December 7th News

Online Learning & Teaching Practices

Each week, Brave Virtual Academy teachers and I discuss our core principles at the heart of BVA.

• Personalization: providing unique learning pathways for individual students
• Agency: giving learners opportunities to participate in key decisions in their learning experience
• Authentic Audience: giving learners the opportunity to create for a real audience both locally and globally
• Connectivity: giving learners opportunities to experience learning in collaboration with peers and experts locally and globally
• Creativity: providing learners individual and collaborative opportunities to make things that matter while building skills for their future.

As a part of our BVA Community Book Club, participants learned from the Distance Learning Playbook for Parents about "mindframes". Student mindframes highlighted the skills of self-regulation or "the ability to control one's behavior, emotions, and thoughts - in pursuit of long term goals." (p. 100). The first one, "Know your current level of understanding" focuses on teaching learners to understand what they currently know and what they need to learn next to continue to grow.

What I like about this mindframe is the emphasis we are all on a path and will continue to grow. This mindframe destigmatizes test scores from serving as a limit of future possible performance and instead suggests they are a pin drop on the map of all learning. It is in being able to define where one's current understanding lies that we begin to set achievable goals to get to the next level. Learners should be aware of and own their performance data. Test scores should not be used to define or label a learner but to represent an estimated snapshot of understanding at a single point in time.