It is always nice to have some affirmation of what you do, but it is even better to have that affirmation as well as more training.   A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be sent to San Francisco to be trained in the Responsive Classroom approach to classroom community.  I follow their blog and newsletter because they are always full of ideas I find quite useful.  There is also a host of ideas from teaches using this approach if you just Google the term.  But to actually having the chance to be trained for an entire week was just fantastic, and it made me confront and evaluate some of my classroom practices honestly.

I always have a pretty close knit community in my classes where students, teachers, and parents could say what they felt, give constructive criticism, and most importantly feel a sense of belonging, significance, and fun.  But after having been through the training I realized that our classroom community could be improved in several ways.  Yes!  It could be even better.

However, here I am going to focus on just one aspect... sharing.  Is that a groan I hear from my fellow teachers out there?  I am right there with you.  Those endless bring-n-brag sessions, known as show-and-tell, about the newest toys were just torturous.  I gave that up aeons ago to save everyone from the misery.  Yet the Responsive Classroom version of sharing will be making its debut in my class come fall.  Yes, really!  With this approach, the purpose of sharing is so that each of us can get to know each other for who they are as a human being.  This means that sharing comes with topics such as, my biggest fear is... the personality trait I most like about myself is... etc.  I believe that structured in this way, sharing has the potential to become something wonderful that will make the classroom a more accepting and loving environment.  Who woulda thunk it?

After taking a look at The 7 Skills Students Must Have I was thinking about my teaching, or lack of it, this last year.  Yes, I admit it.  I'm a teacher and I was doing very little teaching but that doesn't mean their wan't learning happening all around me.  This was due to the iPads that my 4th graders held in their hands.  I asked myself, "Why would I lecture about a topic when my students are holding a device in their hands that provides close to the sum of human knowledge?"  So I started having the students learn on their own and then create lessons and learning experiences for each other.  The learning that took place when I made this switch blew my mind... completely and totally.

For each topic there were experts or expert groups.  Not only did this empower my students, but it removed me from much of the teaching.  The students researched their topic, found digital resources to share, and then put this knowledge together to create a lesson for their peers.  These lessons included a personal presentation, digital tutorial and an interactive notebook page that included QR codes for all applicable digital resources.  If a student had a question about puns, France, or the partial products method of multiplication they had an in-class expert to consult.  They also had access to learning resources created by their peers, whom they know and trust.  They would visit these resources repeatedly simply because they were created by classmates.  That never happens with a textbook.

This didn't always work smoothly, but it was much more effective than my old model of lecture based lessons followed by paper and pencil assessment.  There were  the typical problems of a group member not pulling their weight, personality clashes, getting off track and the like.  But these are real world problems that these students will face throughout their lives so I believe that they need to learn how to deal with them now.  This is actually where I did most of my "teaching" and it was a very effective use of my face to face student-teacher time.