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Great challenges that could be a place students look for ideas for Friday activities.

Dear Colleagues and Cohorts, Take a moment before our faculty meeting next Tuesday to read this post from Responsive Classroom and reflect about how these suggestions can connect to the building of our professional, adult community here in the Learning Village. Please comment below and post your personal/professional Hope and Dream for the year.

My hope is that we will continue to have peaceful pauses at the beginning (or end) of meetings. I find these moments to be a powerful reminder about "being" rather than "doing".

My personal hope for the year is to be positive. I hope to find the good things in each student and lesson, every day. Also, I hope to reflect with my colleagues, my students and/or independently, on what is going well and how to overcome obstacles.

We are going to try this...

Build a package that can be used to ship one pringle to a partner school.

Build a package that can be used to ship one pringle to a partner school.

Could be fun mini challenges for our Fridays.

Great activities that could be used as "Mini-challenges".

"After gathering their list of ideas I presented them with a challenge - tie in all the core areas of curriculum - writing, science, reading, math and social studies into their passion and present a final project the represents all of these areas."

"As we look for silver linings in the midst of this pandemic, perhaps we now have a more critical eye and greater license to examine our traditional grading practices and improve them to more tightly align with research, our beliefs, and our commitment to equity."

Talks about limiting choice options.

We gave our students limited academic choice in our Ancient Greece Project. Students were given the task of describing Athens or Sparta either in a brochure format or in using tools for students to create a venn diagram. It was amazingly successful and students were definitely invested in their projects and thus created great work!!

I think the article also points out the importance of giving students a focused challenge with their choices.

Responsive Classroom article ... What makes Academic Choice different from the daily choices children make in the classroom?

Thinking about this from the point of view of our "Assessment" CFG, I would be interested in how one could tie together these ideas for academic choice with self differentiation. I love the idea of choice being a motivator, especially when the choice being made is one that is challenging to the individual. However, sometime I worry that the choices being made are the "easy" option rather than the one that would be best suited for the chooser. On a completely different note, I liked the idea of having a set of math problems and giving students choices for the ways of solving. This could support those who are not sure what to do (especially with the option of manipulatives) but also gives those more able students the opportunity to be creative in their solving. I think setting an activity like this would also encourage students to really think about their methods of solving, and prepare them to vocalize their thought processes.

I agree with Karen- I think the reflection portion of this article is so important! Think of how much students can grow by participating in academic choice and following up with the metacognition piece. With this, each time we introduce a new set of academic choices to our students, the process should feel smoother and more beneficial for everyone involved!

The idea of persistence has been helping many of my students with math facts, which is really memorization. The comment about the "Western attitude towards struggling" is interesting - and that we shouldn't jump in to help right away.

Thank you sharing this post. I was dismayed to read the comments from teachers about the Kindergarten program, however, Their responses reflected my worries: They said that the challenges included: "1st half of the year was way too easy", they "had to use a lot of supplemental material", "purchased a lot of new materials", and that there was "no differenciation." I am hoping to hear a more positive plug for the Kindergarten program from another source.

I'll just say it.  For many reasons, I hesitated about posting this article. The idea of gay or lesbian parents can be a loaded topic in an elementary classroom.  As was expressed at L2L2, picture books can be powerful tools for creating an inclusive classroom. We don't need to be diversity preachers.  We don't even represent many of the diversities we may share or read books about. Diversity IS.  Maybe that's the first simple step.  

A good site for information on copyright & Creative Commons. As we are using content from the internet, we need to both be aware and make our students aware of these concepts. AND it is a good example of the use of Edublog.

Resources from the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center