reflectiveteacher – Honor Learners

Who we are…as learners

We started our year with our IB PYP unit of inquiry, Who we are. The big idea behind the unit was to support our Kindergarteners to begin to understand who they are as learners to provide a strong foundation for them to take ownership of their learning.

Our provocation was based on the Pixar short film, Piper. You can read more about this in my previous post here. Next, we read Giraffes Can’t Dance by Giles Andrae. As learners made connections between Gerald and Piper, they began to discover what good learners do and as a result, our learners began to understand how having a growth mindset supports learning.

As I observe and interact in the playground, I hear our kindergarten learners talk about how they are challenging themselves to climb to the highest point, or get across the monkey bars. I see them failing and trying again. I see them encouraging each other. I see them learning.

The next part of our unit was less successful. The plan was to learn about our learners’ passions and use this knowledge to inform guided inquiries. I think this fell apart for many reasons. First, we were (and still are) trying to figure out how we function together in our learning hub. We were trying to establish routines and we should have taken more time to do this with learner input, rather than making decisions for them.

Secondly, I think we were either too structured and should have had a more organic approach, or that we were not structured enough and we were trying to run before we could walk. To add to that, I think we were trying to cover too many concepts and skills, thus highlighting the need to develop our understanding of concept based inquiry.

Going forward, my role is not to control every aspect of learning. My role is to support learners as they lead their own learning. I can do this by helping them to develop an understanding of the process of learning as we learn, and I feel like documentation and making learning visible is going to be a key part of this process.

We have had many successes in our Kindergarten learning space, and while it is great to celebrate the great moments, I feel it is also important to share the challenges and fail forward, because this is where our own learning happens. I shall continue to ‘risk and reflect’ to honor our learners.

Learner agency through Teacher Agency

Student agency has been a buzzword with educators for the last few years. As I look through definitions of the term I have found some commonalities:

giving students voice
giving students choice
making learning relevant
students having an active role in learning
student have ownership

When I look at that last term of ownership, my focus shifts to learning. Therefore, I make a conscious effort to use the terms learner, not student and learning not student work.

Over the past two days I have had the amazing opportunity to learn about learner agency with Taryn BondClegg (@makingoodhumans), and have had many opportunities to reflect on my practice as an educator. She structured our workshop learn about agency, by giving us agency. She has also ensured that she gives us the opportunity to unpick the why? how? and what? Taryn began by giving us time to connect and then self assess our understanding. We also generated our own success criteria for the session, because as long as we understood the why, the choice of how and what we learnt was ours. As we were generating our success criteria for the two day, we were asked to share them as we were reminded that:

Learners should have accountability to themselves and their learning community.

After we developed our success criteria, we unpicked the why, how and what of documentation. Again, as long as we were clear on the purpose of documentation, the how and what we documented was our choice.

Before we chose our learning for the day we were asked to consider the following questions:

What do you need to learn about?

How best do you learn?

How much time do you need?

When do you need to take breaks?

How can you learn from one another?

This process supported us to reflect upon ourselves as learners, so that we could control and direct our own learning using the CAR model – choose, act, and reflect. Taryn has blogged about this process and you can find this post here.

Over the two days, I was reminded what it was like to be a learner. This was not a PD session where the vibe was ‘do as I say, not as I model.’ I felt engaged and energized throughout the learning. There were some issues I grappled with, and the conclusions I came to were my own, not answers given to me. I had to push myself outside of my comfort zone and my new learning was earned. I will say that as energized as I was, it was also intense and was very grateful that we did not have homework at the end of the day!

So, what were my big takeaways from learning about learner agency through agency?

The first idea isn’t new, it was just a great reminder. We can support our learners by building positive relationships with our families within our learning community by keeping them informed!

Agency will look different in each circumstance. We need to do what works for us in our situation. Learner agency builds up over time, so be wary of transplanting what works at another school. By all means, learn from others, share ideas and adapt them to make them workable for you.

The foundation for learner agency is learners developing self awareness of who they are as learners. Therefore, taking time to connect each morning and reflect at the end of each day is vital to supporting learners to move from one place to the next on their continuum of learning.

We can give learners agency through a cycle of risk and reflect. We should continually ask ourselves what we can do to give our learners voice, choice and ownership of their learning.

And finally, it is okay to start small, and so I did.

The next day was International Day at our school. We were exploring the theme of peace and our team had planned to have learners do the same learning activity. Our plans changed. We began by exploring why we need peace. Then we generated ideas of how we could be peaceful. Finally, we developed a list of ideas to show what we could do to show our understanding of peace. Some learners chose to play with peaceful intentions, other chose to build collaboratively.

Some chose to paint.

Others chose to write.

And some chose to use the app Draw and Tell to explain their thinking.

Before I finish today, I would like to thank Taryn, our administration and all the experts who took their time to share with us.

Finally, I ask you, what will you do to honor your learners to give them voice, choice and ownership over their learning?

Saying yes…

August has arrived and we are gearing up for a new academic year. With it comes a twinge of anxiety and a whole lot of excitement. After all, as educators we never know how far our impact will carry.

At this moment, my mind is buzzing with ideas, to do lists, organizing a combined learning space, memories of previous academic years, and it is just a tad overwhelming. Yet, when I take a moment, and think about those memories, I am reminded of how much I learnt last year.

Being a part of a collaborative learning community led to growth and learning I could not have imagined at this time last year. We began the year in two separate classroom as teachers who shared ideas, and ended it as a Kindergarten learning community, that knocked down walls, both literally and figuratively!

So, how did it all begin? It is probably a combination of many things, but the one that keeps coming back to me is our willingness to say ‘yes.’

Saying yes…

Saying yes has not meant that I, or our collaborative learning community did everything that was proposed.

Saying yes is more about being open to new possibilities for the benefit of all learners.

Saying yes is about considering what we can achieve together.

Saying yes is about failure and learning.

Saying yes is about learners’ agency: both educators and students.

In the past year I have said yes to:

working as part of a collaborative team that was able to do more together than I could achieve on my own;

deepening my understanding of how young learners develop number sense;

becoming a Seesaw Ambassador;
writing a blog;
tweeting;

leading PD for my colleagues;

and most importantly of all, our learning community said yes to our young learners.

Our learners discovered their voice and felt valued;
They learnt how to plan and manage their own learning;
They learnt about listening and collaboration;
They learnt creative problem solving skills;
They learnt about failure, perseverance, resilience and grit.

And I’m sure the list could go on. I am reminded of this quote by Mother Teresa that came across my Twitter feed:

Being open to new experiences and learning will have an impact!

Will YOU say yes today?