Day 20 of my 30-Day Blogging Challenge for teachers from teachthought.com

Here is the link to the site with the 30-day challenge. 

http://www.teachthought.com/teaching/reflective-teaching-30-day-blogging-challenge-teachers/

Day 20

How do you curate student work–or help them do it themselves?

http://www.teachhub.com/empower-student-to-take-ownership-of-learning

I found the above article incredibly interesting, seemingly due to the fact that I am mostly working with teachers now. The funny thing is that I really see the approach to getting "buy-in" from teachers and students very similar.

The article defines student empowerment as “student ownership of learning”. The funny thing is that I actually find it harder, at times, to get teachers to buy in and take ownership. One of my favorite stories, from when I was teaching, came from a technology workshop that I gave here at school. At the end of the session, one of the teachers came up to me and said: 

"Listen Jeff....All this technology is great, but I worked really hard for my first 10 years of teaching to get my curriculum and my worksheets in order so I could coast for my last 20 years. I did't get into teaching to change what I am doing all the time." 

I will never forget that conversation; and there was a part of me that thought this teacher was brilliant in the sense that they were really trying to work smarter, not harder. However, the downside (not that I need to explain it to anyone) is that this teacher really didn't have any real ownership over what he was doing. Instead, he had created some generic work, that was focused more on student regurgitation rather than student creation. 

This conversation forced me to reflect on what I had been doing and decide if I really was inspiring my kids to take ownership over their own work. I began breaking my class periods down into three 15-minute segments. 

• Teaching/instructing
• Brainstorming
• Creating

The work the students produced inspired me and vice versa. As time went on I felt like I was teaching WITH my students, not TO them. 

Now that my job has changed, I am finding the same kind of inspiration in my colleagues. My job has allowed me to get into other teacher's classrooms, see what they are doing and, in some cases, feel a little jealous that I do not have the ability to use and practice what I am seeing in the classrooms. However, the techniques when working with teachers has really remained similar to the way I was in the classroom.