http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/general/elemsec/job/passport/CommunityConnected_ExperientialLearningEng.pdf

I am super excited to be teaching a new course next school year.  It is called Child Development and Gerontology. The course itself is great, but what I am really excited about is the fact that it is going to be a dual credit course.  That means that I get the same students for an entire afternoon!! Wooo Hooo!!

Why am I so excited you may ask??  Well I have been trying for years to build a more experiential hands on approach to learning and it has been tough.  It is really hard to go anywhere when you are limited to 75 mins. It is pretty tough to create community connections unless they come to you.  But now we will have a whole afternoon to connect and experience, I am so PUMPED!!

I will, however continue to teach 4 sections of regular Social Sciences in 75 minute blocks.  I will continue to try and provide an experiential experience for all of my students by arranging doable field trips (to our local elementary school across the street), baby groups with local parents, visits with seniors, guest speakers, BYOG (Bring Your Own Grandparent) and a new one BYOGS (guest speaker) but the reality is they are still not getting their hands dirty and jumping into the community.  

So….I will continue to fight to make all of my courses experiential, but in the meantime I will work with what I have got in my dual credit course next year.  This is what I am thinking about doing….I’d love to hear any other ideas if you are doing something like this already!!

Dual Credit TOJ4C / IDC4O Child Development and Gerontology

My goal is to expose all of my students to as many careers / experiences with community partners that are willing to connect.  We would likely visit these places for the first three weeks or so of the course. My hope would be to have the students interact and get hands on experience in those first three weeks.  So far I have connected with an elementary school, WHS General Learning Program and a retirement home. I am have a few other feelers out there right now. From there the students would choose where they would like to work.  If a student wants to spend their whole time with one group that is fine but if other students would like to try working with different groups than we will set up mini placements.

Week 1 – Learn about the Inquiry Process, Social Media.

Week 2 & 3 – In small groups go out and meet and work with community partners.

Week 4 – Set up personalized schedules and get into working out in the community and start to look for problems to solve.  (Mentors and teachers may need to help with this).

 Week 5 – See below – I foresee a mix of in class to work on inquiry, solution and reflection and out of class hands on work.
Task # 1 Inquiry – Research & Social Media

Next steps would be for my students to work within those community organizations and complete an inquiry.  After spending time at their placement, they would come up with a question / problem that they want to get an answer for and they would work on getting the answers by completing primary research while at the placement and secondary research while at school.  The purpose of this task would be for them to learn research skills, get hands on experience and at the end they would share what they had learned from the inquiry process with their peers and the world via Social Media. They will be required to chronicle their learning via at least one social media platform: Instagram, Twitter, blog, podcast, vlog or anything they want.  I am toying with the idea of having all them create Linkedin accounts to start connecting and showcasing what they are doing.

Task # 2 – Find a Solution using Design Thinking & Implement it

Stanford d.school Design Thinking Process

With the problem that they looked at in Inquiry # 1 students will come back to class and work through the design thinking process to try and come up with a solution to the problem.  I am not 100 % sure what this is going to look like – it may well be very different for each student. Some problems may take the entire semester to work through, while others may be more simple and not take as long to solve.  My hope is that they will be able to implement their solutions. I’m not sure how this will go, but I am excited to try it out. I am sure there will be some ups and downs, but that is how I roll…..

Task # 3 Showcase, Network, Resume & Linkedin

At the end of the semester we will invite important people to showcase what we have done and share the solutions that came up with and hopefully implemented.  We will share our successes and failures and more importantly our growth. This showcase will also work as a networking opportunity for students. They will be able to make more community connections…it’s not about what you know but about who you know, right Don Wettrick?  Their final task will be to create or update their resume and Linkedin profiles with their experience from the course. Who knows what the will have created to fix a problem, what I do know is that the experience is going to the most valuable asset to employers.

Concerns

And of course there are all the concerns that are floating around in my head…how will I assess them?  How will I keep track of all of them?  How will I support 24 students personalized learning?  What if students don’t show up?  What if we let down our mentors?  What if they don’t come up with a solution?   My philosophy is to forge ahead and deal with it as it comes.  I will have a plan before we get started but I know that I will need to be flexible, that is how life works.

This summer I have meetings lined up to connect with community members that are interested in participating in this experiential learning experiment.  If you know anyone or are interested in participating please let me know 🙂

Thanks for unlearning with us 🙂

Cheers,

R