Disruptive Thinking

Eric Sheninger’s Disruptive Thinking encourages the reader to rethink the learning, rethink the Learner and rethink our mindset. This brings about greater passion for the Learners and the educator as we focus more on our culture for learning and a new culture of thinking. To better prepare our Learner for their future, we’re aligning much of the guidance in Eric’s Disruptive Thinking. Our Learners are so engaged this year! We believe that some is due to how we’re disrupting their thinking, how glad they are to be back in person learning together and how much fun we have learning high school Math. We appreciate that Eric encourages us to see our kids as Learners, not just as students. This is changing our mindset to engage in more thinking and learning, not merely doing. 

     Eric reminds us to start with our why (from Simon Sinek) and our philosophy for learning as we rethink what learning can look like to bring about more inspiring experiences. He encourages us to rethink why we facilitate learning, how we can create opportunities to learn, relate, and integrate concepts that empower our Learners to truly engage. We can ask the right questions to cultivate a thinking culture and create environments that our Learners really need and want to prepare them for their future. 

     The author encourages us to know our Learners, their gaps, their needs, their challenges so we can better create learning opportunities that engage thinking, chase growth (not perfection), personalize the learning and bring out the awe in our day to day learning. We get to know our Learners by understanding what they bring to our learning environment from past years, past courses, the courses on their current caseload and the extra curricular activities in which they engage. We make weekly #GoodCallsHome to connect with their parents to better support our Learners and our learning. Eric reminds us that involving families is a vital component of empowering greater learning. 

     He suggests we find the connectedness in our content to bring about greater understanding, to integrate concepts, to find the relevance to drive thinking and to create opportunities that encourage thinking through play. We create more visual learning, more Tic-Tac-Toe learning opportunities and BINGO games to bring about more play, competition and fun. Our Learners are regularly at the board. They are teaching. They’ve asked to have their voices take up 80% of our class time where my voice they’ve capped at about 20%! Actually, they tell us they learn so much more when they are doing the thinking, speaking, and applying.

     To best use our time in class together, Eric reminds us to give the beginning, middle and end more significance and delineation. The first 5-10 minutes he suggests creates engagement, hooking our Learners and offering them a sense of where we’re headed. Eric guides us to recognize that technology can be incorporated during a Do Now, a Check For Understanding or an Exit Ticket. We use Google Forms and project visuals on the board to make learning more visible. The middle portion of our class includes time for our Learners to ask their questions, time for them to engage in independent practice and time for them to get feedback through thinking and questioning. The last 5-10 minutes should bring about some closure to the goals of the day. This is a great time for a formative assessment or Exit Ticket that checks for understanding and offers the opportunity for our Learners to apply their thinking and ultimately get feedback before class ends. Our Learners often correct their Exit Tickets before they leave and jot themselves notes as to where they might want to improve during our next class.  

     The main portion of our class time is best designed using Universal Design for Learning where all Learners can individually understand and connect to the learning since we’re minimizing all barriers to learning. To bring out the best in our Learners, we encourage our Learners to lead the learning, let their questions drive our thinking and learning, and offer them time to practice the learning while we are available to provide them guidance. 

 

     In closing, Eric reminds us to let our Learners see how much we care about them, our learning and collaboration to unlock their potential. When we do, our Learners can reach and exceed their potential to unleash their greatness!

Making Connections

To start December on a positive note, I've decided to share some of my recent thoughts on how "Making Connections" is enhancing our learning.

• Making weekly #GoodCallsHome is one way to help our learning take on greater meaning. When we reach out and connect with the Parents / Guardians of our Learners, we are sharing the admiration, respect, and appreciation for them. Countless Parents have stated they feel more connected to school and their kid's educators after receiving these positive phone calls to home. Many of our Learners approach me after the call and say "Thank you for calling my Mom/Dad. They said they were really proud of me and hugged me".

• Getting to know, understand, and appreciate our Learners empowers educators to make the learning more meaningful to each individual. The more we understand how they learn or why they struggle learning helps us create learning opportunities that stick, are relevant, or connect to their prior knowledge.

• Tutoring Learners in other districts has enabled me to see how learning is sometimes disconnected or taught in isolation. Recently, I've been tutoring Learners at the high school or college level that share with me that they have yet to see where their current learning fits. Once I share with them the bigger picture, they have a greater appreciation for what they are learning. Let's make sure we're showing how the learning fits together by making connections. 

• We're sharing with our High School Algebra Learners in our Functions Unit how Evaluate, Graph, Solve, and Transform are relating Absolute Value Functions as well as Piece-wise Functions. For example, we're showing a Graph of an Absolute Value Function and explaining the connections between Evaluating, Graphing, Solving, and Transforming the Function. By explicitly showing the connections, the learning is more rich and the retention is deeper. 

• Our Standards-Based Learning chat (#sblchat) during the first and third Wednesday of each month is yet another way to make connections for ourselves that in turn benefits our Learners. During our collaboration, we learn from each other, we connect on Twitter with other professionals, and we take away ideas to bring to our Learners. I have appreciated the connections I've made with countless dedicated educators that frequent our chat. 

I welcome your thoughts on how you're "Making Connections" for learning! 

What I'm Learning From Our Students

     Listening to our Learners and sitting alongside them has recently been eye-opening. I'm learning more about them, how their fears and confidence affect learning, and how taking an interest in them as inviduals is becoming life-changing for me as an educator.  

     Our high school math seniors and I have been experiencing a time of reflection at the start of each week. We share vulnerabilities, times of being especially authentic, reasons to ask for forgiveness, and the need to take time to be more aware and simply present. Each week, we continue to be humbled by honesty shared, fears revealed, and a hunger for being exceptionally genuine. They claim this "different kind of math class" is helping us learn more deeply, make better connections, ask more questions, and be more vulnerable for the sake of learning. It's difficult to convey in words the depth of communication we're experiencing by having this safe place to just be. Little did I know how much this collaboration helps retention and relationship-building. One of the reasons why I believe this has been possible, is the #BlueMind I'm developing after reading the book of that title by Wallace Nichols. We have four posters in our math classroom of water scenes to help us connect, relax, be aware, and experience serenity. 

     This past week, I've worked alongside several 9th graders on our Entrepreneurial Team who have attended our after school help. During this time, they've experienced some refreshing moments of learning while I sat closely alongside them and listened to them as they articulated their thinking and questions. During these moments, they realized and I realized their errors and strengths in thinking. This has enabled me to better understand their gaps, how they think, what fears they have, and how to individualize our learning paths. 

     I challenge you to dare to be more authentic, share your vulnerabilities, and more clearly articulate your uncertainties in order to reach even greater success! I have so much to learn from our high school students. 

Retrieval Practice is Engaging Our Learning!

Thanks to "Make It Stick" and "Small Teaching", we're learning to incorporate regular retrieval of background knowledge, previously learned skills, and the making of connections between the skills. By using daily Distributed Practice, regular Exit Tickets, and daily collaborative questioning, we're seeing our Learners make significant connections between concepts. Some of our Exit Tickets are in paper form, though more and more are done using Google Forms. When our Exit Tickets are in a Google Form, Learners get immediate feedback to their thinking and often have the opportunity to reassess after they've acquired that feedback. Each time they launch our Google Form, the questions are jumbled to keep the thinking fresh and dynamic. Many of our Google Forms use checkboxes that allow for multiple answers. Using this approach, Learners are prompted to think more thoroughly and to include all responses that suit the prompt.

We've seen our Learners make such great connections, assimilating learning, and being engaged in our learning that we've been able to move ahead of our curriculum maps! Our Learners are always encouraged to reassess to demonstrate their highest proficiency on each Standard or Learning Target in our Standards-Based Learning environment. When our Learners reassess, they often experience aha-moments in seeing how our learning is related, connected, or how it's interwoven. "Make It Stick" and "Small Teaching" are inspiring greater teaching, assessing, and learning. 

Efficiency or Effectiveness?

I'm in a debacle as to whether to record the specific feedback I provide to our Learners or simplify identify whether they were a 4.0, 3.0, 2.0, or 1.0. If I record the feedback, I can better monitor their progress and respond to it. Recording that daily feedback will take more time. However, if I simply record their proficiency level of our Formative Assessment (FA), it's quicker, though less informative for teaching and learning.

This first image, with the Learner's name off screen to the left, has the Date, the Standard, Type, specific Feedback, Class Section, and Proficiency Level. This can identify the specific feedback that was provided to the Learner.

This second image is our Google spreadsheet of grades by Standard of the Formative Assessments (FAs) once graded. Many initial ones are ungraded. 

My question is whether to take the time and effort to record the specific or simply the proficiency level of the Formative Assessment.

Please share your thoughts as to what is ideal for our Learners and our learning. Thank you! 

Surprising Snow Success

During our first SNOW day of the 16-17 school year, I returned to Hacking Assessment by Starr Sackstein. to continue reading. Our classroom learning environment was about to be overhauled. After reading Starr's explanation of how menu options should be offered to our Learners to enable them to choose from which Learning Opportunity might best suit them on a given day, I realized another way to make learning more personal in our Standards-Based Learning environment.

I realize that restaurants would not have many return customers if the restaurant offered what they wanted to serve to their customers on a given day. Customers should have the right to select from a menu of choices based on what appeals to their appetite. I compared restaurant goers to our Learners and asked myself whether our Learners would choose to frequent our learning environment if the learning was but dictated to them so they had little to no say in the learning being made available. Once I conceded that many would not return if given that option, I chose to consider providing a Menu of Choices to our Learners. Even though I'd read Make Learning Personal by Barbara Bray and Kathleen McClaskey back in 2015, I realized I needed to take another step toward offering a more personal approach to learning.

At that point, I created a quick outline defining the proposed generic Menu Options for our Learners. After getting feedback from Bryn Williams, Derek Oldfield, Megan Moran and others. I updated the outline to include our innovative approaches to more tasteful and #MAD Learning. I'd be remiss if I did not give Bryn Williams credit for #MAD Learning. Bryn knows I teach High School Math.

#MAD Learning:

• Multiplying the Learning
• Adding to the Learning
• Dividing up the Learning

At the outset of our learning on Friday 2/10, I shared with our #MHSAlgebra1 Learners our proposed Menu Choices and asked for their feedback. They expressed immediate interest and asked if we could start it today! I agreed and offered today's three specials. No sooner were our Learning Opportunities made available, our Learners made their selections and began indulging in their learning. I noticed more collaborative learning, a bit more chaos, and more energy in the room. 

Thanks to Starr, Bryn, Derek, Megan and others, our Learners will be experiencing more tasteful learning, more personalized learning, and I anticipate higher proficiency levels since the learning is now even more Learner-centered! Bon Appetite! 

Integrating Distributed Practice and a Mobile App

I recently aimed to integrate our Standards, Distributed Practice, and the development of a mobile app for our Marlborough High School Learners. I transitioned to Marlborough High School, my alma mater, on November 7th and have been graciously welcomed by the administration, students, colleagues, and parents alike.

After reviewing our Math Department's curriculum for the courses I was scheduled to teach, I took the following steps to streamline the planning and learning process:

• Identify the Power Standards from the Standards for our classes. - Since I started the first day of the second marking period, and had a bit of catch-up to do, I identified the crucial or Power Standards around which to build our learning road map. 

• Determine the Dates of our class meetings. - Using the school calendar and the new pilot rotating schedule, I identified the dates, times and durations of our classes. 

• Create a Syllabus of the sequenced Power Standards. - In a Google sheet, I created columns for Date of class meeting, Learning Objective, supporting Power Standard, Vocabulary needed for the lesson, what the Proficiency Ticket of the day would include for skills, what the Sequence number of the lesson was, and in which Unit the lesson was included. This spreadsheet contained the data that would be available to our Learners in our Syllabus mobile app.

• Create an integrated Distributed Practice for our spiral learning. - In the Google sheet, I created another tab to contain the Distributed Practice that included the New Lesson along with the lessons from the prior four (4) class meetings. With each day's lesson integrated with the lessons from the prior four meetings, I believe we can transition smoothly from one lesson to another, apply the spiral learning described in "Make It Stick" and integrate the learning of the lessons in a seamless way.  

• Develop and deploy a mobile app using the AppSheet add-on in Google sheets. - After designing the Google sheet with the above-mentioned columns, I launched AppSheet to build a mobile app for our Learners, After adding column headers, an About box, and testing the prototype, I deployed the mobile app via email addresses to various members of our Professional Learning Network (PLN) to provide me with feedback to improve the app. 

This is where I stand now. I'm awaiting feedback from administrators and teachers. I anticipate this integrated planning, mobile app for our Learners to access our Syllabus, and the Distributed Practice that is accessible via a tab on this blog to streamline the planning, learning, and our communication. I welcome your thoughts.