January 18th 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 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).

Does Your Child Have an Academic Fitbit?

If you wear a fitness tracker, you know how many minutes you are exercising, the steps you take, maybe even your heart rate and blood oxygen level. With feedback and information, you can adjust your actions. I don't know about you, but if I'm at 9500 steps at the end of the day, I'm going to walk around my house to get to 10,000! If we can give students ways to clearly track our progress, we can help students to monitor growth and, more importantly, actively seek to improve.

Checklists, rubrics, and other tools that break down complex tasks and can help students see where they are and where they need to go next. Traditionally, schools have heavily focused on grades and other forms of summative assessment. This serves as an autopsy rather than as a guidepost in our learning journey. While understanding where we end up through summative measures is important, we empower students to work toward improvement through formative assessments and assignments built for iteration and cycles of revision.