are trying to convey matter and are expressed through communication from body movements, actions, and conversations with them. The students are eager to have an experience filled with healthy relationships, compassion and a sense of purpose. How do we take the steps to have them feel the process of their learning?

Since 2016 I have been exploring with the unlearning process and unpacking biases to create change with the students for learning.  https://learningprogression.blogspot.com/search/label/Unlearning It gets trickier every year and I have to be vulnerable by being a learner with the students. They give me beneficial advice on being a learner along with them.

The students require consistency during the day grounded in longterm conceptual learning where they also see the value to the real world connections. Retrieving and making these connections including learning strategies are important than just being assessed especially the chance to get and give feedback. Thinking about their own thinking and giving them time to retrieve not to assess.

The students spark my learning by connecting on their journey and what they need to move forward together. By showing them we care and allowing all the emotional challenges and disruptions to the learning validate why we are educators. We need to inspire students and change our practices to be more responsive learners with them.

Since I have not blogged since August, I am going to share the session that I presented at BIT2019 for a quick update on the iterations for SEL, collaboration and conceptual learning that has been developing since September this year.

The images on the slides all connect to external links. Many guiding questions are also shared that I have developed with the students and continue to develop. The images that don't have external links are, the screencastify of the assessments that were shared with parents. Feedback reflections on Flipgrid with the parents and the students about students' progress are not linked.  The slides are very explicit about SEL, collaborative cognitive process, developing identity, building empathy, cognitive biases, guiding questions and of course self-management by reflecting and collecting their own data. 

There is so much to share about how the process was developed together this year. Throughout the day I try to remember to take pictures to share the process on Twitter.

Thanks to Fair Chance learning https://www.fairchancelearning.com/ I also had an opportunity to share at TransformEd Ottawa on December 9th about the process that is co-constructed with my learners. Thanks to all colleagues who tweeted and shared about the process. I have captured a few tweets that reflect on my learning with my students this year.  I am missing a few tweets from that day. 

The key when building a community for learning is confronting our biases before we are able to unpack empathy. Often these biases are unconscious or implicit, meaning we might not even be aware we have them.

Until teachers become aware of our biases, and how these attitudes and opinions emerge through the language we use, we can fall into what’s known as the bias confirmation traps. In class, we spent the time learning by nurturing self-awareness and guiding each other to see how our biases interact for better understanding from me to them and among each other. 

We don't know what barriers every child is carrying unless we are building a community, sharing with confidence and having the power of trust of openness. Speaking to impact each other, trusting, connecting and being passionate with each other.

We spend lots of time reflecting together and setting our next steps by facing the challenges and how they are occurring. Together we are making decisions and always giving gratitudes and understanding for empathizing together.

Social-emotional learning is connected to our pedagogical learning process. The emotions are bridged to all learning experiences. Patricia Fiorino has partnered up with me exploring Middle School SEL and shared the Illinois SEL Standard with the students to guide their reflective practices. Her blogpost when Patricia visited with us.

It is important for the students to feel and experience the classroom culture of seeing connections and differences, appreciating the mindset of gratitude to build relationships. That is when teaching and learning will happen.

The students need to recognize their own emotions and the emotions of others:

• Understand their feelings, their causes and how they have influenced them
• Express their feelings and trying to inform their team members by inviting empathy from them during teamwork
• Regulating emotions than having them regulate them and finding strategies for what they need as well as others in their team. 

As mentioned in the BIT2019 presentation, collaboration to be designed for students to share unique skills and knowledge. During collaboration, interpersonal and intrapersonal relations are opportunities to give and receive suggestions. The students engage in meaningful conversations by seeing multiple perspectives. By also applying thinking tools like the causal model, the ladder of inference and the Prop Pro model From Rotman I-Think as well as thinking tools from Project Zero to develop divergent and explicit thinking representing many perspectives. (Links are on the BIT19 presentation)

Students co-creating a causal model about causes and factors for emotional learning and strategies to explicitly practice

The Ladder of inference to collect and interpret data for next steps

All voices are equitable for decision making on how they are learning

The students decide to take breaks as part of their process for learning

Sharing gratitudes 

We have to sustain and make social-emotional learning sticks. The students learn about the brain and how learning takes place. Pruning or unlearning is a process that eliminates connections that are not behaviorally relevant or useful. It is the reductions of unused synapses to allow newly learned information or skills to integrate with past knowledge and experiences. 

As teachers, we are the drivers of neuroplasticity change through the designing of knowledge building, creating rich learning experiences and guiding effective interventions to reach every student.

It is our responsibility to decentralize the classroom and our words and actions need to match those of the students to be able, to tell the truth, and face students' needs. We need to read each others' body language, collect data to inform us and the students inform themselves for better instructions and own success. We need to design learning that guides and suits students' feelings and emotions of how and why to learn. 

How can I give myself a position to learn from the students? How are we investing our time in actions that line up with our professional learning?  How to be a real learner than just teaching as employment?  Everything is rooted in gratitude, how are we giving the time for the gratitude to each other? 

How To Self Engineer A Learning Community?

Learning is a human-centered approach that is filled with rich authentic opportunities for both educators and students who co-learn and explore learning together. It involves a community, a culture, and an environment that is based on trust, empathizing and valuing each other. It is learning how to learn together by collecting data to set goals for the community's next steps.  

I am starting with the students' end of year reflections focusing on what worked for us this year. The students and I became mentors together, by focusing on feedback for growth for our learning community. My learning is motivated and inspired throughout the year from the students' feedback.  

Learning is a human-centered approach because it is filled with emotions. Our environment is a community of active listeners valuing all perspectives and thinking. We spent lots of time learning how our brain develops and how our emotions affect the learning process and our community. Deep learning is a complex process since it is more than just meaningful real-world connections, it is about building a community. Our community focused on self-regulation and self-management of the learning through thinking strategies, agency for learning, developing competencies, connecting and reflecting on all discomforts along the way. The students differ from year to year and our classroom experiences are enriched by dealing with the unexpected uncertainties towards learning. All the complexities and tensions that occur during the year are the best learning opportunities for us. The complexities of emotions from the students and I are stepping stones to unravel the tensions toward inclusivity at becoming flexible thinkers. Through individual and team consolidations of collected data about real experiences of setbacks were pruned and strategies were developed for responsible and equitable practices. Self-management and self-regulation are important and most effective when students interpret and analyze together the data for accountability to move forward. Team members reflected and reconciled with each other to ensure individual development for self-regulation. It is self-engineering the classroom and school experiences that deal with emotions and finding strategies to assure learning contributions are valued and achieved. 

On my last blog post, I share some of the processes of documentation using the Ladder of Inference Changing The Narrative Together!. In that post, I share how students identified their learning abilities and how they progressed by self-managing their learning through their abilities to progress individually and as team members. As we progressed the students continued to focus on their learning abilities, how to deal with emotions during teamwork through team roles that they have created to self-regulate and took ownership.  

The students took roles during teamwork on improving their abilities to think and learn together. They chose their own roles based on the problematic biases that they were encountering to self-regulate and self-manage as a team and a community. We reflected on the following problematic tensions: 

  A short screencastify video of students celebration

                                   

The students connected their learning to the school community by reflecting on how the school improvement plan aligns with our classroom practices. 

After a staff meeting, Mr. Sean Kelly the principal of All Saints high school added teachers reflections on the wall displaying the SIPSAW (School Improvement Plan Students Achievement and Wellbeing) based on the board strategic commitments.                  From the school board Strategic Commitments

                                        https://www.ocsb.ca/commitments/

  

Teachers reflections about classroom practices in relation to the SIPSAW

The students aligned the classroom practices with the SIPSAW

This was such an important practice for the students, as it valued their community connection to the learning skills that are being achieved by them. This has impacted how their learning experiences mattered as part of the large learning community where all leaders and teachers from the school to the board had the same vision for learning. 

The visions and the commitment of "Be Community, Be Well and Be Creative"  An example of the classroom alignment to the school plan 

  

I can only share an image of a student's reflection due to privacy. 

For the students to engineer their learning it is more than just ownership it is a shared responsibility and accountability. It is a journey from academic to assessment, project-based learning, thinking strategies to competencies and of course emotions that affect the intrapersonal and interpersonal relations within the classroom community. 

Learning is a human process that connects our actions to our emotions impacting everyone. Focusing on accountability and creating culturally diverse perspectives where students with all abilities co-design, co-create and collect data to become their own researchers and engineer their next steps to be collaborators and negotiators for learning. 

I finished reading Clarity by Lyn Sharratt on how teachers and students are researchers and authorship of their choices for classroom collaborative practices. 

 More of the end of year Reflections 

What steps will you take to engineer the learning with your students?

Is community building an aspect of inclusivity and equity for learning? 

How courageous are we to deal with the unexpected? Courage by Dr.Brene Brown "To speak one's mind by telling all one's heart."

When Students Shine!

Giving students the time to create is an important learning experience. Creativity is not limited to just building or making, creativity is a process when students:

•  Iterate and ideate to problem solve in any subject
• Collaborate to communicate for problem-solving 
• Develop character for leadership, perseverance by valuing all perspectives, ideas, and feedback
• Developing self-compassion, team compassion by being active listeners, inquiring, accepting suggestions for ideation and iteration
• Always referring to empathy, understanding the purpose with empathy to why care and how to care for learning either by designing or getting feedback and taking action 
• An interdisciplinary process that is inclusive of all thinking skills to problem solve (language arts, math, science, arts, engineering). Religion for us too as we focused on the Ontario Catholic Graduate Expectations
• Connecting learning to real-world problem-solving in all disciplines

For the Science inquiry on ecosystems, the students walked to Kanata Beaver Pond to collect data about the effect of housing developments on the interdependence of the marshes, water, and forest ecosystems. The students spotted a dead bird on the road and wondered how the bird was injured and how to care for injured wild birds.

I knew about the Ottawa Valley Wild Bird Care Centre @WildBirdOttawa . The students checked the Twitter feed and Facebook page to learn more about the centre. After connecting with Patty McLaughlin who works at the centre, she presented the students with the problem of injured birds and easy accessibility for food and water. The problem for Food and Water Dishes Patty became the partner for feedback throughout the process for designing to solve the problem.

The Design Thinking process began by defining the problem that was presented by the centre.  We followed the design process by Mary Cantwell   https://www.deepdesignthinking.com/

The students took ownership and agency of their learning in developing the process. Below there are two projects. The link to the Google Photo album also shares all students' projects and learning with Patty's visit to the classroom.

Link to the project 

The link of the project 

The design thinking process was empowered by students' inquiry about injured birds. This was the first design thinking process with a partnership for this year's group of Grade 7 students. I am looking forward to their own lead design process as they plan for many community connections and problem-solving for action taking.

Of course, many thinking strategies and community development have taken into effect in order for students to build their confidence to take risks and value each others thinking. Building this community takes time, this blog post refers to the process of self-regulation and social-emotional learning developments.

The students personalized the design process by:

• Defining the problem
• Developing the empathy map
• Ideation by valuing all perspectives individually to finalize a team design
• Team design meets all problems for feeding injured birds
• An initial meeting with Patty for the first feedback after ideation and 1st prototype
• Back to ideation and iteration for most teams
• More ideation and iteration after designs were 3D printed
• Students decompose the designs using Tinkercad involving team discussions on math, science and engineering
• Presenting the design face to face with the end user

Initial online meeting for Iteration

This was an exciting and amazing process full of agency, inquiry and problem-solving. The students were dedicated to persevere and decompose algorithms.

This post is highlighting the importance of having students explore the core of creativity. Creativity is not a task! It is the core of giving the students agency, providing them the opportunity to design their thinking, learning, risk-taking, collaboration, communication, empathy and making a difference in their community.

When students lead they learn more in any situation using creative processes from writing to designing. It is about spreading uniqueness of thinking and decision making for every step during the process and for students to continue seeking growth and be emotionally engaging for learning.

No matter how complex the knowledge is, it is not to for us to regulate, it is to allow students to connect with it to make a difference with their learning.

The students solve problems that they perceive as meaningful. We need to support thinking and not to disconnect them from knowledge building, developing ideas, prototyping their learning and making connections among each others' thinking.

Learning and students' thinking has to be revisable, iterated and reflected upon to our students to be successful. So many layers that intervene with all of the learning stages that focus on thinking skills models, social-emotional reaction to learning. Learning is prototyping, thinking is prototyping by allowing students to connect, reflect, reconnect and reflect again.

When students are experiencing designing and creativity they are also experiencing the equity of learning. We continue to transfer the empathy building from the designing experiences to our daily active learning at the school and outside the school. The design process involves social-emotional development and dealing with many situations during the process.

Some reflections about iteration, leadership, and creativity.

All reflections are in French. The students indicated in their reflections that the design thinking process has encouraged them to persevere in their learning and accept risk-taking. Also building empathy and compassion when collaborating and learning.

Let's make time for creativity on a daily basis by focusing on learning as prototyping and co-creating than just consuming.

How are we giving time for wondering than telling!  How do we foster creativity in the classroom? How are we allowing students to drive interest in learning?  How are students exercising or applying their agency?

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” 

Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790)

“Too much of what is called ‘education’ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.” 

Thomas Sowell (1930 – )