It started with some discussion around 21st Century Skills with our district’s partnership with USD MTLC and the fabulous Dr. Katie Martin (@katieMTLC).  Was I skeptical?  No.  But was I hesitant to take the plunge?  YES!  It is scary to take on new challenges, and to feel okay with sometimes failing spectacularly in front of your students, peers, and administrators!  And even more than that, it feels overwhelming to think that your practice needs a complete overhaul.  But here is what I learned:  Teachers are already doing some really amazing things in their classrooms.  Change doesn’t happen overnight, and small changes add up to great things when we start examining the learning experiences that we are creating for our students.

At first, I made small shifts in my instruction, trying to increase collaboration and critical thinking.  I have never shied away from using technology, but it was definitely a different experience to use it to promote these ideas.  What I found was that I didn’t need to be the expert in the room.  My 3rd graders were incredibly adept at learning the technology, often teaching me things that I wasn’t aware existed. They needed my guidance in collaborating and communicating effectively throughout the process.  Taking myself off of the “stage” at the front of the room, and putting the kids in the driver’s seat made it possible for me to facilitate deeper discussions and encourage them to question and problem solve.  Before I knew it, my students were teaching other teachers on campus how to get their students collaborating using GAFE!  These first small changes got me excited about the possibilities and made me want to share my experience with others.  Doug Kriedeman (@OUSDAssessment) was an incredible mentor through the process as he encouraged me to not only share my successes, but also my struggles and complete failures.  This led me to share my process with the teachers at my school, but it also led me to the world of Twitter and the expansion of my PLN.  If I was going to understand the importance of having my students connect globally, then I was going to have to get myself on board as well.

Embracing change can lead to innovative experiences for our students!  We can’t expect to keep doing the same old things, when the world is changing so dramatically.  Start small, but START!

Posted in Education | Tagged #IMMOOC, @lorrah_hogue | 1 Comment

One of the most powerful and innovative things that I did with my students that year was Genius Hour.  I heard about another amazing book in the Burgess Publishing family called Pure Genius by Don Wettrick (@DonWettrick).  I was excited to begin, but really nervous to try something so different!  In #IMMOOC’s Week 2 Live show, George said that our kids are conditioned to a certain kind of system and they are sometimes reluctant to move away from it because they are good at it.  This is SO TRUE!  My first week of Genius Hour was incredibly eye opening as I asked the students to think about their passions and their interests in order to decide on a topic to research.  I told them to think big and choose whatever topic they wanted to know more about.  These 3rd graders didn’t know how to proceed.  They weren’t used to being asked what they were truly interested in, or figuring out the questions that needed to be answered, without direction from their teacher. They offered up research topics that they thought I wanted them to choose, and not one kid told me that they wanted to learn more about Minecraft, robotics, or YouTube.  After a week of investigations and discussions, many students finally realized that I wasn’t kidding and that I wanted them to be the problem-finders.  Some students, however, were begging me to just assign them a topic and put them on the path to success.  This was such an important struggle for them to work through!

                  

This is where I come to the other important part of the definition of innovation:  “new AND better.”  Genius Hour was certainly new, but how did I know that it was better than other research projects that I had tried in the past?  These kids did more communicating and collaborating in the first week than in any other research project that I had ever done.  They worked in pairs to develop essential questions to guide their research, with some students deciding to pair up because of similar passions.  Google Classroom became an incredibly useful tool for organizing research and facilitating communication.  Students would post weekly reflections on their research into Classroom, inviting comments and questions from the class.  They collaborated on shared Google Docs from home when their excitement extended beyond the school day.  When it came time to create some kind of presentation of their research, students created videos, slideshows, models and posters, but all of them learned a great deal about thinking for themselves, learning from failures, and persevering when navigating uncharted waters.  What I learned about my students through this process was immeasurable, and I was able to use this knowledge to help me to work with them across all subject areas.  One student (a boy who was hard to motivate, didn’t like to talk much, and really disliked any assignment that involved writing) decided to research Dr. Seuss.  As I worked with him to help him with his essential question, I asked him why he was so interested in Dr. Seuss.  He told me that he really wanted to write children’s books when he grew up and he would like to know more about how Dr. Seuss got his start.  I was blown away that this child who seemingly hated writing wanted to be a writer!  He researched Dr. Seuss’ difficult road to publishing his first book and it led to the most valuable discussions about failure leading to success! I realized that without this innovation in my teaching practice, I would never have known about his goal or been able to use this knowledge to make connections to his own work in school.

Innovation ISN’T about specific technology or devices.  In my experience, technology has been a game changer in the ways that it has enabled me to organize and facilitate collaboration and feedback.  It has created new opportunities for my students to connect globally and to share their ideas in new ways, but the true innovation lies in the way that we change the experiences to make our students more engaged and empowered.  My initial frustration with the slow roll out of devices didn’t keep me from innovating.  Instead, I realized that I needed to change my way of thinking far more than I needed a class set of iPads.

This is where the idea that "less is more" comes in. At the beginning of the school year, I wrote down some teacher growth goals (or things I want to incorporate into my teaching practices) in my lesson planner. These included:
* Depth & Complexity "Thinking Tools"
* Socratic Seminars
* Global Goals
* Problems of the Month
* Novel Engineering

While this list may seem like a lot, having it all written down in my planner has helped me narrow my teaching focus. So, I may see an idea on Twitter and if I can't somehow use it to help enhance the teaching of one of the things written on my list, I say to myself, "Great idea...but not for this year!" There's definitely something to be said about depth over breadth (I mean, this was one of the key features in the shift to the Common Core State Standards, right?). Instead of trying a million different things and not doing them very well, I've been working on trying a few things that I'm passionate about in order to become an expert at them.