Learning Stories - in the beginning...

Last week I started talking about Learning Stories with the children in my home group/studio. The idea for using Learning Stories with our students came from discussions with staff from Discovery 1 school, NZ.

Here is the summary of what we discussed: I posted this in a school based blog as we were talking and the students told me what to type:

Today we had a chat about Learning Stories.

We thought about these questions:

What is a learning story?

What does it need?

How could we do it?

This is what we thought:

A learning story is a story about learning (like a recount).

It is similar to a journal.

It's a record of work that you are proud of.

It doesn't have to sound like a recount - it could be written like a narrative.

It's a description of a person's learning.

A learning story needs to have

Describe what you've learned about.

It needs to be a decent length.

A picture/example of the work

You can include a plan if it's a big model

It needs to tell us what skills you learned along the way

It needs to have good writing.

It needs to have information.

It may contain pictures and diagrams.

A comment from another person, confirming that they saw your work and what you learned.

It could be done with a friend or a group.

We are going to experiment with learning stories in the following ways:

Blogs

Written in a book

Movies (Video logs)

Comic strip (Comic life)

Use the puppet apps on our ipads

Digital (keynote/pages)

Podcasts

Drawing

Typed in Pages/keynote

We actually set up profiles on blogger today - tomorrow I'll help the children set appropriate privacy settings and they will start publishing online! My idea is that Learning Advisors can comment, focusing on naming outcomes covered/proven in their learning story and a suggestion about where to go to next. Parents will be able to read them and comment on them at their convenience from work and home.

Other Learning Advisors and students will be able to read everyone's learning stories and leave comments too.

Possibilities are endless and the children are motivated as they love the idea of publishing online to a live audience and understand why they need to edit and check their work before publishing. It will be interesting to see how they develop their stories and experiment with different ways of presenting them. I'm sure that in time they won't all choose to publish online but look for other ways to share their learning. I wonder what they'll come up with??

Student Selected Learning - Getting kids started.

Where I work the vision is that children will get to a point where they can plan their learning and challenge the boundaries of what they know and what they think they can do. There's a lot of research out there that shows students learn more effectively when they are given opportunities to make choices as they become more involved in the learning process instead of just waiting for an adult to decide what it is pertinent for them to know and what they "should" be able to do.

Think back to when you were a kid - was there any way you could possibly have predicted what today's world would be like? We live in an age where information is growing at such exponential rates that we can hardly keep up, yet todays kids, when given access to tools to process this information, such as hand held technologies, lap it up and adapt to new tools and processes quickly.

Now that we live in an "instant" world, how can we mere humans keep children interested in learning? Once again, by giving them a say in how and what they learn and allowing them to explore "new" technologies.

Over the past few weeks we were visited by Daniel Birch who is the Principal of Discovery1 school in Christchurch NZ. His school has been practising student directed learning for a decade now and his reminder and challenge to us was to give our students greater control over their learning and encourage them to take what is presented to them, play with it, explore it, then reinvent it to make it meaningful to them.

How in the world can you do that? I hear you saying - the same thing I said to myself just a few years ago, take a risk and start with asking the children what they are interested in learning about.

At my school we hold learning conferences with students regularly. We have conferencing prior to our planning sessions and instead of the name teacher, we use the term Learning Advisor. The idea is that conferencing along with our observation of the students informs workshops and targeted teaching in the following weeks. Children are assigned to a home group, but may work with Learning Advisors who are assigned to a different home group.  Staff strengths are utilised more effectively and children are exposed to a variety of experiences and approaches to learning.

When we hold these Learning Conferences sometimes they are with individual students and other times they are with a group of students who have a common interest in studying a particular topic. We call them Passion Project Groups. Sometimes Learning Conferences may occur with more than one Learning Advisor.

When children come to a conference we use a "Spark Sheet" to help them articulate their learning and determine where they would like to go to next. At the moment we are experimenting with ways to record what is agreed upon at each conference, goal setting and the reasoning behind it.

All you need is to ask "What would you like to learn about? Why?" and the students will take it on board, as long as they are confident that they will be listened to and their ideas taken into account. It's really important to follow through on what students say and not be tokenistic. I have realised that when students know that they will actually "get to do it" their ideas become more creative and they are more deeply involved with and aware of their learning.

I urge you teachers out there to try it out - yes it can be scary- but have faith, all kids love to learn when they are given a chance to take it and make it their own!

My school's Learning Process (FYI only)

My draft of a Learning Conference record sheet (FYI as well)

DANCE!

It was with great anticipation that I opened the mystery envelope that arrived in my mailbox during the last week of Christmas holidays - each year the principal chooses a new theme that is kept top secret. What would it be? Last year was SPLASH! The year before that was BLOOM!

So what would it be this year??

A glittering (and a tad misshapen) disco ball answered my question - DANCE!

Ok Liz, I hear you thinking, how are you supposed to get a whole years worth of work and cover all the VELS/National Curriculum with only one theme - not to mention something like DANCE????

Therein lies the challenge. Dance isn't about the art and culture side of things, it's about taking risks, feeling safe and confident and trying new things. It's about dancing on the inside as well as the outside and having faith in yourself.

"Dance like nobody is watching"

So, what's happened so far?

The scene has been set - there are disco balls hanging from the ceilings and we started the year with nothing on the walls to prompt the children to be inspired to fill them.

There was so much excitement on the first day...

"The light is reflecting from the disco ball!"
"Why is it sparkly?"
"Can I teach you a dance I know?"
"I know! Let's find out about different dances and where they come from!"
"Could we do a production?"
"Can my mum come and teach us a dance?"
"Can my sister come and do Zumba with us?"
"Can we label a map and put up flags from all the countries we find dances from?"

Already the children have begun looking at traditional dances from their backgrounds and their history. They are finding flags and using atlases. They are figuring out how old dances are and where they came from. They are eager to go home and find experts in their family to question about history and culture.

Some Year Four students have found a suitable wall space and are creating a display to share everyone's research. After a few days I already have samples of factual texts they have all written and an idea of their ability to locate and interpret information. Sharing discoveries with each other has given me opportunities to observe their note taking, speaking and listening skills. I can already see who works well in a group, who can take themselves further and who is organised.

As a Village we have looked at the story "Giraffes Can't Dance" and the hymn "Lord of the Dance". Some children have already made links between totems, teepees and this years theme. The children have organised and chosen names related to Dance for each home group and some have designed logos - there are even some children in another home group who are writing theme songs to go with their home group name.

Can you believe how much we have managed to achieve in 4 days of school? Where will we dance to next?

I couldn't resist finishing up this post with a clip from one of my favourite movies - "Napoleon Dynamite". It encapsulates what it means to dance at my school - Napoleon was not a popular kid at high school, yet he took a risk and danced like nobody was watching to support his friend Pedro in his campaign for school president. He risked being ridiculed but danced his heart out anyway, not letting himself be stymied by what others thought of him. Go Napoleon and Vote for Pedro!