I have been trying to catch up with episodes of George Couros’s excellent Innovator’s Mindset Podcast. Of course, I had to revisit the episode in which I was lucky to appear. While listening to it, I began to realize when I was talking about my favorite teachers. They were actually the ones who allowed me to experience personalized learning. This is nearly 40 years ago! In 1997, the movie of the year was Beverly Hills Cop 2, and the biggest song of the year was “ Want to Dance with Somebody” by Whitney Houston. Specifically, Mr. Vollrath, who I talked about in the episode, realized that it was not the ability to spell a word but to know what it means and use it in the proper context. As I write this post right now, I am still not the best speller, but there are tools that can assist me with it. I see red lines in Google Docs that alert me if I misspelled something. It’s like he understood the WHY of the words, which was not the spelling but the understanding of the words and the abi
“How do you react when your students don’t grasp a concept or skill the first time you teach it?” Bell, Kasey. Shake Up Learning: Practical Ideas to Move Learning from Static to Dynamic (Kindle Location 780). Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc.. Kindle Edition. If you listen to the talk in educational chats today, you will hear phrases like “fail forward” and “FAIL = First Attempt In Learning”. The general idea is that we don’t expect success the first time we try something. So, we shouldn’t expect students to master a concept or skill the first time they try it. Teachers and students need to be ok with this fact. There is a lot of debate in my school around applying this idea to summative assessments, not just formative. I have a very strong opinion on this topic, but this is not the post for that. (But, I imagine you may already know where I stand on telling a student it’s time to stop learning.) For the sake of this post, let’s look at pre-summative assessment learning. If