Category Archives: Career-Long Learners

20 hour Project

There are some definite perks to having a husband like George Couros. He pushes my thinking, asks questions and has high expectations for my teaching and learning. I appreciate all of these qualities immensely and would not be the teacher I am today without his guidance and support. I was talking with him about how I enjoy the idea of Genius Hour and my students really enjoy working on projects like that, but I find that we end up making a bunch of things that eventually get taken home or go in the garbage. I know that the learning is more in the process than in the end product, but I was wanting to try something where the students acquire a skill that they could use for the rest of their life, something they could take with them. My husband, of course, had something for me to watch and told me that he thought I could definitely do this with my kids.

This video is about the 20 hour project. What Josh Kaufman explains is that we can learn a new skill in 20 hours. The way he proposes that we learn this skill is through a few simple steps.

  1. Deconstruct the Skill (Break the skill down into smaller and smaller pieces- practice the most important skills first).
  2. Learn Enough to Self-correct ( Get 3-5 resources about what you want to learn. Too many resources and you procrastinate, learn just enough so that you can start and self-correct as you go. Get better at noticing when you make a mistake, and then doing something a little different).
  3. Remove Practice Barriers (Don’t get caught up in the research phase. Remember that in the end, the point is to actually practice the skill, not just learn how to practice it.)
  4. Practice at Least 20 Hours

I love that this is a simple premise that can yield some pretty amazing results. There are so many skills that students could learn and so many ways to learn them. YouTube is an amazing resources and has hundreds of experts waiting to assist you. I wanted to try the 20 hour project myself before I got into it with the students so that I could show them my example.

My 20 Hour Project

In high school, I ran cross country and really enjoyed it. I didn’t keep up with it in university and when I started my first year of teaching, I tried to get back into it. The first time I ran, I was so itchy I was dragging myself across the concrete (a ridiculous image, I know). The next time I went running, I was luckily with a friend, the reaction was worse. He had to call an ambulance and take me to the hospital ( my blood pressure was dangerously low and I was passing out, and my whole body was covered in hives). Needless to say, after that I avoided running. Fast forward to almost 7 years later and I finally got my doctor to recommend me to see a specialist. What the specialist concluded was that I have something called “exercise induced anaphylaxis”  so basically, I am allergic to running (which no one believes me, so I also asked him for a doctors note). He told me that I would be able to run, if I ran on an empty stomach (hadn’t eaten for 4-5 hours) and took an antihistamine before I went. I was so elated that I could finally run, I rushed to the drugstore and bought some Aerius and started researching. I found 3 resources and an expert who has been running for a long time (my husband) and made a plan. Since I haven’t run in a long time, I started with really short runs and have started working my way up. The first week, I did short 1.5 km runs (because I wanted to stay close to home incase the medication didn’t work). Then, when I realized it was working I started interval training. The first 2 weeks I ran for 2 minutes and walked for 1. Then the third week I ran for 3 and walked for 1. I even started bringing my dogs on the run so that they would push me. The end goal is to be able to run a 10 km in an hour. I am currently only running 4km to get myself used to running and I will continue to increase the distance as I get more comfortable. I am currently running/walking 4km in about 21 minutes, but I know I will get slower as I increase the distance I am running. When I started, it was really tough and I NEEDED that walking time, but as I practice more and more, I feel like I need it less and less. I am really starting to love running. I have also been biking and doing runners yoga to stretch my muscles and help with my performance. So far I am about 5 hours into my project and really liking the idea and the end goal.

As I go through my journey, I have started planning how I can assist my students with their project. I found this resources that has some ideas as to which skills students might choose. Students are definitely not limited to this list, we will also brainstorm ideas and help each other refine our ideas.

One important aspect of this project will be that students do some research. Students will need a mentor to support their journey. They can tweet out asking for help or use YouTube to find an “expert” to support their learning. Students will find 3-5 resources and add them to their 20 hour project google doc. This will allow them to easily find their resources, as well as limit themselves so they don’t procrastinate.

Along with research, we will also need a way to display what we have learned and the process. This way, students can self correct and share with others their progress and ask for support. Students will blog or vlog their progress to illustrate their learning. They must blog each time they work on the project. That might be a few sentences about what they have done that day, their struggles, their success or a video showing progress.

Below is an example of a video of me vlogging my experience. I will continue to document my progress, and ask for support from others as to how to improve my time and how to train smarter. This vlog is only up to day 10, but I will try and update it as I continue to run more and talk about my progress.

 

 

Teacher for hire: Googleyness a necessity

At the end of a long and wonderful day, I sat down to tackle my ever growing list of emails. In the impossible quest of emptying my inbox, I came across an email from my principal Travis McNaughton about our PD session tomorrow. He asked us to watch a video featuring a talk by Tony Wagner about innovation in the classroom.

During the video, Tony Wagner talks about Google and their hiring practices. Google hires people based on their ability to think outside the box, as opposed to focusing on grades or standardized test scores. When I looked on Googles website, they had a list of things they look for in a potential candidate. Their criteria include: Leadership, Role-related knowledge (someone with a variety of strengths and passions), How you think (problem solving) and Googleyness (what makes you, you as well as how you work in a team). They are not looking for someone with a large content background, because they realize that all people have access to the internet and can easily Google what they need to figure out. They need someone who has skills and the ability to persevere and work through problems. They want employees with passion and creativity.

How do I transfer the ideas from Google to my classroom? What do I need to do to as a teacher to facilitate leadership, passion, problem solving and teamwork?

My question is, how do I get students to think like a Googler? How do I prepare my students for a world that focuses less on content and more on skills? How do I become and innovation facilitator?

Is it me…

This year has been a really busy school year (my excuse for not blogging since August). I got married (eeee!) moved cities, as well as started a new grade and division. Lots of change, lots of new, lots of exciting. I have a group of ladies I connect with on Twitter and we call ourself #plngelato (because we are teachers that support each other and we all love delicious gelato). We have a challenge to blog once a month (better late then never) and this is my December edition.

My husband is great for being honest and pushing me to be all that I can be. We were having a conversation the other day about how I am much more relaxed now  as opposed to at the start of the school year. He said to me, “You know it was more about you when you were stressed and tired then it was about the kids”. My first reaction was to berate him and tell him that he doesn’t know what it’s like and how difficult my class is… instead I took a deep breath and thought about his comment. Was it me? It was… I was trying to move mountains and push my students and myself beyond what we were capable of. I was expecting too much from myself and from my students which caused me to constantly be disappointed, frustrated and exhausted.

I am sure many other teachers out there would want to smack me if I say “it’s you, not your students” so I won’t :). I just want to share with you my experience.

The school I taught in for the past 3 years was a bit of an anomaly. All students who were in grade 4, were achieving at the grade 4 level or higher. This is not the norm in most schools, nor is it my experience this year. In September of this year (at my new school) I was teaching as if all students were at the same level, I was expecting all students to listen and work hard. I forgot that each student is an individual and I needed to treat them as such. I forgot that as teachers, we need to start where the students are and work from there. I wouldn’t walk into a grade 1 class and expect them all to understand calculus, that would be unrealistic, so why was I expecting grade 4 level work out of students who were struggling? It’s a much smaller extreme, but still a fault of the teacher. I was worried that it would reflect poorly on me if I wasn’t hitting all the curriculum outcomes, but as my teaching partner told me “You have to reach them where they are, not where they are supposed to be”.

After a month and a half of beating my head against a wall I started to change. Not necessarily intentionally, but I started to change the way that I was looking at student needs. I use a spelling program (that my amazing teaching partner Adrienne Zenko showed me) that differentiates learning for all students. Each student gets words at their own level (as determined by the program) and they sort the words into meaningful groups which allows them to learn word patterns. I noticed that students were engaged during the time when they were doing spelling practice. Students were actually focused and would ask to create new and inventive ways to practice their words. What was the difference between this and the other activities I was asking them to do? It was at their level. They were capable of working independently and were seeing success.

Another area that I saw success was in math. I use an amazing math program called JUMP math which goes through each concept in very small incremental steps, allowing students to fly through the parts that make sense to them or get extra support for the sections they are struggling with. There is also enrichment for students who are understanding that concept and would like to explore the topic in more depth and breadth. As with the spelling program, students were achieving at their own level, they were independent and were experiencing success.

As January fast approaches, I feel it is time to make a resolution. In 2015 I will treat each student as individuals and make sure that they can all experience success at their own level. I will not take where they are working now as a reflection on me as a teacher, instead I will measure their success through the progress they make this year.

What is your New Years Resolution for your teaching practice?

Please excuse the mess, we’re learning here

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This upcoming school year, my goal is to relinquish control and allow learning to be more “messy”. For the past 3 years I have been working at a school that promotes group work, but expects students to be in rows, so learning has looked very neat and tidy.
I can admit that I like control and that I like to think learning is a linear path. As we know, it’s not. Often the best learning happens when we make mistakes and fail the first time we try something. In this upcoming school year, I would like learning to be messy. It’s okay if we don’t get the correct answer right away, or if we work on projects that don’t have a correct answer.

I am very excited to change my space and my teaching to suit this practice. I will be following Nicholas Provenzano for tips on how to change my space. I want the space to flow so that we can change configurations quickly. Horseshoe for  discussion, pods for group work, pairs for small projects and free floor space to work on projects or to read. I am excited to make my classroom flexible, so that the space is best for the learning we are doing.

I also hope to give students more choice and creativity in the projects we do. Choice can come in many different forms. It ranges from “choose the country you would like to research” to “In whatever way best suits your learning, share what you have researched about the country you choose”. This year I hope to move away from “small choices” to “big choices”. This will have to happen in baby steps, allowing smaller choice in the beginning until the students and I (okay this is mostly for me) can get used to what this type of learning looks like. For example in the beginning of the year I was hoping to do some “copy cat ” writing. Where students use a story they have already read and write a story with different characters and setting that follows the same format. This allows a little choice, students choose the story they use to “copy” from. By the end of the year I hope to do a project where students display their learning of “quality of life” using whatever medium they want. Our entire social curriculum this year is based on this overarching theme, so it will be a good way for them to display their learning from the year.

To someone who already practices “messy learning” these ideas may seem small, but I need to retrain my teaching from 3 years where learning looked very neat and tidy. Every student working on a different project is a foreign concept for me, I hope to adjust quickly. I would love suggestions on how other teachers support real learning in their classrooms. How is your classroom set up to support learning? How do you frame units and projects? I would love ideas and help!