Student Designed Units

Brief digression: I haven’t blogged in months. Since July actually. As one who talks about the importance of blogging as a reflective tool, that smacks a bit of hypocrisy.

There are several reasons why. One, I’m in kind of a weird transition year, firmly planted in the now but looking forward as well. Two, I just haven’t felt like what I’m doing with my kids is that amazing, and it isn’t something I haven’t written about before. It just seems like it isn’t anything amazing.

Tuesday night, the moderators of #caedchat had a hangout to talk about year 4 of #caedchat. We talked about blogging briefly, and I mentioned my blogging hiatus. My buddy David said that he enjoyed when I blogged about what we did in the classroom. Thanks for the nudge, David.

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History teachers live in a blessed time right now - THERE ARE NO CONTENT STANDARDS. We can literally teach whatever we want! (Untrue if you teach an AP class, but you most likely signed up for that deal with the devil…)

As I was planning my second semester, I realized that there was some content that was going to be new, and some I should cover a bit of - yeah, the Cold War probably merits mentioning in a two year world history class...

Anyways, I saw this hole at the end of the year - about a four to five week chunk of time that could be filled with literally anything that I could justify teaching in a history class. Why not get my students - who are now in their second year with me - to figure out what THEY wanted to do in our last unit of our two years together?

And thus was born this and this. Kids got about 75 minutes to work through this process. After that, they will look through the other unit proposals from their period and choose the two they are most interested in. I’ll combine these choices across classes and students will then get to vote on the peer-created unit they are most excited about and that’s what we’ll cover in April and May.

Want a student-centered classroom? Why not use ‘I’ve got no content standards’ to your advantage and let students choose what to study?

I’m excited to see how this goes!

Napa 1:1 GAFE Summit Day 2 Resources: Innovation Day Resources

I had the honor to copresent about running Innovation Day at your school with my Humanities partner (and work wife) Sarah Press at the second day of the Napa 1:1 GAFE summit.

The session preso is embedded below - tons of links and resources are in there!

#edu531 Guest Appearance

About a month ago, Andrew Schwab put out a call to folks to have them stop by his #edu531 class - a class of preservice teachers - via Google hangout. Clearly, I was interested in chatting with some folks about to head out into the classroom!

I chose to talk about the importance of student choice in the classroom. We started the conversation with some brainstorming around the importance of student choice. Next we talked about SAMR and how it relates to choice - as you move up into modification and redefinition with technology, I believe the importance of student choice becomes clearer: choice allows you to modify and redefine what can happen - and who does the thinking! - in the classroom. We then moved into what student choice looks like in the classroom: the easier way to do it (choice around demonstration of knowledge) and the harder way to do it (choice around content).

Dan Pink's ideas about autonomy, mastery, and purpose are important here, and were mentioned. I tied these ideas into genius hour, 20Time, and Innovation Day. It's always fun to share these more envelope-pushing projects with teachers, particularly newer teachers. The sooner you can get teachers unattached to all-content-all-the-time, the better.

Finally, I shared some free tools at the end. Want to check it out? The link to the doc I shared with the #edu531 folks is here.

On the big screen! Thanks for the pic, Andrew.