Model the Learning

The following is my talk from the BIT17 Ignite session on November 9. The automated slide deck is here : 20 slides, 15 seconds each, for 5 minutes total. What a thrill! We’ve been asked to speak tonight to share our passions. There’s a lot that I’m passionate about - I’ve always got too many things on the go! So instead, I’m going to take a slightly different approach, and share WHY I’m passionate. Have you ever learned a new word, and then all of a sudden, you start seeing or hearing that word everywhere? You swear you’ve never heard it before, but suddenly it’s in the news, in the book you’re reading, or in a conversation? At the end of the summer, for me, it wasn’t just a new word that seemed to be popping up everywhere, it was a new question . I saw it in tweets, I saw it in blogs, I saw it in the books I was reading. And that question, was WHY. WHY? Such a little word, but such a big question! And it’s one I started asking myself. Why am I here? Not in t...

Jonathan So ( @MrSoclassroom ) recently threw out an interesting challenge on Twitter for teachers: What are your top five, life-changing-as-a-teacher moments? His original post on his top five really got me thinking about what has made me stop, re-evaluate what I do, and change direction in how I teach. These are all fairly recent moments for me, so I'm guessing there's a little bit of memory bias in here, but here they are... :) In chronological-ish order of occurrence: 1) Flipping my Classes - Handing the responsibility of learning over to my students was definitely career-changing. I learned so much from my students in terms of how they learn (because they were each choosing to learn in their own way), and how they collaborate, and  I saw first-hand how the allowance of self-paced curriculum can reduce stress and deepen understanding. It was humbling as I discovered my lectures weren't a necessary part of the learning process (students mastered even some of the h...