Another Year and The Unlearning Continues

We are now a month into school and I am feeling like I need to write.  It has been a busy three months since I last posted. Two months of summer and a month of start up.  This summer I took a stab at trying to be an entrepreneur. I offered an online course to teachers who were interested in learning to unlearn.  We had a very small cohort, but overall I think it went well. I really enjoyed working with the teachers and I really hope they got something out of it.  I hope to continue with these courses – there will be a few tweaks to this summer’s course but I am hoping to relaunch later in the fall. Stay tuned if you are interested.  

Now that we are back at school we are full on into a passion project based classroom.  I am currently teaching grade 11 Intro to Anthro, Psych and Soc, grade 12 Human Growth and Development and grade 12 World Issues.  We spent the first two – three weeks learning about the course material, getting ourselves organized with all the tools / housekeeping items we will need (twitter, research skills, google classroom, excursion forms etc) and we listened to guests talk about their passions, about different not for profit organizations and about what it means to be a social entrepreneur.   Now the students are in the process of creating their passion projects for the semester, it is chaos and I love it.  

Throughout every semester I keep a running document of things to change for the next year.  Before this years start up I went back to those documents, looked at what went well last year and what needed to change and made some tweaks to this years structure.  After teaching the dual credit course I realized that having specific days for specific tasks brought back some of the structure into the classroom that I seemed to be missing.  Therefore this year this is what our day to day looks like.

Mondays – Get Organized

• Twitter Time – prompt to help them stay on top of tweeting
• Fill out weekly planners
• Create a weekly update via a vlog, blog or podcast
• Class announcements and sharing

Tuesdays – Content Day 

• These days are reserved for lessons and guest related to the curriculum
• Research Days – work on research for their issue that relates to the curriculum
• Tweet about what you learned

Wednesdays – Community Outreach

• Twitter Time – prompt to help them stay on top of tweeting
• For my grade 11s we are working with a group of students in the General Learning Program who are going to visit us every other Wednesday for the semester.
• For my grade 12s students can go out into the community and do a placement that is related to our course.
• Grade 12s class podcast – run by students.

Thursdays & Fridays – Passion Project Days

• Twitter Time – prompt to help them stay on top of tweeting
• These two days are to be scheduled by the students.  Many of them are out working in the community, having meetings and phone calls.

Since I have about 95% of the same students in my grade 12 classes that I had last year, it has been an adjustment for them.  They were used to a little more freedom, but are learning to follow the day to day. My grade 11s don’t know any different and seem to have settled just fine into it.  Overall I am super excited for the semester – there are some really cool projects that the students are working on already. Follow us @MrsRChambers and  #jmsshpa11 & #jmsshpa12 if you want to see what they are all up to.

Thanks for unlearning with us 🙂

Rebecca