Identity
Identity
When new students arrive in our learning environment, it is essential that we learn the skills, interests, strengths, and challenges of these learners so that we can help construct a meaningful and relevant learning experience that will allow students to achieve their goals.
The Personal Learning Framework starts this process through the Identity stage. Focusing on identity helps both the learner and instructor to develop a positive relationship that can lead to a dynamic learning experience.
Writing A Biography
Essential Questions
- Who am I as a learner and citizen?
- What strengths and challenges do I bring to the community?
- What are my hopes and aspirations for the year?
Learning Targets
- Students will utilize the writing process to create a biographical paragraph for their Personal Learning Plan.
- Students will be able to produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
- Students will be able to use knowledge of language and its conventions when writing.
Archives
Community and Relationships
The second segment of the Identity phase moves from the individual to the relationships and community connections of the student. Through a series of exercises and graphic organizers, educators can help students identify networks of support, strong, positive relationships, the positive character traits that make good relationships.
To do this, educators are encouraged to have students complete an exercise where students create a relationship web. Follow these simple steps to build the relationship web:
- Students start the process with a blank sheet of paper. Students place their immediate family members at the center of the page and enclose those family members in a shape of their choice.
- Students then brainstorm extended family units. Arrows are drawn from the immediate family to the extended family groups. Students may place the extended family groups according to maternal or paternal lineage or family patterns of their choice.
- Students then are encouraged to consider communities to which they belong starting with the classroom, school, and district communities and moving outwards to encompass extracurricular activities, sports, camps, etc.
- By the end of the brainstorming session, all students should have a web of relationships and organization to which they can be considered members.
Principles and Values
Once students have provided evidence of their individuality, strengths and challenges, and the positive and supporting relationships that are present in their lives, teachers can help students to identify the principles and values prized by the individual student. Remember that this comes out of your work in the identity phase; students have reflected on themselves, their relationships, and the positive characteristics of those relationships. Now, they should be encouraged to isolate those principles or values that they find most important.
This step is important for a number of reasons. First, by self-identifying their principles and values, students will begin framing their performance, decision-making, and growth through the lenses of those principles and values. True, after a year or more of middle school, during which students and their relationships may experience significant change, these principles and values may change. However, these can provide critical bearings for students navigating the middle level.
Additionally, these principles and values can be used to examine a wide range of student experience at the middle level. Whether role playing in teacher's advisory, examining character's in literature, or conducting a historical investigation, students can view the world, and analyze their growth through the perspective provided by their principles and values.
Finally, by identifying these principles and values, students can transition into the growth stage where they can begin setting goals based on the principles and values they have identified in the Identity phase of the personal learning plan.