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, reflect, and share the gratitude from the last students I had in my 20 years at Brookfield Central High School, as expressed 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'll soak this one in.
Sometimes I feel that there is a great misunderstanding when it comes to personalizing learning in the classroom. The idea that in a personalized learning environment students are free to do whatever they wish. That they are creating their learning experience from scratch. In a PL environment the learner’s strengths, challenges, and interests are essential to recognize. But like any learning environment we are familiar with, standards and outcomes are just as essential to learning in a PL environment. When I began looking at outcomes in my classroom years ago, I was focused on outcomes specific to a unit. So once an outcome was mastered, it wasn’t revisited. I had heard of other districts that were looking at overarching outcomes that were not unit specific and were practiced across multiple units of instruction. I had a hard time wrapping my head around the idea. How would I be able to keep track of content proficiency if I only tracked overarching outcomes? ...