Student Leadership – Week 6
There is nothing I love more than students taking leadership of their own learning. On the one hand, it’s a little unnerving for me… as the teacher… not completely in control of student learning. On the other hand, I am in control and I am facilitating (or as a colleague said to me, ACTIVATING) student learning. Yes… that makes sense to me.
Students lead activities (aka. micro curricula), students participate willingly, students lead group discussions, students ask questions, students advocate for their own learning, students provide direction, students are accountable… STUDENTS ROCK!!! This week, we delved into BC’s New Curriculum started to design and develop our own curricular competencies for our upcoming IGNITE presentations on curriculum.
We also discussed and differentiated formative and summative assessment. The crazy part is, assessment has everything to do with how successful a curriculum is implemented, but has nothing to do with how curriculum is developed. Developing curriculum is focused on the WHAT and the WHY. The HOW is up to the teacher.
In our class… we are developing our curriculum in light of BC’s New Curriculum. Our IGNITE assignment is about personalizing their learning with the BIG IDEAS and content area of curriculum, curriculum development, and curriculum theory. Our commonality amongst all students are the curricular competencies. What are students expected to demonstrate and how will this be assessed?
We looked all all three core competency areas of thinking, communicating, and personal/social. At first, I asked each discussion group which core competency they wished to explore as we embarked on developing curricular competencies for our upcoming assignment. Worth mentioning, ALL of the groups wanted to look at the PERSONAL/SOCIAL core competency. So interesting… but not possible.
We looked at all three core competencies and developed DRAFT curricular competencies with our discussion groups. The students taught me about “collaborations” on CANVAS and we collated all of our group work on a live document. From this, we narrowed down the DRAFT curricular competencies to 12. Now, here is DEMOCRACY at its finest… we’re voting for 5. The vote is happening online and students will mutually on decide the curricular competencies.
The online vote ends tomorrow to give our first cohort of IGNITERS some time to prepare for Tuesday’s class. There will be at least one curricular competency per core competency. I can’t wait to see what the students decide. Furthermore, we will provide formative feedback to the presenter by identifying the BIG IDEA(s) at the end of the presentation. We’ll see how this goes. I am very excited to see how all of this unfolds. I hope they are excited too. #buildingtheplaneinthesky