The other evening I had a wonderful opportunity to spend about 70 minutes with a group of 40ish first and second year teachers in my area. I was asked to come in and help them with some ideas around engagement. At first, I was really struggling with this concept because there are so many deeper issues that lead to students not being engaged in the classroom. While I am not able to solve the problems for each educator, I did try to curate a hands on session that challenged their thinking about simple and free approaches to rethink how we allow students to express learning.
The intended outcome was to have beginning teachers know and be able to select strategies to engage students and increase motivation.
I am not going to go through my whole presentation, but I want to summarize some of the ideas as a reference.
Here are the slides from the workshop in case you need to reference them for your own benefit.
I focused on changing our perception – of kids, of learning, of ourselves, and of what is possible. Many are hitting that slump that comes this time of year and I wanted to help bounce them out of this mindset. In 70 minutes, we cannot change the world, but we can plant some seeds that can change the world of students.
We started with a quick activity where they were asked to share what their struggles in the classroom currently are as an educator. The goal here was not to focus on the bad, but more to have them see they are not alone in their struggles. We are in this together. These same struggles are what veteran teachers face as well. I wanted them to see that we can support one another and none of us are in isolation.
From here we begain to dive into several simple activities to have students express learning in ways they have not considered. The goal here was to equip them with some techniques they could use in their classrooms the next day to get them moving in the right direction. None of these are magic bullet fixes. None of these will solve every engagement issue. I realize this and you know this. However, a whole session on deep rooted research and theory is not going to work either when they have been teaching all day and then asked to come to a two hour class.
After we spent time going through several of these activities, experiencing them, and then thinking about classroom application we had to wrap up our session. Unfortunately, we had to cut many of the activities out because we ran out of time.
In the end, we did a reflection that I read about from Mitch Resnick where participants will write down one word that stood out to them from the session around creative learning. From there, I had them exchange their circles with other people and they had to then take that word and write a question using that word about learning and their classroom.
Here are the questions posed. They are organized by word category into this document. You can read the questions.
Please link in ideas, blog posts, books, etc. that you think will help. Simply add a bullet underneath the question and help them feel hope! Help each other understand there are answers.
I will be sharing this document with others to also help in the conversation.
Please share your wisdom and maybe we can all learn a thing or two if we all collectively share.
And as a bonus here is the New Teacher Mixtape Playlist. I collected as many of the songs as I could using this cool idea from John Spencer. We started with this prompt and at the end of the session I collected their songs.
Feel free to send me your song and I will add to the mix.
New Teacher Mixtape Playlist https://open.spotify.com/user/coffeechug/playlist/2QomdFZaCrMN7Yb2q8tMLS?si=1DQ96r-WRNyPRtegNIBfpQ #NowPlaying