Cycle 2 Reflection
Cycle 2 has in many ways shifted the way that I think about teaching and learning. I find myself re-thinking the ways that I teach, in a good way, but I also know I’m not quite there yet. I went into Differentiation looking for strategies on how to create more access to students for certain kinds of content. I came away with it radically changing how I teach my class. The best way to explain this is visually.
I started treating teaching more like project management. I was still teaching content and skills, but often in smaller groups and in various ways. I introduced students to Trello, a software management website that I used to use at my old job, managing a tutoring company. Students were working on small projects, and they all learned how to manage their own project work and schedule with Trello. Here are some of what their Trello pages looked like.
Student engagement went up, productivity went up, and what felt like real productive struggle through team work went up. It felt a bit more chaotic, but in a kind of chaotic way that I like. The research lesson that I put my work and effort into was helpful, and is a strategy I’ll use for some reading content, but what it really allowed to me do was try this new form of teaching. Students started to take charge of their education in a a new way, and started to care about the quality of their work in a way I’d never seen.
The projects all came from the book “Wicked Arts Assignments” and provided students to engage in creative opportunities, collaboration, and gave them voice and choice in a way they hadn’t experienced before. When many of the groups struggled, I was able to check in with them, help redirect, or sometimes I just sat back and let them figure it out on their own. I was able to teach 26 individual students in this, whereas before I felt like I was teaching a class of 26 students. I got to know students better and through their authentic work. Below is some of their final work from the projects.