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!

Choice is Important to Creating Student Voice

Writing is very a individual skill that all students need to learn. The problem is, I find many writing programs teach a formula… but is that what’s best for creativity? My students are able to “begin with a bang”, use interesting describing words, and vary their sentence starters. They can write a paragraph with a strong opening and closing sentence. But when do we teach kids to be creative? When do we teach them to add their voice and personality?

I have a student in my class and his writing is dripping with personality. He is humorous, concise and uses amazing vocabulary. When I read a stack of writing, I know his right away because it is just so… him 🙂

How do we teach that?

Students need to know how to write a proper sentence and knowing how to join ideas into a paragraph is important. But so is voice. How do we help students develop their own style?

One strategy that I have tried is to give students choice. On Thursday, the students in my class wrote about what life would be like as a settler. I told students they just needed to explain what it would be like. Some students wrote letters, others wrote stories, some wrote paragraphs. Because they were given choice they were able to let their personality to come through.

For example, one student wrote:

“ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I don’t want any more farm torture!” I uttered. I wish we’d have just stayed in Boston. Now I have to do farming. I can’t believe we live in a dirt house and we don’t even have a bed yet! “Why did the sheep run away.” ”oh no the cattle are fighting again and the horses just joined in!” Sadly I do not get enough allowance for this. ”Finally it is dinner time, noooooooo beans!”

He totally understands what life would be like, and it’s interesting and entertaining to read.

Another student wrote:

“Dear Christina,

I’ve been on the train for 3 days now. I’m heading from Iowa to Curlew. I don’t know how many days we will be on the train for. I just hope it’s not for 10 days( my neighbor is getting a bit stinky every…single…second!!! ). The bathroom had been occupied for hours. I can’t wait for my turn in the kitchen! I’m starving!

your truly,
Annemarie”

She understands what a settler would go through, but she did it in a way that make sense to her.

Allowing students to have choice is so important to creativity. When a student can create something, in the way they understand, it allows them to add a personal touch, and seeing each child for their own amazing individuality is why I became a teacher in the first place. The more we encourage our students to be themselves, the better we all are.