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!

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