Making school a Formative Experience

Peardeck is much more interesting for the kids to engage with instead of writing answers in their notebooks. I have the free version so it does not store answers that I can formally check, but I definitely get a strong sense when I display the answers after the allotted time. This also shows other students where they are going right/wrong.

I teach 4th grade and students are still getting comfortable with using a laptop as a learning tool. Typing is still difficult and I work with a high population of ELLs, which means writing a simple sentence can also be challenging. I think more multiple question options would help me get through content faster. They all want to do well with their answers, so it ends up taking longer than a quick assessment. The students asked for more time for each question. I applaud them for wanting to do well though. The peardeck just shows how difficult reading comprehension can be for students. But I think constantly getting feedback in a way where they know they will not be formally graded is very helpful.

::The Third Teacher::

Learning how space was the third teacher was a completely new concept. It also took me a while to get on board. I have always believed that the humans in the room (teachers and students) are the pulse that keeps the learning going. Without the brilliance of my students and their hard work in collaboration my job would be near impossible. Thinking that space was just as important as them left me making thinking, "Are you sure about that?" 

Keeping an open mind, I tried to think about what I was currently doing in my classroom that is the third teacher. More toward the end of the year I let some groups of students to collaborate on the whiteboards to get ideas out there together. It was extremely beneficial for them. I noticed that for a lot of groups having the stuff taken away from physically blocking them led to more focus on the work and less focus on the book/desk/laptop/notebooks. I also had very minimal shelving that did allow them to act as standing desks and lots of students absolutely loved this too. After reflecting on this I started to understand how these certain environments allowed for certain learning interactions to happen more easily. 

The concept of the 3rd teacher is that instead of a teacher such as myself, who allows very little interaction with these learning spaces, how about I stretch it out to a larger scale to make more widely used in my classroom. Instead of only certain groups using whiteboards to brainstorm, what if I allowed this for every group? Same with standing room desk options. 

One thing that I will start immediately in my classroom is the concept of over decreasing the visual stimuli. I do a pretty good job of never using store bought posters and displaying student work and anchor charts of all of our ideas. After this course I will take more careful consideration of the color choices and the busyness of the room. I am truly inspired by the design spaces that I saw throughout this course.