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Teaching Reflection


Upon my thoughts as a teacher, reflecting on what I have done the first half of the year, and what I can do to be innovative and engaging, I begin to plan for the second half of the year... on the first day off of my winter break. 
WHY CAN'T I JUST ENJOY MY TIME OFF?
I am ambitious, I am reflective, I crave professional growth, and I honestly like planning!


I have begun to read "The Innovator's Mindset" by @gcouros and I realized that I have dwindled my sense of wonder and creativity in my own teaching, that I am not the type of teacher that is encouraging my own student's creativity, and curiosity. There are a few students that enjoy my class, and there are a few that don't, and some that just go through the motions. 


I had ideas of changing the way my course is run by creating a student-centered, peer-teaching, sharing classroom. I thought it would be a great idea to show my class grabber videos on the different sub-topics we cover in class, have the students choose 1, and in groups, create the curriculum, from finding and learning the content  (via youtube videos, articles, websites), finding activities and labs for the students in the class to complete, and finally to present and teach the topic to their classmates and share their process, progress, and final product online. 

While speaking to an amazing co-worker, @gerj26, with great ideas, great insight, and a guru in teaching methods in my eyes, she helped me narrow and focus my grand ideas to something substantial and do-able. So, hearing about sketch-noting (and never having done it) I took a shot to organize my thoughts on creating a class that brings the focus back on engaging students' curiosity and creativity. After reading an article about sketch-noting, I decided to leap. I loved the look of the title, I loved the use of colors, but my final product, not in love with. 
In hopes of perhaps inspiring someone else to be creative, and change their class norms, I decided to just share my thoughts and plans for the rest of the school year. On the top left hand quarter is how my class is structured now. 
1. In a flipped classroom, they have questions that they must answer, using a variety of methods (powerpoint, videos, websites) on topics we will be learning. 
2. They come to class and we complete an activity (labs, worksheets, clay models, screen-casts, using augmented reality apps *not creating them*, notes, videos, etc.). 
3. Along the various topics they complete formative assessments (I call them DUA's, for Daily Understanding Assessments, which are a short 10 multiple-choice question).
4. Once all the sections are complete, the students complete a summative assessment (test, boring old-school, pen-paper test). 

How I plan to change it up: 
1. I present the different sub-topics to students with a grabber video. 
2. The students will be divided into groups according to their interests, but all topics must be represented. 
3. Students will have 3 different activities in which they pick one that they must complete for each category: 
  - Learning (Examples: Notes on Powerpoints, Videos, Articles, POGILS)
  - Hands-On (Examples: Labs, Models, Creating solutions to real-world scenarios, etc.)
  - Reinforcement (Examples: Worksheets, Gizmos, Drawings, Summaries, DUA's). 
4. The students then must complete student driving activities to peer teach on their interest topic         --> Examples: 
      1. Reach out to Experts in the Field
      2. Find Scenarios on Current Experiments or Issues in the field and have students come up with               solutions
      3. Create Videos/Movies
      4. Find/Create Labs to be completed in class
      5. Create Youtube channels/lists, etc.
      6. Create assessments to see if classmates learned the content
**These are examples that I can come up with, but the students can come up with their own methods 
     and ideas on what they would do to peer-teach and share online.
5. Assessments would include video reflections on the process and progress, how they peer-teach, and how much other students learned based on their peer teaching. 

Over my break, I will be putting together the activities that I will be giving the students to choose from, creating timelines and due dates, and finding real world applications on topics they are learning. After a few tries of this type of teaching, I'll ask the students what they thought, and I will re-blog and let you know how it went :-) Wish me luck!!!

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