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https://padlet.com/deepali_kataria2/differentiation-hx2us8x9czwmhrn

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20 Things Educators Need To Know About Learning Spaces

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Here are 20 considerations for challenging old, limited notions of learning spaces in order to move students into a 21st century economy.

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https://www.inspiringinquiry.com/learningteaching/approaches-to-learning

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IB- ATL skills and sub skills document

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3 Student Feedback Effective Strategies & Tips

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Independent Learning Thursdays – A Stepping Stone to Student Agency | SharingPYP Blog

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The Shift from Engaging Students to Empowering Learners

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7 Things That Happen When Students Own Their Learning

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‘Student Agency’ Is Not Something You Give or Take - EdSurge News

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I feel strange saying that I, a Davidson College Junior named Andrew, have obtained ‘Student Agency.’ Does that make me a ‘Student Agent,’ a sort of…

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Don't Wait to Innovate!

Teachers often begin the school year with team-building activities or a review of the rules and procedures. But what if we began with student-centered projects? The following is an exploration of six student-centered projects you can launch in your first month of school.

Starting the Year with Student-Centered Projects

So, imagine a classroom with 34 students. It's the first week of school and you have a mix of students who spent the summer owning their learning and doing amazing projects mixed with another group who spent their hours binge-watching Netflix and playing video games. They are strangers right now but at some point, they will be a community. But what do you actually want to accomplish at the beginning?

Chances are, you'd love to see the following:

Team-building and social cohesion

Review of former content to make up for the "summer slide"

Clarifying expectations and going over procedures

A general pre-assessment of where your students are at within the standards

Often, teachers begin the school year with icebreakers. For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of icebreakers. In my experience, extroverts have already broken the ice before they walked through the door and introverts are perfectly happy to let the ice melt slowly. I've never enjoyed the small-talk chatter of gathering names for People Bingo, the super awkward human knot, or the "tell me 3 facts about you" activities. But I get it. There is value in the pure joy and laughter in a great icebreaker.

Other teachers spend the first week going over expectations and having students complete pre-assessments. They might spend time in community-building but they know that time is short and they need to get on with the content.

But I've found that there's actually a way to build community, go over expectations, and pre-assess students while also promoting student ownership.

Starting with Student Ownership

If you ask teachers what they want in the long-term for students, you are likely to hear terms like "life-long learners," "critical thinkers," and "falling in love with learning." You might hear something about students being self-directed and independent.

So what if we began the school year with a focus on student ownership?

By starting with student-centered projects, you are making a bold statement that says, "I trust you to be self-directed and I value your agency as a learner." Rather than sharing 3 items about themselves or playing a game of People Bingo, students can actually share their expertise and passions through Genius Hour projects and Geek Out blogs.

So, what about procedures and expectations? The beauty of a student-centered project is that you can teach the procedures as you go. You might spend 10 minutes going over the procedure grid but then you can clarify expectations as students move from independent to partners to small group to whole class instruction.

The following are a few student-centered projects you can do with your students at the beginning of the year.

#1: Genius Hour (Let Students Choose the Topic)

Genius Hour begins with a simple premise. Give your students 20% of their class time to learn what they want. They choose the content while also mastering skills and hitting the academic standards. With Genius Hour, students own the entire journey. They choose the topics based upon their own geeky interests. It doesn't have to be a traditional academic area. They might like fashion or food or sports or Legos or Minecraft or deep sea creatures.

They can then match these topics with the standards. Notice that many of the ELA standards, for example, are essentially skill standards that can connect to just about any topic. Students ask the questions and engage in their own research to find the answers. Along the way, they design their own plan of instruction. They decide on the resources and activities. Each student sets goals and engages in self-assessment. They work at their own pace and set their own deadlines.

In the end, students figure out what they will make and how they will share their learning with the world. A word of caution: It's not a free-for-all. The best Genius Hour projects have systems and structures that empower students to reach their full potential. Even so, there will be mistakes. You'll have to experiment. But in the end, students are empowered to be self-directed learners, engaging in creativity and critical thinking. In other words, they own the learning.

[arve url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n7EelMbzG0″ title="Getting Started with Genius Hour" /]
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A problem-based simulation activity might involve doing a collaborative wilderness survival activity, where students have to figure out what supplies they will take in order to survive a plane crash. It might involve a space simulation, where they have to decide which items they need in order to start a lunar colony or how they might fix a broken item on a spacecraft. You might do something like a Breakout EDU project, where students have to solve problems collaboratively while working within a tight time constraint.

The idea here is that students work collaboratively to decide on their own strategies. They are forced to make decisions, communicate with peers, and learn from their mistakes. It's a great way to model productive failure and iterative thinking.

#3: Design Challenges (Let Students Own the Creative Process)

I want to see students engaged in creative thinking from day one. This is why A.J. Juliani and I created the LAUNCH Cycle (which we also explored in our book Launch: Using Design Thinking to Boost Creativity and Bring Out the Maker in Every Student)

[arve url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhQWrHQwYTk" title="The LAUNCH Cycle" /] Subscribe to YouTube Channel

With design thinking, students own the entire creative process from the initial place of awareness through the inquiry, which leads to the research and then into the ideation and eventually into the place where they are creating their prototypes. Note that there is a structure here. However, the structure is designed to facilitate rather than limit a student's creative voice.

Here's an example of a design challenge that connects to math:

[arve url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a_P-N3EFIc" title="Design the Ultimate Tiny House" /]
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#4: Maker Projects (Let the Students Make Their Own Creations)

Maker projects are similar to design challenges. However, they are shorter and based on the idea of rapid prototyping. Check out the following video to see the distinction:

[arve url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE3HUudpYeA" /]
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A.J. Juliani has a great curation of maker projects that he included on his recent blog post:
Best Activities for Students K-2:
#5: Wonder Week (Let Students Ask the Questions)

The Wonder Week Project is an inquiry-based, week-long project, where students ask questions about anything they find interesting. These are those nagging questions they have that they've never had a chance to answer in school. So, students begin with a place of inquiry, with a particular question they are dying to figure out.

From there, they move into research. They might go online and look for answers on websites (and, yes, I think Wikipedia is great for this) or look at YouTube videos. They might contact experts in the field and send out emails or even do video conferencing. Eventually, they share their answers through a blog, video, or podcast.

Think of Wonder Week as a shorter and tighter version of Genius Hour.

#6: Geek Out Blogs (Let Students Build an Audience)

The idea is simple. Students write topical or thematic blogs in the topics that they geek out about. We go over examples of blogs (which exposes students to high-interest non-fiction reading) and they look at trends. They see foodie blogs, skateboarding blogs, sports blogs, fashion blogs, gaming blogs, car blogs, history blogs, science blogs, etc.

Next, they create a specific themed blog. They define the driving interest as well as the audience. From there, they begin writing blog posts in various formats:

1. They choose the format, including video, audio, and text.

2. They choose the topics of the posts.

3. They engage in research and share their findings with the classmates.

4. They create posts that range from listiclesto Q&A to interviews to human interest stories to persuasive pieces to instructions on how to do something.

With Geek Out Blogs, students get to own the entire writing process, from finding a topic and an audience all the way into research, writing, editing, and publishing. They get to choose the format and the genre of each post. And ultimately, they get to be the experts.

A Community of Makers

When you start the year with student-centered projects, you set the tone for students to become self-starters and self-managers, which is something they will need for the rest of their lives. They learn how to think like entrepreneurs:

But it's more than that. When you start with student ownership, you are sending the powerful message to students that it's okay to be known and that their passions, interests, and expertise are valued in your classroom. So, as they feel known and trusted on an individual level, they are able to share their ideas with classmates. From here, you grow into a tight classroom community where your students are able to recognize and appreciate the diverse range of interests and t alents. And when that happens, you begin to grow into a community of makers.

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6 Student-Centered Projects for the First Week of School

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Don't Wait to Innovate! Teachers often begin the school year with team-building activities or a review of the rules and procedures. But what if we began with student-centered projects? The following is an exploration of six student-centered projects you can launch in your first month of school.

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Agency is the capacity and propensity to take purposeful initiative-the opposite of helplessness. Young people with high levels of agency do not respond passively to their circumstances; they tend to seek meaning and act with purpose to achieve the conditions they desire in their own and others' lives.
A new Harvard study , sponsored by the Raikes Foundation , suggests that student agency may be as important an outcome of schooling as basic skills.

The report, The Influence of Teaching Beyond Standardized Test Scores: Engagement, Mindsets, and Agency , relies on the Tripod survey of teaching. Over 300,000 students in grades six to nine in 14 states were surveyed during the 2013-14 school year.

Developed by Ron Ferguson 15 years ago, the Tripod construction appears more relevant to traditional teacher-centered classrooms than student-centered approaches. As a result, there are some limitations of an instrument designed for measuring agency in low agency environments. However, next generation Bay Area models including Summit Public Schools and Education for Change (EFC) find the survey useful.

"Where this report is effective is in pushing us to think about agency in the context of what grown-ups have to do to facilitate it," said Hae-Sin Thomas, CEO of EFC. "Tripod unfortunately is not a tool designed specifically to evaluate teacher practice specific to agency, but it's as good as it gets with respect to student surveys and student-centered teacher practice."

An important subset of Habits of Success ( discussed last week ), agency, the capacity and propensity to take purposeful action, is key to success in life.

Albert Bandura said:

Through agentic action, people devise ways of adapting flexibly to remarkably diverse geographic, climatic and social environments; they figure out ways to circumvent physical and environmental constraints, redesign and construct environments to their liking... By these inventive means, people improve their odds in the fitness survival game.

Hitlin and Elder suggest four overlapping conceptions of agency:

Existential agency: The capacity, or free will, for exerting influence on our environments.

Programmatic agency: Following rules and routines.

Identify agency: What we believe about ourselves and the ways that we wish to be perceived by others.

Life-course agency: Actions that we take to affect future outcomes.

10 Guidelines for Teaching

The Influence of Teaching report makes 10 suggestions for teaching.

More Than Teaching

The report logic map is shown below. It suggests that teachers and family assets play a major role in support agency development.

The central question explored by this report is, "How do distinct components of teaching influence the development and expression of agency-related factors in sixth to ninth grade classrooms?"

A more useful question, given advances in tools and schools in the last 15 years, would be, "How do distinct components of learner experience influence the development and expression of agency?" In particular, factors related to learning models, progressions, and environments appear critical to promoting or damaging agency.

A useful complement to this report is exploring how new models, like NGLC grantees, promote agency through:

Blended learning environments where students have some ability to co-create path, pace, and place;

Competency-based learning environments where students show what they know and progress based on demonstrated mastery;

Project-based and interest-based learning where students have some ability to shape the driving question, the process, and the work product; and

Work and service learning experience that students select or create.

The report completely misses model-based factors which are becoming at least as important as teacher factors. The difference between a Summit or EFC secondary school and a big bad high school is everything. There are certainly differences in teacher quality, but it's one of a dozen model factors (e.g., mission, schedule, structure, advisory, technology blend, learning trajectories, and real world connections).

The report dumps a lot in teacher's laps but most of them are stuck in an obsolete low agency model that infantilizes teenagers rather than empowering them to own their learning.

Every high agency secondary school I have visited has had some kind of an advisory structure . The sustained relationship with a caring adult that sets the cultural tone, is part of a distributed guidance system, and provides continuous feedback on success habits is every bit as important as classroom instruction in developing student agency.

Agency development isn't just a product of quality teaching, it's the product of a quality system-one designed as a high agency environment.

Hae-Sin Thomas said, "It's definitely time to take this conversation around agency to a deeper level- what are the components of agency, how do we measure those components, how do we map those components to specific practices, conditions or attitudes and then how do we measure those specific to building agency."

For more see:
Stay in-the-know with all things EdTech and innovations in learning by Images from The Influence of Teaching Beyond Standardized Test Scores: Engagement, Mindsets, and Agency. signing up to receive the weekly Smart Update

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Agency is the capacity and propensity to take purposeful initiative-the opposite of helplessness. Young people with high levels of agency do not respond passively to their circumstances; they tend to seek meaning and act with purpose to achieve the conditions they desire in their own and others' lives.

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The design of a learning space profoundly impacts the overall learning process, but designed spaces should always support learning rather than drive it.

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20 Things Educators Need To Know About Learning Spaces

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Here are 20 considerations for challenging old, limited notions of learning spaces in order to move students into a 21st century economy.