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 highlight the skills of self-regulation or "the ability to control one's behavior, emotions, and thoughts - in pursuit of long term goals" (p. 100).

Metacognition means to think about one's own thinking. When we teach learners to be reflective, they can see that learning has occurred and that their efforts resulted in their success. This promotes ownership of one's own learning and the understanding of the role learners play in actively building skills and understanding of content.

"Teaching something to someone else allows you to learn it twice" (p. 116).