Shaking Old Habits...

When Claire posted the first #hackyrclass challenge on Growth Mindset, I thought, "Cool. I've done PD on this last year. This shouldn't be too hard.' However, when I tried to think of something to hack my class with, I struggled to come up with ideas. I was suffering from teacher's block. And then, my lurking thought habits raised their ugly head. 'Why don't you wait until the end of the week. Just read others posts for now. You're not ready yet to post.' I knew it was the wrong kind of thinking, but I couldn't help myself. I told myself I could wait and if I didn't carry on with the challenge it was okay. Until today.

While cooking dinner tonight, I thought I'd just check in on Twitter - see what everybody has been up to. And people have been really busy and doing really exciting things. Having read Mel's post on her first challenge, I recognised I had done a similar task with my Year 10 English class. And once I made this link, I was inspired to ignore the dirty dishes piling up on the kitchen bench, and get this post written and shared with Claire asap before I chickened out.  So thank you Mel and Claire, and all you other teachers out there who are taking on this challenge and sharing what you are doing and encouraging others like myself to just do it.

In terms of my experience with hacking my class this week, it sprang from an idea that I had while looking at readings about project based learning and ideas I took away from the GAFE Summit. I was looking at a unit plan I had recently written on holding class debates and linking it to the TV show The Vote that was screened on TV3. I had planned to assign groups a moot to debate and then I would teach them some information literacy skills and then they would go away, research and debate. While I was reading over this plan, I had a unique thought, 'Why am I assigning topics for students to research. Shouldn't they be deciding for themselves what are the important issues they would like to debate?' And then I thought, 'Why don't I have the students design a campaign to go with their debate. Students could create posters, leaflets, video presentations on their issues and share this with their classmates in the lead up to the debate.' I thought I had used up all my creative ideas for that day, when another thought struck me - 'What if I shared my unit plan using a Google doc and we co-constructed our learning intentions and how we were going to learn them.'

The next day when I was planning what I was going to do for the next couple of weeks to prepare my students for the upcoming examinations, I decided I would trial this co-constructing idea. So, yesterday I had everything ready. I had my Google doc on the overhead projector. I had my link to my hook video - a student offering study tips to other students. I had my twitter account open and ready to share the doc with my students. So when 10BA came to class, I was quite excited. I thought this was going to be fun.

At this stage, I should let you know that I don't teach in a 1:1 school. We've begun the journey, and my Year 10 class is a trial class. We've being encouraging students to bring in their own devices and yesterday, I had 4 students with their laptops. And slowly, one by on I heard the dreaded, ' Miss, the internet is not working.' So, instead of students working in groups and typing directly into the doc, I assumed the traditional role and typed students ideas myself.

Even though the technology failed on the day, the co-constructing of the learning intentions was really successful. Students were engaged and definitely taking ownership. We're not finished, we still have the how to do, but I know that this is the way to go to encourage that growth mindset and have a go attitude. (And hopefully, the wireless will be working!)

Wow, that's my longest blog post ever! (To be fair - that's not hard considering it's only my third.)