EduNut: pedagogy

Showing posts with label pedagogy. Show all posts

Friday, March 1, 2019

Infographic: Anatomy of the PBL Process

I created this PBL infographic using Piktochart to help students and their parents visualize the anatomy of a project at my school. Some have requested if they could use it, so here it is- have at it. Modify as needed.

Thursday, September 6, 2018

Google Apps for Ed: Resources to Inspire!

My district finally got on board the Google for Ed train. Since my school has been using the apps for the past six years (as a PBL magnet), they invited me to show ed tech leaders from across the city how the apps can be used in practical and transformative ways.

The goal was to inspire, but I didn't want to overwhelm first-timers, so I made sure there were plenty of templates they could copy and use right away, and I also built a resource site to further support their exploration of each of the tools (you'll see a link to it in the last slide).

If you have any questions, or you hit a wall after clicking on an enticing link to a resource, feel free to comment and I'll make sure you've got access. Hope this helps! I enjoyed developing it!

Monday, August 20, 2018

NOTES Thinking Through Project-based Learning: Guiding Deeper Inquiry

I've been teaching Humanities at a wall-to-wall PBL magnet for the past six years, so you'd think I'd be well-versed in designing PBL experiences for my students. While I've had lots of practice (mostly hits, but plenty of misses, too), I figured it was time to get back to the basics and see if I could glean new insights into some of the practices that have felt a little stale for the past couple of years.

Here are my notes on the book authored by Jane Krauss and Suzie Boos of the Buck Institute (PBL flagship). I'm posting them here for my colleagues, but I also thought they could be useful to anyone who's thinking about purchasing the book, as well. It can be purchased HERE.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Chapter 1: The Whys and Hows of PBL

PBL definition:

Students gain important knowledge, skills, and dispositions by investigating open-ended questions to “make meaning” that they transmit in purposeful ways.

The goal is to help students develop into knowledgeable, autonomous, and life-long learners.

High-quality PBL involves:

setting conditions in which students are compelled to inquire
real-world concerns
open-ended questions leading toward essential understandings
personalization: student choice around content, process, and/or product
potentially life-changing relevance: students care about the content enough to give quality thinking toward complex challenges
students learn together and from one another
learning is meaningful to people beyond school
students are personally affected by what they learn and so they're more likely to remember it
technology is used to investigate and construct new meaning and reach beyond the classroom to a community of learners (not simply to create flashy products)

PBL students:

Chapter 2: The Inquiring Human Animal

Inquiry

The personal path of questioning, investigating, and reasoning that takes one from not knowing to knowing.

Looking for patterns, analyzing systems, scrutinizing processes, exploring relationships, and solving problems.

Research

Mind, Brain, and Education Science (2010), Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa synthesizes more than 4,500 studies to offer five key concepts:

Cultivate Wonder

In PBL, curiosity

Use Novelty Deliberately

Executive Function

Self-directed learning develops executive function (cognitive processes that help regulate actions). Patterns of behavior become more established, and neural pathways in the brain actually become “hard wired” more so during the middle/high school years than any other time.

Relevance

Stress vs. Struggle

Liberating Constraints

Seek the right balance b/w stress and struggle by designing for "optimal ambiguity" (Davis, Sumara, & Luce-Kapler, 2007)

Analogy: Soccer game...within the rules, there's still room for brilliance. Without rules, a free for all.

Brain-based PBL Strategies

Chapter 3: Making the World Safe for Thinking

Ideas:

Thinking

“Simply placing our students in problem-solving situations is not enough for these [thinking skills] to develop. Skillful critical thinking has to be explicitly taught” (Developing a Thinking Curriculum Coote, n.d., p. 6).

Fertile Questions

Six characteristics:

Chapter 4: The Thinking-Out-Loud-and-in-View Classroom

Foster a Culture of Curiosity

Help Students Build a Thinking Toolkit

S = Substitute

C = Combine

A = Adapt

M = Modify

P = Put to other uses

E = Eliminate or minimize

R = Rearrange or Reverse

- Giving Feedback

C = Clarifying questions

L = Like

A= Advice

M= Meet in the middle (discuss)

Teacher as "Meddler in the Middle"

Chapter 5: Designing Rich Learning Experiences

Step 1: Identify Project-Worthy Concepts

What important and enduring concepts are fundamental to the subjects I teach?

ID 4 or 5 big concepts.

Step 2: Explore Their Significance and Relevance

Why do these topics or concepts matter?

What should students remember about this topic in 5 years? For a lifetime?

In what ways are they important and enduring?

What is their relevance in different people's lives? In different parts of the world?

Step 3: Find Real-Life Contexts

Who engages in these topics?

Who are the people for whom these topics are central to their work? 5-7 professions

What are the interdisciplinary connections?

Step 4: Engage Critical Thinking

What might you ask of students? How might you push past rote learning into investigation, analysis, and synthesis?

How can you engage critical thinking in a project by asking students to:

Step 5: Write a Project Sketch

An overview and what students will learn

Step 6: Plan the Setup

A title, entry event, and driving question

Chapter 7: Language Arts

Individual writing tasks for lit skills in addition to team products (86)

Writer's Workshop model is an ideal fit for the writing that happens during projects in any subject.

Chapter 8: Social Studies

National Council for the SS: (90)

Social studies is the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence.

NCSS recommends aligning curriculum and instruction with what kids care about—“unifying motifs” that represent developments in children’s social and emotional intelligence. The motifs include:

• Concern with self: development of self-esteem and a sense of identity

• Concern for right and wrong: development of ethics

• Concern for others: development of group- and other-centeredness

• Concern for the world: development of a global perspective

Chapter 11: The Project Spiral

When projects "go big" and generate local buzz, or they have a greater impact than expected.

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

The Nuts and Bolts of Preparing Students for NaNoWriMo

This is part of a SERIES of posts about engaging my students in National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. NaNoWriMo, a challenge to complete the manuscript for a novel in the course of a month.

NaNoWriMo's winding down and I've been continuously impressed by my sophomore students' level of energy and excitement around completing their first-ever novels. My last post in this series will include their voices and their individual experiences-- the positive ones as well as a few that may serve as cautionary tales (if you're considering trying this yourself). In the meantime, these next few posts will focus primarily on the instructional planning and the supports that were in place before, during, and after November's write-fest. This one details the prep leading up to the first day of NaNoWriMo. Enjoy!
LATE SEPTEMBER PREP

Phase 1: The Hero's Journey

Students were introduced to Joseph Campbell's hero's journey as well as some Jungian archetypes common to ancient and modern narratives.

Each step and archetype of the hero's journey was explored through multiple forms of storytelling such as mythology, literature, poetry, song lyrics, and films.

Students were challenged to reflect on their own lives relative to the hero's journey and the archetypes that impact them as hero's of their own story.

OCTOBER PREP

Phase 2: Genre Study

Using a Google Form, students generated a list of their favorite genres of fiction. They then voted on the one genre from the list that they'd use for a genre study and how the hero's journey unfolds in the narrative. This year's choice: fantasy fiction.

Individuals proposed novels to use for the study by creating "billboards" and adding them to a class slideshow so that students could vote for the top six choices.

Book clubs (literature circles) were formed for each of the 6 novels. Each book club determined their own reading schedule, developed a contract conveying group norms, members' roles, and expectations, and met at least once a week to discuss the novel. Students were given class time to read (individually or in groups, depending on the group's agreed-upon norms) and annotate with the purpose of identifying stages of the hero's journey and whatever archetypes they could find.

Book clubs were tasked with completing a slideshow by the end of the three weeks that detailed the fantasy novel's hero journey and archetypes. This essentially created the conditions that made group discussion more purposeful in that members had to agree to which hero stages they would include in their group's presentation.

Phase 3: Hello NaNoWriMo!

As groups engaged in their genre study, they were given a number of writing prompts for creating their own hero journeys. These "zero drafts" were shared on their blogs and during "open mic" sessions at the end of class, which-- in turn, fostered a supportive culture for sharing and providing constructive feedback on ideas.

WriteAbout.com is where our blogs live

NaNoWriMo was introduced by sharing fun videos about the annual event created by experienced NaNoWriMo participants.

A parent letter was sent home introducing NaNoWriMo with a request for prize donations (for word wards, goal achieving, etc)

Students engaged in lessons and activities provided by the NaNoWriMo site along with a free student booklet. I used most of it but modified the lessons so that they were on Google docs rather than an edit-able pdf file.

As the Book Clubs went into their final stretch (mid-October), students chose one of their stories (from their collection of zero drafts) to further develop by creating character profiles and by experimenting with different ways of organizing plot outlines.

LAST WEEK OF OCTOBER

Students were introduced to the NaNoWriMo site as well as the Young Writer's Program site (geared specifically toward teens).

Students had a couple of practice writing sprints to guage how many words they could type within the span of an hour, and-- using those numbers, determined which writing goal they would choose: 15K, 30K, or 50K, which was then broken down into daily word count goals (500, 1000, or 1667).

Calendars were distributed to help time manage and keep track of word counts and goals.

Contracts were signed (the contracts NaNoWriMo provides in the student booklets are both funny and reassuring to first-timers).

In the final days of October, having already developed the concept and characters for their novels, students created book covers that included graphics and an enticing blurb for the back cover. These were posted on a discussion board to generate excitement and to provide positive feedback as a writing community.

Example Book Cover

On the last day of October, students were encouraged to bring a writing totem to school for the start of NaNoWriMo (totem = good luck charm). Some of the totems were profoundly personal. Nicole chose to write the story of her grandfather's army days and so her totem was his actual dog tag (more stories like that to come...)

Students' totems from both classes

I hope this has served to help rather than overwhelm. As soon as I have some time freed up, I'll add links to most of what's listed above. In the meantime, if there's any particular detail you'd like me to elaborate on in a separate post or a resource you'd like to have access to, please let me know in the comments.

Next: Instructional Supports Provided to Students during NaNoWriMo

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Diving Into NaNoWriMo as a First-Timer (Whilst Holding a Hundred Young Writers' Hands)

This is part of a SERIES of posts about engaging my students in National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. NaNoWriMo, a challenge to complete the manuscript for a novel in the course of a month.

Happy NaNoWriMo Eve!

Tomorrow marks the first day of the 18th annual National Novel Writing Month, a "fun, seat-of-your-pants approach" to writing the complete first draft of a novel in 30 days.

I've only seventeen regrets in my life and they are that I've missed NaNoWriMo for the past seventeen years. I'm done procrastinating and, b'gosh, I'm going to write that novel that's been knockin' on my belly's door, the one that costs me hundreds of dollars each year in therapy co-pays for ignoring it! Time to clear up this creative constipation. This is happening.

I'll be a newbie-- not just as a novel writer, but as a teacher who's holding the hands of her entire sophomore Humanities class as we all take the proverbial leap en masse.

Oh, geesh...I'm realizing the full weight of this endeavor as I write. Goddess help me. Rubber duckie totem, where art thou?

Ah, there you are. I'll be okay now. So I'm a little petrified. That's normal, right? It's probably good that, whilst modeling the writing process, I'm able to also model the fear and trepidation that comes with setting a daily word count of 1667 and committing to a total of fifty thousand words [rubs duckie].

I'm thinking if I crank out a few short blogs each week to share my experience, it might be useful to other first-time educators who are going in as blind as I am.

It won't be a perfect novel. It won't be even the least bit pretty. Hell, it might not even get done, but if I'm asking a hundred teens to try it and I'm cheering them on and lighting all kinds of fires beneath their feet, the least I could do is jump in there with them so we can all suffer, bleed, laugh, and celebrate together.

It's the write thing to do.

Part II: The Nuts and Bolts of Preparing My Students for NaNoWriMo

Monday, February 15, 2016

Differentiate with Digital Tools: Five Free Web Apps

This is a presentation I gave for my district-sponsored Digital Learning Conference.

I love sharing at this local conference each year because it's teachers teaching teachers! If it helps others, all the better.

The link to the slideshow is HERE should you want to comment or ask questions.

Sunday, April 5, 2015

Letter Grades Inhibit Deep Learning. They Must Die.

In the world of school, grades are supposed to represent where a student is at in relation to mastery. A = spot on, F = far from it. Well, that's the idea, anyway, but I have a hunch that's kind of rare.

My guess is that it's more likely grades are used as leverage, lorded over students as a form of academic "justice"; rewards go to the high-achievers while punishment is doled out to the offending slackers who didn't get the work done.

When it comes to what we know about the nature of learning, though, letter grades fall short in fostering, within our students, a willingness to think about, discuss, and reflect on their learning. For the most part, there's no solid sense of the why behind them or what was learned as a result, so it's no wonder that high-achievers are hyper-focused on them and struggling students avoid them (and the loser-tag they exact).

Learning is a process that needs choice, voice, reflection, timely feedback, and opportunities to revise in order to grow, but points awarded for simply completing tasks (we'll call them giddyap grades) convey the opposite. They're more about getting things done so they likely represent a student's level of agency rather than where they're at with the content. The problem is that no one would really know for sure, including the student, who sees an A, and thinks "success!" and sees the F and thinks, "Oh dang, no cell phone for a month."

Dan Pink makes the case that the carrot and stick approach motivates people when the work is menial, rote, or mechanical. In other words, if the task doesn't require any specialized knowledge or ability, rewards and punishments increase motivation and productivity. But when the tasks require even the most rudimentary cognitive challenge, increased incentives have the opposite effect.

Pink's target audience is the tech industry, so he pushes to dispel the myth that innovation is driven by monetary incentives. Money is a motivator in that if you don't pay people enough, it's likely they won't be motivated. However, the best use of money as a motivator, the studies suggest, is to take the issue of it completely off the table. Pay people enough so that the monetary reward is not perceived as conditional. When this happens, three factors emerge that seem to drive people toward increased productivity, innovation, and satisfaction around the work they do. Those factors are autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Autonomy = the desire to direct our own lives
Mastery = the urge to get better at something that matters
Purpose = the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

Now, take money out of the equation and replace it with grades. Notice how Pink's definition for mastery jives with growth mindset, where all endeavors are viewed as practice, and where failure is merely an opportunity to learn rather than grounds for punishment. If I can make mastery the focus of the work we do, but do so within contexts that are meaningful to my students (purpose), where they set their own goals, work at their own pace, and assess their own gains (autonomy), then yes, I can make that almighty letter grade work to my advantage by challenging students to give themselves the grades they deserve. They'd use their body of work, feedback, and their reflections to make that case. That would be the only time grades would come into play and it would be on their terms.

My gut and my experiences tell me this is possible and it's the right direction for me to move toward. It's already being pioneered by teachers who are generously sharing their journeys and inspiring others to do so (see Starr Sackstein here and Mark Barnes here).

I don't call this blog EduNut for nothin'. I'm obsessed with teaching, and so a lot of my personal time is spent striving to build on what I know. It's a weekend morning and I'm wrestling with pedagogy on the pages of my blog, obviously driven by a sense of purpose and a desire for mastery of my craft. Pink's ideas resonate with me because I can easily see how they play out in my own learning. I want to replicate that for students.

I'll be transitioning to as close as I can come to a "no grades" assessment plan for next year. I still have to ultimately place letters into that grade book at the end of each term, but at least I can do so in a way that honors my students' work and progress more authentically than not.

Beginning in late-May, I'll be blogging and vlogging to make it all transparent as best I can (Sackstein-style). I'm excited and nervous at the same time. In the past, those two feelings together have always preceded the crossing of a meaningful threshold in my life or career. 'Tis a good sign.

Friday, April 3, 2015

I Pseudo-Stalked My Students and Found Some Things

Each year, I've tried to impress upon my advisees that they must stay mindful of the digital footprint they've made. Instead of the usual talking to, this year I decided to make it "for reals" and stalk their social media profiles to collect potentially-incriminating items they never thought were public, where prospective employers might find them, should they do a simple search.

The idea was to spend no more than five minutes searching for each of my twelve advisees, so that when it was time to show them (privately) what I'd found, I could say, "And this (points to compromising picture) was only after five minutes of searching!"

Don't worry, it never got to that point.

I set out to search and I braced myself for shock and/or alarm (we're talking members of the teen species here). It was very easy to find them, especially the ones with unusual names, but finding potentially embarrassing stuff was a whole other matter. There wasn't anything to find except the usual and mostly-innocuous shared stuff of adolescent lives.

But as I was searching those first few minutes, reading through bad jokes, glancing quickly through pics of friends making faces, getting distracted by cute sleepy kitten videos, clicking through all those awkward selfies, something started happening.

I started seeing my students-- seeing them in ways they wanted others to see them, I could see hints of insecurities, their frustrations, their fears, and their aspirations. It was both humbling and deeply moving at the same time.

Jason, a student new to our school, is quite the artist with a gift for portraiture. He seems able to hone in on whatever it is about his subjects that reveal their humanity. I wanted to see more of his art than what was on his Tumblr.

Then there's Mona, whose anti-authority persona at school is tough as nails, and yet her Facebook stream was chock full of Buddhist quotes and messages of inspiration. "How you make others feel says a lot about yourself," says one of 'em. Indeed, Ms. Mona, indeed.

I got lost in Lena's joyous collection of photos, including that of her recent quinceañera (a rite of passage for Latina girls). She looks incredibly happy in each picture, surrounded by loving friends and family. There is so much pride in her heritage, and in all the pictures of celebrations, she's surrounded by children looking up at her, adoringly. She's shared with me how incredibly anxious she is about her struggles with reading and writing and getting into college. Now I can see a little more of that story; how she may be taking her family with her on that dream, and how she may fear letting them down should she fail. Suddenly, the role I play in her life takes on more weight and possibility. I can help her. I will.

One hundred students a year; that's one hundred beautifully-flawed, sad, joyous, lonely, witty, hopeful, and complex human beings under the same roof with me every day and yet, I don't know much about them aside from a few surface facts and their reading and writing needs. That's okay, they're teens and so they have secret lives that even their parents don't know about. I'm good with that, and honestly, I don't want to know everything.

But a lot of what they shared was public for a reason, and if there's any take-away from that ill-fated search for potentially-embarrassing photos, it's that (just like me, doing what I'm doing at this moment) they're all reaching out in the hope they'll be seen on their own terms. As a Humanities teacher, I can do more to make room for that in my classroom and at my school. I can and so I will.

I end with this last little find: It's what one student tweeted about the project we were doing (Pan-African music analysis):

The truth is out there, and it ain't always pretty...and-- invariably, someone will retweet it.

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Wabi-Sabi Teacher = Beautifully-Flawed

A couple of decades ago, while learning how to spin a clay pot, an art instructor told me about wabi-sabi, a Japanese art form that conveyed the beauty of impermanence and time's impact on objects. Picture a sculpted piece of driftwood along the beach, or a smoothed-over river stone; both are wabi-sabi-ware, organically worn and shaped by nature's geologically-slow hand. The instructor applied it to the imperfections in my clay pot noting that it gave it a wabi-sabi feel. I didn't think too much about it, except that I felt relieved she saw the asymmetry of my piece a thing of beauty rather than a newbie flaw. It was a natural part of my process as an artist, she said, and that's what made it special.

When I first started teaching fifteen years ago, I could've used someone like that art teacher to tell me I didn't have to be perfect right out the gate. We enter into our first classroom with a head full of theory and meticulously-constructed "units of study", and it doesn't take much more than a spit wad hurled across the room to realize we're going to have to adapt to survive. When it happened to me, the sense of fear and urgency was strong enough to put me into overdrive.

As a result, I would spend a good amount of time and energy those first years trying to reach edu-nirvana, that state where all those rock star teachers in the movies were at. You know who I mean, the ones who stood and delivered atop desks and, at the risk of life, job, and limb, challenged students to positively disrupt their lives using education as the way to do it. I wanted to be that teacher, as many young teachers did. It wasn't hard to shed that myth after a year or two of experience, but the motivation for impacting others and the passion for teaching remained.

Now that I'm at the mid-point of my career as a teacher, I find myself thinking about that clay pot. Teaching is a craft, like ceramic art. There is no higher place to be than where we are when we're knee-to-knee with students as their mentors and guides.

We can embody wabi-sabi, not only in our aesthetic (gray hairs and the wrinkles of a smile), but in our ways of "being", too. I see it in artists and teachers who value process over product. I sense it in those who accept their own finite natures with grace and brevity, making sure they're "present" for their students; honoring their learning journeys with patience and compassion. It's in anyone who seems to be in sync and at peace with nature's rhythms.

This is what I wish to remember as I embark on the second half of my journey as a teacher: that I am that stone, newly-aware of being less jagged in all the right places, and I embrace all that which makes me beautifully flawed.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Idea: Easing into the Launch of a Class Blog

I stumbled upon a process for launching a class blog that was non-threatening to struggling writers and yet, still engaged the more confident scribes in the room.

For our first post, I had students collect ten images (self-created or not) representing different aspects of their lives or personalities.

They then created a slideshow with the images and embedded it into the main page of their blog. The only requirements: (1) images must be "appropriate" enough to show a roomful of grand-folks, and (2) no text. No text piques readers' curiosity and prompts them to comment with their questions, thereby inspiring the blogger to draft another post in response.

The next day, I had students create a list of "Top Ten" (any topic of their choosing). I used my own blog as an exemplar, sharing my list of "Top Ten Moments of Bliss" (in no particular order):

Snowboarding with Tommy, my nephew
Receiving my Bachelor's degree- my whole family was there.
Falling in love and realizing it for the first time
Rock climbing, making it to the top, breathing, and then turning around to take in the view
Biking down the Sandia Crest trail
Backpacking around Cuba, up to the mountain valleys (lush)
Bungee jumping off of a New Zealand mining bridge (where bungee jumping first originated)
Walking along the Nova Scotian coastline
Waking up on mornings after a big trek along the New Zealand coast (Akaroa)
Floating on a river through a cave- looking up and seeing glow worms (they looked like stars!)

I asked the class which item on my list was most intriguing to them and conveyed how I could use their feedback to determine the topic for my next post.

Happy blogging!
P.S. I use Google Sites as a platform for our class blog.
If you'd like a template that you can simply copy, leave a comment and I'll kick it your way.

Monday, August 11, 2014

Welcome to Being Human- A Syllabus Intro to Humanities

Syllabus Intro to Humanities, Gr 10:

Once upon a time, roughly 5 billion years ago, a gravitational collapse gave birth to the solar system you're presently spinning around in. At first, things were a mess. Most of the cosmic matter gathered and fused at the core while the rest of it scattered outwardly into a flat, orbiting disc of debris.

As that debris field spun, it slowly (over the course of a billion years) started massing into clumps, thereby forming a number of stars and satellites, one of which we're all sitting on as it orbits its own star (the sun).

A billion years later, after things cooled down a bit on this home-planet, conditions were ripe for simple life forms to emerge, and eventually they evolved into increasingly-diverse complex organisms. It took mammalian life billions more years to emerge, but the planet was still hostile to larger forms of life, so there were a few mass extinctions. Each time, though, life continued to evolve.

Tens of millions of years after the last of those mass extinctions (that of the dinosaurs), ape-like animals began to emerge and at some point, they adapted by standing upright on two legs, thus heralding an evolutionary chain of events that would lead to the emergence of the species you, yourself, are a part of. That species' brain slowly grew and evolved to become self-aware of its own existence, and with the use of language (this one, the one you're using as you read this), created words to carry and record ideas from one generation to the next, words such as "human," which conveyed a category of life separate from all the rest.

Which brings us to this moment, whereby we find ourselves here in this class focusing on that very thing we call human. Welcome to World Studies, fellow human beings. Here, we'll explore what it means to be human and, if things go as planned, you may see more clearly your part in the ongoing story. ■

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Idea: 30-Day Challenge Blog

Matt Cutts, in his short TED Talk, shares how he was inspired to change one little thing in his life and commit to it for at least 30 days. It changed him in ways he didn't anticipate. Since my advisory students were setting academic goals, I decided to share Cutts' Talk with them since it validated my own advice about how changing habits takes time and a commitment to being consistent over a period of time.

I love moonlighting as an advisor. Sure, I'm an englush teecher at heart, but I chose that path as a career because it held the most potential for positively impacting the lives of others, and being an advisor significantly ups that mojo. Also, much of what we address is stuff I need reminding about to keep my own house in order, which brings me back to the 30-Day Challenge.

What I hadn't anticipated was how inspired my students would be after veiwing Cutts' Talk. They proposed we each take on a goal for the next month just as Cutts had done. I loved the idea, especially since it furthered my own advisory agenda!

That evening, I built a group blog using a Google Site as the platform. First we used it to brainstorm ideas for goals, then once they were decided, we chronicled our attempts to either rid ourselves of our habits or develop them. We spent roughly ten minutes at the start of each class crafting our posts and providing supportive feedback to one another. Those students who had a hard time deciding on a goal found it easier to piggy-back off of an idea that was already started, like turning in work on time, or drinking a certain amount of water each day.

Shortly after, another advisory class joined us and our blogroll grew to 37, including the other teacher, who had a newborn infant and felt the family pet was being neglected, so her daily goal was to spend at least 5 minutes playing with her dog.

Even though the challenge was optional, most of the students joined the blog by the second week, having been inspired by the other class joining us or by the attention given to bloggers whose pursuits from the very first day became a topic of discussion among peers.

Looking back, I can see there was a wonderful burst of organic energy around this endeavor. Teachers know this kind of momentum is pure gold when it comes directly from the students themselves, inspired by their own ideas and interests. Still, there are times when that energy requires the invisible hand of the facilitator to ensure the flow, intensity, and direction of the energy so that it's sure to be sustained. And that's where I kind of dropped the ball.

As the month rolled on, it became difficult for some to keep up with their daily posts, especially during the weekend when it wasn't a part of their usual day to post to a blog. A few students had set some high-maintenance goals and started falling behind. Admittedly, I was a slacker myself when it came to maintaining consistency since I let the blog time slide if there was a school-wide event or grade-wide activity we had to complete. The other advisor's dog got the ball thrown a few times but by the end of the month, it was clear that tug-time on the rope would remain a rare treat.

There was definitely a loss of momentum by the time we reached the finish line. Many had already dropped out of the race and watched as the remaining goal-setters hobbled in. Regardless, throughout the challenge, some really cool things emerged that helped me to see it as something worth replicating and improving upon.

Something I hadn't anticipated was how much (and how quickly) I could learn about my students through their chronicles. The goals they set served as a formative assessment, conveying their interests, values, and a sense of their personalities.

A few wanted to publish a photograph each day, and their pictures were like a window into their worlds. Oftentimes, I was taken aback by the beauty they had captured, which conveyed a special connectedness to the natural world.

One of Noah's photos

Others set athletic goals, like jogging a mile each day or doing something at daily dance practice that would push them further toward a longer-term goal. Dominic went from a 7:18 mile to ending the month at 6:27. Ashley wanted to be sure and say something nice to someone each day. She told her mom how much she meant to her and she blogged that her mom wanted to know what she did wrong. Ivan set out to compliment five people a day, telling them how much he admired them for their humor or athleticism. Curious about the reaction he kept getting, which was a mix of suspicion and gratitude, he began wondering if people, across the board, were under-appreciated.

Christina decided she'd "try not to be mean" to other people, and in the process, she realized it wasn't as hard as she thought. In my comment to her post, I wrote, "Could it be that being more mindful of our own actions toward others helps us become better human beings? Does it help us see ourselves in a light that's closer to who we actually are? Or is it a way toward becoming more compassionate, toward others and toward ourselves?"

Rayne decided to go meatless and curse-less. It didn't last the month, but after a couple of weeks, he noted there was a change in his mood and wasn't sure if it was the lack of meat or expletives that was doing it.

Mikaela tried to break her habit of saying, "I'm sorry," something her friends told her she did all the time. She wrote about how they began helping her with the challenge since, even though she tried, she couldn't catch herself saying it. It compelled her to reflect on where it was coming from, which lead to some interesting insights around her own self-concept.

So, I'm going to try this again at the start of the Spring semester with the same advisory group, and I'll build on what worked and change what didn't.

What worked:

Making it optional and not attaching a grade to it
Inviting other advisories- perhaps this time, inviting the entire sophomore class!
Supportive commenting

What didn't:

Inconsistency. We'll make it a for-sure start-of-advisory ritual, no matter what's on our plate.
Weekend lag. We'll decide, as a group, to give ourselves a break over the weekends, unless otherwise compelled to keep it up. I'll try to be a model for the "keep it up" crowd.

What I'll add:

Reflecting on the experience of the first round so that we can address goals that might've been unrealistic or impractical, what worked, what didn't (their perspective)
Adding resources on the blog for generating ideas and how to set realistic goals, with students' contributions
End of writing time share-out to the class, for those who'd like to, or for those who'd like to give kudos to someone deserving whose blog they read
Amp up the public spin on it with students' permission, sharing kudos on our school's Facebook page.
Discussion around the quality of comments and the effects they have on bloggers' motivation
Allowing for students to set their blogs to "private" if they want (Google Sites makes this possible)
End-of-week celebration, in some form
A reflective written piece, or a video blog for their ePortfolios: "take-aways" around goal-setting
End-of-month wrap-up party, and possibly the launch of a third round...?