Minor Details - September 6

September 6 - 9, 2022

Reading through my blog posts for this week, I am impressed by what we achieved as a class in 4 short days and excited about the potential we have to learn together all year.

Always Kind * Always Better

As part of the Intro Questionnaire, students were asked to reflect on a couple of really important questions:

How would it impact their learning if everybody in our class chose to treat everyone with kindness?
What is the difference between "I did my best" and "I'm always striving to be better"?

On Tuesday, Brianna and Tori started a respectful and insightful discussion by sharing their thinking around why both of these things are choices and why some people might have received different messages about what these statements mean.

Our discussion helped us develop a common understanding of what we can do to be "always kind and always better".

In this image, you can see the results of our discussion. It will be very helpful to use this list as we grow together as a kind community of learners. I think we're off to a great start!

Attentive Listening

I'm not sure where this quote comes from (see photo below), but whoever wrote it has got the correct measure of things. In fact, according to statistics, we only understand and can remember about 25-30% of what we hear.

This week, we have started recognizing that we hear things, but often don't either understand or connect what we're hearing.

Attentive listening happens when we can repeat accurately what we have heard in our own words, we remember it hours later and we are able to connect it to what we already know.

We discussed 5 strategies to help us listen attentively so we understand:

Pay attention
Show that you're listening
Provide feedback
Don't judge or interrupt (we agreed we fail on this one more often than the other strategies)
Respond appropriately

We will be working all year to improve our attentive listening skills. What would really help is to discuss the strategies and practise them at home.

Challenge #4

This challenge was introduced simply as "Design a food separator". It was wonderful to see the improvement in questioning skills since Challenge #1!

Students spent about an hour planning, designing and testing their devices ("iterative prototyping"). As they continued to modify their original designs, they realized that they needed more time. So we will continue to work on this challenge next week.

In these photos you can see early versions of designs and it will be interesting to see how the final designs compare to these early prototypes.

One of the criteria for the challenge was to build the simplest possible device. Why? Because students will be learning to write excellent procedural instructions in order to write instructions to build their devices.

PS ... I can't take sole credit for the idea for this challenge. It was derived from a collaboration with my brilliant engineer husband.

Team Contract Brainstorming

Today we talked about the purpose of a contract and that primarily, it helps prevent conflict over what we expect from another person.

Learning is a team effort that requires students, parents and teachers to work together.

When we're not exactly sure what is expected of us and we make assumptions, it can often lead to conflict.

So we worked in small groups to brainstorm what we believe are the most important responsibilities for students, parents and teachers when it comes to supporting learning.

In this image, you can see what students came up with.

What do you think? Please have conversations at home and let us know if we've hit the mark.

In the next couple of weeks, we're going to draw up a contract that we can use to help us work together to create the best possible learning environment.

Dance Project

Our class is taking a leadership role with a fun project for the whole school. A huge thank you to Alexis and Macy for taking their own time to choreograph dance moves and having the courage to teach the moves to our class.

We can't spoil the fun (you'll have to wait until the September assembly), but here is the song we are dancing to (bet you can't stand still) and you can see a short snippet of Macy and Alexis leading the class here.

How I Built This

Guy Raz has an excellent podcast called "How I Built This" in which he interviews highly successful entrepreneurs.

We will be listening to his interview with David Kelley who is the CEO of IDEO, a creative design company that has designed thousands of products from the Apple mouse to Nerf footballs and the Ford 150 dashboard.

His ideas about creativity, collaboration and design thinking apply directly to what we will be doing this year and we will be listening to the podcast together to help us develop our communication, collaboration and problem-solving skills.

You can listen to the podcast here.

This is the link to the ABC Nightline episode where David Kelley's team designs a better shopping cart (click here).

Click here to see the questions that we will be answering while we listen to the podcast.

Design Challenge #3

In this design challenge, students were required to make a plan before starting to solve the problem. We reflected on why making a plan is so important (especially when you have limited materials) and why students often skip the planning step (because they'd rather move on to the "fun" part).

This challenge posed more problems than the previous two, especially when it came to both partners clearly understanding the plan and working together on the same plan.

In these images, you can see the challenge, the questioning process and Jersey and Jadon working on solving the problem.

Please have a conversation at home about the failures we had and what we learned.

Design Challenge #2

In this challenge, one of the most important things we learned is not to make assumptions about the criteria.

We reflected on what things people do that result in productive and efffective group work, and what things people do in groups that really annoy us. It was interesting to see that just about everyone agreed on the same behaviours!

In these photos, you can see Laura & Zoe's solution (one piece of paper and about 10cm of tape) and Josh & Colin's solution (1 piece of paper and 1cm of tape).

Student Council

Student Council is an excellent opportunity for students to develop their leadership and communication skills while planning and organizing events to build culture at DeWitt Carter.

Students are encouraged to apply for a position on Student Council by writing an application letter and submitting by Monday September 12.

The Big Project Update

Today The Big Project communications team (Kylie, Jersey and Macy) brought the grade 7 students up to speed on our progress with our project to revitalize our school yard.

Last year we completed Phase One and we are ready to build garden boxes, a buddy bench and set up a seasonal greenhouse in the spring of 2023.

Phase Two will involve planning the outdoor classroom.

Students are encouraged to apply for the leadership positions of Project Manager and Field Trip Coordinator by applying in writing by Wednesday September 16.

You can view the entire presentation explaining our vision and progress to date here.

Design Challenge Week

Throughout the year we will be engaged in a lot of innovative, creative challenges. In order to solve problems (now and in the future), students need to develop the skills you see listed here.

This week, there will be 4 different design challenges that will provide opportunities to start building these skills.

Today's challenge was to cut a single piece of paper so that you could step through it. Students needed to ask several questions to clarify the challenge (no tape or glue or tieing ends together; the paper had to be continuous, etc.)

In these pictures, you can see how students who persevered worked through failure to successfully solve the problem. The last photo shows my solution. If you would like to know how I did it, click here for a tutorial.

Introduction to Ecosystems - Seed Planting

To learn about interactions in ecosystems, we will be growing our own plants and doing experiments to determine optimal growing conditions for different plants.

We started today by researching the germination rate and planting depth for basil and marigold seeds. We wrote a Cornell note to summarize the information (see blog post below) and planted our marigold seeds.

Check back in 5 to 8 days to see whether they have sprouted on schedule.

Cornell Notes

All through elementary and secondary school, students are asked to take notes. But we don't actually teach them how to take effective notes!

A professor at Cornell University discovered this and developed a remarkably effective system for taking notes that uses principles of design and an understanding of how our brains process information. To learn more about Cornell notes, please read the article I wrote here.

We will be using this system to take notes this year. In this picture, you can see Travis' first Cornell note.

There is a clear purpose written at the top of the note. You can see the questions written clearly on one side of the page and the answer directly opposite the question.

When students prepare for tests, they simply cover up the "answer" side of the page and use the "question" to test their understanding.

Our Classroom

I love this photo of our classroom - taken just before students arrived for the first day of the school year.

I have filled the room with art and plants. We will have even more plants once we get the Nutri-Tower going. Instead of desks, we have large tables we can use for collaborative learning projects and flexible seating.

My hope is that this becomes a safe place to take risks in our learning and that we all look forward to being here together every day. I can't do this alone. Each one of us needs to make a commitment to our mission:

Always Kind * Always Better

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