Model the Learning

This year marked a shift in focus of my blogging , away from adventures in the classroom working mostly with students, and toward adventures as a board co-ordinator working mostly with teachers.  The past few years, I've enjoyed reflecting on which posts become the most-read, but this year the numbers seemed skewed - the more established blog's views were much higher than the new blog, due partially to previously-made links, and partially due to something fishy going on in the hit counter (and, I suspect, some bots). So this year, as I'm working toward my new #onewordONT goal for 2018, I decided to look at the most-read three posts from each blog. Here they are: Model the Learning: 3) BIT17 Ignite - Find Your Why - My Ignite talk from BIT2017. 2) Making the Most of Tracking Observations with Forms - Using Google Forms in new ways to track what we see in the math classroom. 1) A New Diagnostic - Looking at a new tool being developed in our board for assessing...

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...