I am fortunate enough to be in Philadelphia this week attending the 2015 ISTE conference. If you have never been, you need to make it happen. Mind Blowing. (and huge)
I have seen and heard a lot of really cool things and have much more to do before I leave, but today I attended one of the most intriguing speeches I've heard in a long time.
I have new job and it entails innovative technology instruction. A blank slate and ample support to provide the type of learning that isn't found in your standard curriculum. This is everything I have ever wanted in my career, but it can be a little daunting to plan for!
So, I have a lot to do before I begin and I focused my attendance around all the ideas that I have for my class. I decided to attend a session called Developing the Innovator's Mindset lead by George Couros, who I have seen all over Twitter with great ideas and inspiring messages. At the end of his speech, I was left with many thoughts about what he said.
His message was all about how to BE innovative. Since my new job is to be innovative, I came up with these thoughts:
To me, part of being innovative is to show no fear. Try new things, learn to use the resources that your students use, and go with the flow. Let the kids lead the learning. Stay out of your comfort zone.
There are many teachers who think that they have all the answers, or at least portray that to their kids. Afraid of being wrong, they project an aura of superiority over their students that veils their insecurity of leaving the safe, curriculum guided world of predetermined lessons. The what-if holds them in a box and stifles the opportunities.
I, for one, began my career with this fear. For the first several years, I followed the lesson plans of others to the T. What was the result? Poor test scores, behavior problems, and (most importantly) kids that I failed.
Then, I decided that the way I was teaching (somewhat like a stoic robot) wasn't working. I tried other things. I gave up on standard curriculum and started letting kids decide what we would learn about. At first, it was in small amounts wherever I could fit it in. As I observed the students, I realized the power of this. I had to start training myself to be able to fit this into the standards and make sure that I was still "following guidelines" and meeting the requirements of my position (which I was), but it drove me crazy. I could see that these kids got more out of solving things they wanted to solve than following a textbook's "exciting" activity of summarizing a news article they clipped out of the newspaper (most of them didn't get the paper, they were part of the 21st century and got news off the internet).
Slowly, I became more adept at making time for these authentic learning opportunities. Not quite PBL, not quite Genius Hour, but something very similar.
In our exploration of various topics, I often did not know the answer. My students were trained to simply ask an adult and blindly take their answer as the truth. This got hard to manage when you have 20 different topics going at the same time, so I stopped answering and replied "I don't know" and left them to their own devices. After the kids realized I wouldn't give them answers, they started to find the answers on their own. I believe that this curious method (by some accounts) helped create problem-solvers. All of this changed the way I taught and the way my kids learned, and I believe, it was an improvement.
I guess my point is, change what you are doing to be more student-centered. We've all heard that a million times, but really look in the mirror and see if you are. I did and I wasn't (though I thought I was) and changing my ways was probably the best thing I ever did as a teacher.
