Student Driven Learning

The most satisfying types of lessons, for me, are those where your planning is completely waylaid by how your children choose to learn!

I will use two examples from this year's teaching to illustrate this statement:

1. The case of the 'Prepared Opinions'

My current Seventh Graders were a lovely bunch of nervous twitches and sweaty palms when it came to public speaking! More prepared speeches were completed during breaks and after school (without the intimidating peer-based audience present) than I liked.

One of their assignments for assess

ment of their verbal skills was to provide an opinion on an emotionally loaded topic.

In my efforts to 'prepare' them for the shock of presenting an 'unprepared' response, I gave them some time to think and some guidelines as to how to formulate an opinion.

This backfired beautifully as you can imagine - they deftly prepared their responses in advance! (Yes - after almost 19 years of teaching I should have seen this coming...and yes I was too caught up in their history of abject terror at speaking that I missed that OBVIOUS little fact completely!)

So - after calling them out on their preparedness (which I so aptly facilitated) they became quite upset with their teacher. And rightly so.

I did not trust them to provide their opinions and effectively cut off their 'opinion-shaping-hands' so to speak.

I then called an all stop - we were going to throw things around! I looked at my most upset pupil and challenged him to respond to how he felt - he had to provide an opinion on having his prepared opinion rejected.

It was beautiful!

Here was a child, terrified of speaking in front of an audience; who was used to relying on weeks of preparation and rote learning - flying into a passionate treatise on how he felt about his situation! He kept on topic, provided emotive feedback while keeping in mind that he was speaking in public and had to adhere to general mores and values pertaining to speaking in front of an audience.

He not only met the requirements set out in the rubric - he lead a revolution!

The whole class decided that I had to provide topics on the spot and they would respond to them on -the spot, no preparation allowed.

I celebrated their growth and boosted levels of confidence for weeks!

Teacher-Lesson learnt?

Planning is good.
Building in support structures is great.
Just don't over-do it!
Do not become the helicopter teacher!
Trust their will to try!
Trust their courage to hold fast!

2. Choosing a Format to learn from

At the end of a topic, I enjoy getting feedback from my classes to improve on my next efforts in guiding them through their journey in the Science Lab!

On one such occasion, they started talking about how much fun it would be if they could teach the Sixth Graders.

The conversation went on for a while and I observed carefully how my class was taking control of their own learning once again!

Here they were -all thirty of them- engaged in discussing the best ways in which to get a topic across to a younger grade. Referencing their knowledge of dealing with younger grades as siblings and as leaders and using their own historical interactions as ex-Sixth Graders.

Once they had reached consensus, they presented the following suggestion:

They would like to summarise their work on plants by creating interactive posters/games in order to present their knowledge and to make the content accessible for younger grades.

I loved it!

Here they were not only cognisant of WHAT they had to learn but also of HOW to know and understand their content well enough to be able to create a means of explaining it clearly to a younger audience.

All of this while including their own brand of scaffolding by allowing for choices in format!

The level of skills sets they added to their content-learning was off the charts. They were researchers, content creators, designers, project managers and presenters.