It's All About Learning

Positively Positive – Attitude IS Everything!

Attitude is everything. Everywhere. In every situation.

A person’s attitude not only contributes to one’s own feelings, but also the feelings of others. A person’s attitude is contagious. If you have a positive, optimistic, attitude, that is what you will receive in return, for the most part. If you possess a negative disposition, you will get negativity (feelings, words, behaviour) in return.

Having a positive attitude …

…. inspires.

…. is infectious.

…. motivates.

…. provides hope.

…. boosts energy.

…. increases happiness.

…. contributes to achievement of goals.

…. facilitates success.

…. helps to build and maintain relationships.

It is so imperative that we, as educators (and leaders), friends, parents, and acquaintances are aware of the impact our attitude has on those we deal with daily (whether in person, on the phone, or in writing – including virtually).

It’s not always easy to have a positive attitude, in fact, sometimes it almost seems impossible, but it is necessary to achieve success in all we do. This is especially important as deal with children, families, and staff.

What will you do to ensure you maintain a positive attitude in all (or most, we are all humans after all) situations?

Do you think this is a realistic expectation?

Self-Assessment – Oh the Horror!

Self-Assessment … it’s a (long) process.

We all know the importance of Assessment AS learning ….

This is when students (and adults, for that matter) reflect, and self-assess their learning that real long-term learning and growth can occur.

When the students in my Health and Career Education classes completed their end of the term self-assessment this past week, most were engaged and interested in the process. They took this assessment opportunity very seriously put effort into their responses. A few students, however, found this self-assessment difficult. One Grade 6 student wrote,

“I don’t like grading myself. I feel more comfortable being graded by someone else, like you, Mrs. Henriksen. You would be better at grading me because you have more experience with grading.”

Part of my response to this students was that no one really knew her learning this term better than she did.

Another student got upset about completing the self-assessment and refused to conference with me about his learning this term (even though I made it very non-threatening and open-ended). Initially, he wrote,

“I think I deserve an F!”

I let him know that that was not going to happen and that he did NOT, in fact, deserve an F. He’d done a lot of learning this term. That didn’t seem to make a difference in his thoughts though. I will try to conference with him again this week sometime.

I find it disturbing that grades are done TO our students and not WITH our students. It’s sad that some students feel so uncomfortable about reflecting upon their own learning and sharing this information with others.

This has, of course, left me with more questions than answers.

Why do some students have such difficulty reflecting on their learning? Why is it so foreign to them?

What do I do to make this a more comfortable process? (Not doing the self-assessment is not an option.)

How long does it take for people to become more comfortable with self-assessment?

How much self-assessment are these students involved with in their other subjects?

Will the final term be any easier for them to self-assess their learning?

App-Learning Curve

16 iPads - Part 1 — Photo by Kominyetska on flickr

Having iPads at my school and having to manage them and their apps has proven to be an interesting task. If you know me at all, you would know that when I am involved in a project I usually jump in with both feet. That’s what I’ve done with the iPads.

Knowing that we wanted the iPads to be used by everyone,without exception, I downloaded over 300 apps to each of the iPads – ensuring that there was something for everyone to use. Yah, well, that didn’t work out too well. Students started to create – movies, photos, slide shows, etc… Great idea, right? Not so much. The iPads started running out of room! On the second day of use. Yah. Way to go, Tia!

It’s all a learning curve.

So, I took the iPads home again for the weekend, I examined each app on the iPads and determined what should remain and what needed to get removed. I ended up deleting over 100 apps off each of the iPads.

Favourite iPad Apps — Photo by flickr member: {Flixelpix} David

You may be wondering which apps remain on the iPads and why I chose to keep the ones I did. There are still a lot of easy to use apps for early primary students – alphabet, number, basic skills-type apps. There are some Science/Social Studies topic apps for intermediate students that remain. Most of the apps that are currently on each iPad, though, are “creation-type” apps – those apps which students can create projects with.

Some of my favourites creation-type apps include:Continue reading “App-Learning Curve”

Letter Grades and Learning

My students started their self-assessment for Term 2 today (in the 2 French classes I teach). I also managed to start the individual conferences with my students. During these conferences, we discussed the Prescribed Learning Outcomes (PLOs) for the term and how their knowledge, in relation to these PLOs, translate into a letter grade. In doing this, we also discussed the Ministry of Education descriptions for each letter grade.

After completing a good number of individual conferences, here are some of the conclusions I made today:

Letter grades ….

– squash learning

– inhibit motivation

– contribute to the disengagement of students in our schools

– put undo pressure on students

– take away from the actual learning

– contribute to the decline of relationships: between parents and child, child and teacher, and parents and teachers.

– shut our most vulnerable students down.Continue reading “Letter Grades and Learning”

Attendance and Engagement

Engagement is what makes the difference for kids!

I am the vice principal of an inner-city school. It has been determined that our school is in the top ten percent of schools in our district of 124 schools with the highest rate of absenteeism.

So, you may wonder what is being done to help increase the attendance rate of the students in our school. First of all, our school is one of the schools being targeted for the Attendance Matters program in our district. This is a research-based program with many components (far too complicated to get into here). One component is having a breakfast program at our school every morning. While this breakfast program just started in January, it has quickly become the ‘cool’ place to be in the mornings. It is a very busy time, for sure. In addition to the breakfast program, there is also an outreach component for the families who may be having some difficulty with school attendance (lates or absences). While there were some bumps in the road at the beginning as we were learning which families would benefit the greatest by the outreach, it now seems to be going quite smoothly. Providing breakfast, however, only helps a small number of our at-risk students with high absenteeism actually come to school. For some families, our child care workers have been known to actually go to the homes of these children to bring them to school themselves.

This support from the district-based and school-based staff is helpful, but there needs to be more that is going to get these kids to come to school and want to be there. I strongly believe engagement is the key to increasing the attendance of our students. To do this, students need to like what they are doing at school, and have choice in what they do. Like David Warlick discussed at our District Focus Day, students need to have a personal investment in what they are learning. Learning should also be fun and social experiences for our students.

These thoughts were reinforced for me this evening at 4:30pm. Yes, 4:30pm and some of our most at-risk students with some of the highest rates of absenteeism, were still at school and engaged in their learning. You see, we have the wonderful opportunity of being a Community School. With that title, comes some excellent opportunities for our students. For some of these programs, students are registered on a first-come first-serve basis, while for other programs, students are invited into the program. We try to be strategic when considering which students are involved in these programs (especially when we know a certain program will be extremely popular and thus, difficult to determine who participates and who does not).

Every Tuesday after school, a small group of select students, participate in the Lego-Robotics program. That is where I was today at 4:30 pm. As soon as I walked into the classroom where the program operates, I noticed the engagement, the excitement, the collaboration, and the learning of each and every student. In fact, most of them were so engaged in programming the robot they had built, they didn’t even notice I was there. There were groups of two sitting at laptops, programming their robots to move across the special carpet in a certain manner. There were other sets of partners watching their robots to see if they were successful in their programming.

This was all quite something to watch.

One if these students has probably missed close to 50% of classes this year so far. But, here she was, at 4:30pm, learning. At school. Amazing. She was excited, engaged, enthusiastic, and learning. What more could we ask?

I doubt that this student will never miss a Tuesday of school while the Lego Robotics program is operating. This demonstrates the importance of engaging our students in their learning.

Here are a few questions for you to consider . . .

What can we do to ensure our students are engaged?
How can we engage even the most at-risk students?
What, if anything, do we need to do differently with these students?
How can we ensure our teachers are engaging our students in meaningful, real ways?
Can we expect this of all teachers? If not, why not?

David Warlick – Part 2 – Checklist for Teachers

There were many wonderful ideas and thoughts presented to us by David Warlick (@dwarlick) at the Focus Day this past Friday. Instead of trying to share all that I learned in one VERY long blog post, I have decided to write a few shorter posts.

David Warlick started the day by reminding us that

“We know almost NOTHING about the future for our children. This is the first time in history that we don’t know what the future will be like for our students.”

Things are changing so rapidly today – like never before.

ipad engagement 9/365 — Photo by flickr member henriksent

With this in mind, and knowing how different our children are today (their families, their life, their experience, their knowledge, their interests, their learning styles, and their brains), we really need to think about how we are teaching our students. We need to be more reflective and design our lessons to try to ensure our students are more engaged in their learning.

David Warlick shared a checklist which he thinks would be great for teachers to use when planning their lessons. While we know that not all lessons will have these characteristics, they are important to keep in mind and strive toward.

Checklist for Lessons (for teachers)

Guided by Safely Made Mistakes – It is when we make mistakes that we truly learn. It is imperative that we create a safe environment for our students where mistakes are valued and even encouraged. We need to model and acknowledge our own mistakes as well (yes, we all make them).
Inspires Personal Investment – How can I inspire? How do we show our students that what they are doing is valuable. It is when they see the value in what they are doing that they will be inspired to continue.
Provokes Conversation – How can the learning experience require learners to exchange knowledge? Children are in constant conversations with people all day long – in person, via text messaging, via skype, via facebook, etc… The list goes on and on. How can we take our knowledge of this and use it to our advantage? How can we get our students talking with each other (and others) in a meaningful way?
Responsiveness – How can we make the learning experience talk back to our learners? Children today thrive on interaction with others. They thrive on the social experience. How can we help nurture this responsive environment in our lessons and in our classrooms?

While I agree that this checklist would be very beneficial if used by teachers when planning their lessons, I also believe that our schools would also benefit greatly if the leaders of our schools also used this checklist in their leadership.

As leaders, we need to try to ensure that our staff work in an environment where they feel safe to try new things and know that they will be supported in their successes AND their mistakes.

Elsona van Huyssteen Question — by flickr member royblumenthal

It is when our teachers and staff have a personal investment in their teaching and their student’s learning that the real difference is made. They need to be encouraged and their value needs to be acknowledged and celebrated.

Ongoing conversation is very important for our schools to improve and move forward. We are moving into unknown territory in education and learning. These are areas we need to have ongoing discussions about with our staff (and students, and parents). Without ongoing conversation about these important topics, changes will not occur.

How are we making our schools responsive? How are we encouraging discussions, questions, thoughts, and feelings? How are we engaging our staff members, our parents, and our students?

If we want our teachers to use a checklist like this in the planning of their lessons, then we should try to ensure we are using this same checklist to guide our leadership in and around our school.

What are your thoughts?

If you are a teacher, would you find this checklist helpful?

If you are a leader in education, how many of the items on this checklist do you use in your leadership? Is this checklist helpful in your leadership?

Focus Day with David Warlick – Part 1

David Warlick presented at our District Focus Day today. What a great 5 hours this was! Yes, 5 hours with David Warlick. To say that many of us, okay, probably just me, were overwhelmed at the end of David’s presentation is probably an understatement. I took 16 pages of notes. Not sure why I took so many notes, because he gives us a link to his presentation, but I guess I just like taking notes. I think it helps me process information.

With 5 hours of information and 16 pages of notes, I can’t possibly do only one blog post on our Focus Day today. It will have to be multiple blog posts (not sure how many)…

Part 1 – Gathering Information

David Warlick talked a great deal about the abundance of information we have today. He demonstrated this abundance by showing us one page on the website, Personalize Media, entitled, The Count. On this page, there is an ongoing count of all information shared, tweeted, watched, joined, downloaded and posted in all areas of social media. Take a look at the link, it is quite something!

So, how do we deal with all this information, you might wonder? Yes, it is overwhelming, but David discussed with us a few ways we could manage this information. Continue reading “Focus Day with David Warlick – Part 1”

David Warlick Preview

David Warlick (@dwarlick), author of blog 2 Cents Worth, is visiting our district tomorrow for the second time this year. In October, he talked to us during one of our Engaging the Digital Learner evening sessions. His session was entitled, “Cracking the Code of 21st Century Learners”. Indeed, something we need to do. Together. I remember how great it was having him speak with us that night, so I thought what better way to prepare seeing him again, than to read the blog post about his visit.

Off I went to search my blog for “David Warlick”. Drat! I’ve only mentioned him once, in a post BEFORE he came to our Engaging the Digital Learner session. It’s been so busy this year, I guess the blog post about that night didn’t happen. So, here I am reviewing my notes about the evening.

Better late than never, I say. 🙂Continue reading “David Warlick Preview”

Children: The Heart of the Matter

Our city is hosting the Children: The Heart of the Matter conference this weekend. Last night was the Keynote address by Dr. Gordon Neufeld. Dr. Neufeld is a developmental psychologist with 40 years of experience with children and youth and their care-givers. He has presented his ideas extensively around the world and has written a book entitled, Hold on To Your Kids. In addition, he has trained many who, in turn, practise and teach others about the developmental process and how to help our children when they have difficulties (notice I wrote WHEN, not IF). In fact, our presenter who I talked about in some earlier blogposts, Colleen Drobot (here, here, and here), was trained by Dr. Neufeld. So, when I heard that he was going to be speaking in my school district, I couldn’t wait to attend.

I enjoyed listening to Dr. Neufeld’s throughout the evening. During the first part of his keynote address, Dr. Neufeld talked about the various methods many parents, teachers, and caregivers use currently use to try to discipline children. He went on to describe why each of these methods work and why (even though they work in the short-term) they do not work longterm. He talked about how each of these methods: spanking, isolation, “cry it out” at bedtime, time-outs, etc… affect children. These methods, bit by bit, harden a child’s heart and end up distancing them from us. As a result of this distance, the children then search out their peers to fill the needs that we, as parents, should be there to provide.

It was great having this background knowledge and understanding about what our current practise is actually doing to our developing children. We were all very excited when he started talking about “Now what?” strategies.Continue reading “Children: The Heart of the Matter”

Anything is Possible

Currently, we are studying Careers with my Grade 6 Health and Career Education students. The students have done a number of activities for the last few weeks. One of these activities was completing an interest inventory in which the students went through a number of items describing skills, attitudes, likes and dislikes. Upon completion of this online inventory, the students were given a list of occupations for which they may be suited.

We talked again today about these attributes and interests and how important it is that they decide on a career which they are going to enjoy. I could tell that some of my students looked rather skeptical when I told them that they could do anything they set their mind to. If they make goals and have a dream, they can accomplish that dream. Again, some eyes of disbelief stared at me.

Then I told them a story about a “friend”. I described her as coming from an abusive home – both physical abuse and emotional abuse. Both of her parents didn’t go past a Grade 8 education. In fact, none of her entire family graduated high school. I told them that both of her parents were alcoholics (we later talked about Alcoholics Anonymous when a student brought up a treatment that his father was currently going through). I went on to tell them that this girl went to many schools – 8 school in her 12 years of public education. We talked about how her parents finally divorced after many years of fighting and abuse. Continue reading “Anything is Possible”