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Thank You for 20 Years.

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After 20 years of teaching at Brookfield Central, I am saying goodbye. Although I spent the majority of that time in the physics classroom alongside my learners. That changed for my last 18 weeks. I ended up in a place similar to where I started, teaching chemistry and biology. So, rather than dealing with juniors and seniors at the end of their high school careers, I was in classrooms with freshmen and sophomores still trying to find their place. At the same time, I was learning and teaching a set curriculum I hadn't taught in over a decade. So, we were learning. But, of course, I already knew the content.  The point of this post is to take a step back, take in, and share the gratitude from the last students I had in my 20 years at Brookfield Central High School through the cards and notes they made for me on my last day with them.  I don't take many yay me moments. But after 20 years, I think I'll soak this one in.
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Taking Tech Tips to Heart

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We are reaching the end of the 3rd term of the 2018-19 school year. During the 4th term, my students will begin work on their passion projects. As I look forward and attempt to iterate the process for the end of the school year, I’m looking to Kasey Bell’s 20 tech tips for teachers to help me improve the process.

If you are unfamiliar with Kasey’s 20 tech tips for teachers,  I would highly recommend checking out her speaking about them on the first episode of here new podcast The Shake Up Learning Show.   The 20 tips are highlighted in the infographic below.


As I looked to the tips to drive changes to the process, 3 different ones jumped out at me.

Don’t integrate too many tools at once

When starting out the project, there are so many different things I want students to do as part of the process. These steps include brainstorming ideas, refining their idea, creating a pitch video, doing research and summarize their research, create a task list with due date, create a project log, create a product to share their learning to a public audience, among other steps. These are a lot of steps and many times, I force students into using a different tool for each step. As we reach the end of this term, I am hoping that students have a better idea of the different tools available to them. So letting students propose the tools they wish to use rather than dictating them may be the way to go. If students don’t know which tool to use, I could propose a few options. But, I’d like to move away from dictating. Possibly coming up with a document in which I explain the different required components and they propose the tool they would like to use and conference with me for approval.

Don’t assess the bells and whistles

When I was in high school and it was time to turn in a report to the teacher, I can just picture all of the reports turned in with new plastic covers. Some were transparent. Some were colored. This concept has not gone away not that we are creating digital products. So when setting up assessment rubrics, content still needs to guide the scoring.
That doesn’t mean that presentation shouldn’t be considered. There is a lot to be said for creating a professional presentation. But a lot of being professional is the quality of the content. But little steps like cropping, aligning, formatting fonts, and choosing a background go a long way to give that professional look without spending hours looking for clipart or adding fancy animations.
The key is conveying this to learners when you offer them a variety of way to demonstrate outcomes. A standardized rubric that covers all submission formats can be useful for cutting to the heart of the content of the creation rather than the possible flourishes that each creation app offers.

Be consistent

Sticking to my grad ideas is probably my biggest failure as a teacher. I am great at presenting these grand ideas. But continuing to hold students accountable for my vision is something that I falter at. Keeping that high level of expectations is tough. It is easy for me to lower my expectations when students don’t meet them at first. I need to do a better job in believing in my ideals and my vision. I need to embrace the idea of a growth mindset. Of course it won’t be exactly what I envisioned the first time students try it. Realizing that this is a process where I need to hold myself as accountable for sticking to my vision is key.
When my expectations are not being met by learners, creating channels of communication to find out where the issue is will be key. I am very good at doing this with content pieces. I need to do the same with the passion project. Just because students have more freedom doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be held accountable for high level work.

If you have read this far and have any suggestions for any of these 3 areas, I would love to hear from you.

I’ve been loving Kasey’s podcast so far. If you haven’t listened in yet, please do. Here’s a link to the Podcast Page. New episodes are released on Tuesday. But you’ll have 5 episodes waiting for your right now!
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