Leaders of Learning: stupendous HarvardX MOOC

My brain hurts in one of those, good-brain-hurt ways. With very little time to spare I completed the most challenging MOOC I have taken yet, Leaders of Learning with Dr. Elmore from Harvard University. I initially decided to take the class because this year I will work with mathematics teachers in the classroom as well as all Upper School teachers on integrating technology into their curriculum.

I thought I was going to get a formula to help me navigate. Instead, I learned I don't need a formula. I became a detective, an observer, a forensic expert examining evidence. And not just of myself but of my students, peers, parent body, administrators and the School (a being all of its own, both physically and culturally). I learned to listen to group dynamics, human interaction and personal psychology. I learned that learning, teaching, organization and space must be aligned with philosophy to work together.

Here are the four Modes of Learning:

After much thought (and confirmed by the MOLA results) I have realized that I am mostly Distributed Individual and Hierarchical Collective. I have been having a hard time reconciling this and will continue to think on it throughout the school year.

People learn best when they can pursue a body of knowledge at their own pace with guidance from a community. I would present an essential question to the class. Together they would brainstorm what they need to learn. They would divide and conquer so as to pick their preference for deeper understanding while then being able to learn from their peers. Teachers take on the role of resource specialist being sure to provide digital and physical resources as well as space and time to discover. There is an extended learning platform (forum, website, google docs) available to help organize the community learning. Teachers do provide structure with rubrics, have time and space available for formative assessment on an individual basis (both digital and physical) and are allowed time to reflect and plan with fellow teachers.

Here is my overall philosophy though I need to take time to live this, ingest it and fully understand how the theory applies to this school year.

• physical & digital space for collaborative study
• physical & digital space for individual collaboration with teachers or peer evaluator
• physical & digital space for research
• physical & digital space for teacher collaboration

We were asked to imagine an ideal space but I decided to use my thinking time to try and apply these ideas to my limited resources as my classroom stands at this exact moment in time.  I have two bookshelves, a few small desks and 4 large desks, laboratory stools, a rug, an interactive white board that I must be next to in order to use and one long white board. You will see two configurations below. One for larger group work and the other for smaller group work. I have tried to leave space along the white board wall so students can feel free to use it to collaborate standing up.

So as I synthesize this incredible knowledge and realize how fortunate I am to have had the opportunity to study in a MOOC (a quadrant I am quite comfortable in) with witty, thought provoking, creative pioneers in learning, I hope to continue the momentum through this school year.

The Lemon in the Bottle

While I am extremely grateful for the fact I have access to clean drinking water whenever I want and don't need to buy it in plastic bottles, I don't really like plain water, it is after all, plain. So I got a brilliant idea to put slices of lemon or lime into the bottle to flavor the tap water. Two days passed and I thought it was time to replenish the citrus.

What was I thinking?

How was I going to get it out? 

I shook. 

I stuck a chopstick in to try and coax it out. 

I used a butter knife when I realized the chopstick was too round. 

I used a steak knife when I realized the butter knife was too round. 

I hacked it into smaller pieces and eventually the bottles were lemon free.

As school starts in 1 week time, everything I read, hear, see or do becomes fodder for a lesson plan. 

You see, I have been teaching digital art, movie making, programming and robotics along side math and started to realize that the creativity that leads to breakthroughs in thinking in those subjects was not cultivated at all by me in math classes.

So last year I started encouraging creative math thinking. I'd throw out open ended problems such as 

'compute the result 3,456' and challenge the class to come up with the most creative answer.

Students worked individually then shared in small groups who picked a few examples to show to the entire class. We voted on the most creative answer. Note, I did not say the right answer. This encouraged students to take risks and try new things because improving the process was the goal, not the final answer.

My students reported at the end of the year that creative thinking helped them problem solve because they started to think of different ways to do things. Even more exciting, they learned how to be more creative from watching their peers' solutions.

This year I will continue these exercises but I will also give them other types of problems to solve to explicitly teach the power of creative thinking (like how to get a piece of lemon out of a bottle).

Back to the lemon in the bottle. I brainstormed a few other possibilities: letting the fruit dry out or trying to dissolve it.  Any other ideas?