Category: Weekly Reflections

Collaboration

I was absent from this class due to illness. This meant that I had to ask my peers about this class, and look at the blog posts from my classmates to inpsire me on what to write for my blog post. This inspired me to think about collaboration in classrooms with students, and also collaborating with fellow teachers. We’re always being encouraged to share resources with one another and not gatekeep what we find or create. Teaching is not meant to be a competitive field, when we collaborate and share resources we can spend more time and energy creating relationships with students. I’ve heard that teaching can be a lonely profession, but it doesn’t have to be. Working together to create meaningful learning experiences for our classes expands our knowledge as teachers. I chose the picture above because my driving question for L2P is about nature-based learning. I believe that nature-based learning is the perfect environment to teach our students about working together. Nature is extremely interconnected and is constantly collaborating with eachother. The soil collaborates with the roots of the trees to help them grow, and the branches create leaves, which in turn fall off and enriches the soil, a cycle. Which is a lovely metaphor for when we collaborate with eachother. Okay, but what does this have to do with EdCamp?

EdCamp and Professional Development

EdCamp is a great way to collaborate with like-minded indviduals. From what I understand from our class, we chose topics that are interesting to us and formed groups based on the most popular topics. Everyone got to show case what they know about these topics, and discuss with their peers about them. I personally learn the most through discussion, and I thrive when things are explained to me in different ways from different people. As someone who loves learning in a lecture based classroom, this first semester in our PDPP has been anything but that. I’ve found through collaborating with my peers, I’m learning about different perspectives and ways of thing, as opposed to facts and academic content. This has really helped me grow as a person, and opened my mind. I have always struggled with the concept of having a growth mindset. I don’t react well to constructive cristism, but when this feedback is given to me, not in a grade based sense, I’ve found I digest it so much better. Being open to changing your perspective and admitting you might have had the wrong idea about something is super valuable as an educator.

Learning can be really boring when a teacher is just talking at you for even 20 minutes straight. The use of visuals and other components in a classroom is important for keeping students engaged. We talk about this a lot in our other classes, and it reminds me of the concept of UDL (Universal Design for Learning).

What is UDL?

The video above gives a great outline of what UDL is, and how it helps students learn. For us as teachers, UDL gives us different tools to engage students, and takes the pressure off of us just speaking in front of a classroom, so it’s a win win. I personally learn really well with YouTube videos. As a history major for most of my degree I spent a lot of time trying to organzie different events or classes in my brain. Particularily in the semesters where I was in 4 or 5 history classes, keeping information tucked away in the part of my brain I had for each class was difficult. YouTube video summaries on historical events became my lifeline for jumpstarting my brain when studying for a midterm or final. History videos often are paired with geographical visuals that can be super helpful for keeping sequences of events straight. Here is an example of a video that uses a map to show us how the battle for North Africa in WW2 played out. (I specifically remember watching this video a couple times)

Other Multimedia Strategies

I know youtube isn’t the only way to introduce different media into the classroom, I just have found it works the best for myself in learning. In creating lessons for other classes I’ve found live polling or quizzing tools to be useful to gauge understanding for the students, or check for previous knowledge on a subject. Mentimeter being one of my favourites, as it creates a word cloud which is a wonderful visual to see where everyone is at. Here is a visual of what students see:

Using tools like Kahoot to gamify learning is also a create technology tool for the classroom. I’ve also participated in classes where we listen to podcasts together, which is a great way to calm students and bring the energy levels down. Students can just put their heads down and listen, or watch the captions on the projector.

Learning about the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry felt extremely appropriate after hearing from Trevor Mckenzie about inquiry based learning. The students at PSII take inquiry based learning to a whole new level by having their inquiry question at the centre of each school subject. The school is in the heart of downtown, and seems to lend itself well to students who are young entrepeneurs, being near all kinds of businesses. The layout of the school itself is extremely unique and lends itself to collaboration between students. Here is a YouTube video that walks through the space.

Why does this matter?

Education in British Columbia has been changing a lot in the past few years, specifcally with the introduction of the proficency scale. And with the additional emphasis on the First Peoples’ Learning Principles. The ministry is trying to take the spotlight away from grades and percentages, and highlight student learning as a process. As we learn in our psychology class, when students are motivated intrinsically to seek knowledge and learn, they are much more likely to persist and excel at school. When students focus on grades, they memorize and cram for tests and when they complete the tests the information falls out of their head. With schools like PSII focused on inquiry based learning, students are learning more in each subject, because it is related to something that interests them. I know even for myself when I am allowed the freedom to choose my topic even for an essay, I almost always remember more about the topic, and produce a better product.

I included the First Peoples’ Principles of learning above because I think it relates to the structure PSII has created. Particularily “Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness on reciprocal relationships and a sense of place).”

Trevor Mackenzie’s Inquiry Mindset presentation inspired me as an emerging teacher. His discussion around curiosity stood out to me the most, as someone extremely motivated by passion and curiosity. Through my years as a student, I noticed the hardest projects, essays, etc. were the ones where we could choose whatever topic we wanted that related to the course. These assignments were also the ones that I remember the most, and succeeded in. Space to explore what interests you definitely leaves the most room for meaningful understanding. Trevor Mackenzie did a really good job of describing why it is that curiosity fuels us so much. Not just at a university/senior high school level but even at elementary schools.

He used an example of inquiry mindset in a Physical Education setting, and as a future PHE educator, it was really neat to see how an inquiry mindset could be included in non-academic environments. Trevor also provided a lot of statistics showing increased engagement and performance when students are curious. I think this ties into our discussion about the phone ban in schools. If students are curious and engaged in the topic, the urge to pull out their phones should decrease. Additionally, his philosophy on feedback piqued my interested a lot. Where he returns essays with written feedback throughout, but no numeric mark on the paper. Students are left to then guess what grade they got, and think more critically about what grade they might actually deserve. Instead of just looking at the number and throwing the paper out without even reading the valuable feedback left by the teacher. This tactic is something I plan to use in my future teaching. Vertical learning, while simple, is also something else I’m going to take with me into teaching. As someone who is constantly feeling antsy in their seat, I can’t imagine how younger people are feeling being trapped in their desks all day.
All in all, the presentation Trevor Mackenzie gave I found to be the most valuable lesson we’ve had so far!

Jesse Miller discussed the influence of social media on teachers and students, the importance of boundaries, and how we can navigate what is productive/safe use of media in classrooms. I found his presentation to be very informative, and he brought up a lot of scenarios I wouldn’t have considered having to deal with previously. A point that stuck with me was that he believes that we view a lot of social media tools as taboo, which makes young people feel like they need to use them in secret. Hiding the use of certain websites means that students may not be using them in a safe manner, when they are open about their use we can direct them to safe use. However, as teachers, there are boundaries we need to set with students, which sometimes means telling them you don’t want to know what they’re doing online.
Jesse Miller emphasized that we must follow the policies that our school has set around cell phones and social media. There should be no flexibility/pushing the boundaries of these policies. He brought up how we shouldn’t be using our personal devices to take photos of students because our phones are connected to the cloud and these photos may not just stay on our phones. Even if the photos are taken with consent and are just being used in the classroom setting, once that photo is taken, even if deleted, it still exists on our cloud. Jesse mentioned that if we are provided a phone from the school to use, this would be safe to use for classroom photos.

My favourite part of Jesse Miller’s presentation was when he gave a variety of book recommendations, fiction and non-fiction. As an avid reader who is interested in exploring more about the impacts of technology in our society, I thought this was super valuable! Giving those listening to your presentation an opportunity to explore more and stay interested means there’s more taken away.