- This is the last time I will be talking for more than 10 minutes in a period. After today, you will spend class time working on learning, not listening to me.
- I'm fresh out of spoons to feed you information; you'll have to feed yourselves. But I'll help you learn how to do that.
- I am not the center of this classroom universe; you, the learners, are. We're going to focus on you, not me.
- You have to reach true understanding of the content and learn how to learn. This is hard work. But I'm here to support you, help you, and make sure you're on a path (not the path-a path) that will get you to the learning you need to do.
Those are two very big mistakes I am not going to make next year. I plan on changing, tweaking, and rearranging some facets of my instruction (which are now intertwined with my 1:1 classroom) in order to sharpen my focus on students and their learning. Below are some ideas I have:
- Start the year with a week-long "Biology Tech Bootcamp." I will teach them the core technology and web 2.0 tools they will need for the entire year during this one week, making sure students can operate the basic functions of these tools. Getting them comfortable with the technology will ease the transition into full-blown student-centered learning, as well as provide the opportunity to practice working in teams without the added pressure of learning science content at the same time.
- As implied in the previous suggestion, start students working in teams right away. This is to make this the "new norm" for how learning will take place in the room as much as possible.
- Schedule regular meetings with teams. This is so they can show me what they've been doing, why they've been doing it, and where they need to go. It will also help me see if the path they are on will get them to the learning I need them to learn, and help them make any needed course corrections. Consider it a recurring "team performance review."
- Use Google Docs as a place where students can ask for help. While I had team "status boards" on my bulletin boards where they could ask for help, students were often reluctant to really admit they needed help (and sometimes didn't know when they needed help). I am going to try having a standing Google Doc for each period, and have students write what they need help with at the end of each period. I am also toying with the idea of having them "categorize" their help, placing their specific needs into categories such as "Technology," "Answering the Objectives," or "Making Connections." By doing this, it might prevent students from writing "I don't get it-any of it" anywhere in that document. (This will probably happen, but a science teacher can dream, can't she?)
- From the Google Doc lists (as well as from other formative assessments), generate "workshops" where individual students can get help. These will be "workshops" that will be up to the students to complete; they will only involve me indirectly, if they have questions during the activity laid out for them. This year I would announce topics that students told me they needed help on from the status boards, and they could come see me with their questions. However, it seemed like they just wanted me to give them a mini-lecture and some notes. So, the workshops developed from the Google Doc will involve independent student work, checking of answers, and "fix-it" strategies if they are still not mastering a concept.
- Teach more metacognitive strategies. In order to be truly student-centered, students need to center on themselves and their own processes of learning. Schedule be damned, I'm going to teach these guys how to think about their thinking.
"Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself."
~Vilfredo Pareto
And you can keep your spoons, too.