To encourage dialogue and reflection about using our strengths in our process of learning, our question for the week is: What are your strengths as a learner? Knowing Your Strengths (Week of 9/11/22) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
Blake's Guiding Lights
Our Students
Blake's Core Values: Respect, Responsibility, Resourcefulness, Reflection
Our Essential Question: How can we cultivate and curate the progression of student learning and growth?
Our Mission: Blake Middle School believes in a living mission statement, based on the concept that our community seeks and respects knowledge, integrity, character, wisdom, and the willingness to adapt to a continually evolving world.
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. - John Dewey
You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow. - John Dewey
After an (almost) full week of school last week, it felt like we were fully back in the swing of things, for sure. Hopefully the beautiful weather we are having has been enjoyed by all! Ours was a pretty quiet one - some time outside, a visit to a Farmers’ Market, and sports for Grayden.
The words from Tom Whitby, Michael Horn’s post, and tapping into the interests/desires from our students (responses to last week’s question) can help us to maintain the ‘long view’ while also keeping a close eye on the day-to-day work with all of our learners…
The best thing we can do is prepare students to learn for the rest of their lives. - Tom Whitby (@tomwhitby)
by Michael Horn in Education Next
Educators preach about growth and grit to children, but the system itself fails to encourage perseverance and curiosity. Instead, it does the opposite by affixing labels to students, sorting them into relatively static groups, and signaling to the students that their effort doesn’t matter.
A better alternative is reinventing school culture as a whole and reorienting it toward a mastery-based, positive-sum system that will allow students to embrace their strengths and flourish.
Mastery-based learning systematically embeds perseverance into its design. It showcases having a growth mindset, because students can improve their performance and master academic knowledge, skills, and habits of success.
Research shows that when students receive feedback but cannot improve their performance with that feedback, it has a negative influence on student learning. Conversely, when students can use the feedback, it has a positive impact on learning.
This zero-sum mindset—that for every winner there must be a loser—means that, by age 18, before people have lived most of their lives, we have labeled the vast majority of students.
…when we shrink the definition of life success and only value people on a few uniform and narrow dimensions, competition is problematic.
People don’t learn in a linear way, all on the same path and at the same pace. People develop at different rates. They have different strengths and weaknesses, with different contexts, background knowledge, working memory and cognitive capacities, and social and emotional learning states. It’s vital that we do not sort students off of a pathway too soon. Instead, we’d be better off creating and illuminating a variety of viable pathways. Customizing is critical to helping every child fulfill their human potential.
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: What are you hoping to learn this year? Be specific.
- I am hoping to learn more about the relationship between art and teaching. How I can blend the two.
- I am hoping to learn a new recipe!
- I'm hoping to learn how to be a better person in general.
- I'm hoping to learn new math things
- i want to learn more about our government
- How to raise trout
- A lot of things
- Things that I will use in my life once I'm out of schooling.
- More about math because I feel as if I'm not good at it.
- I really want to learn about different cultures and people all around the world.
- I'm excited for the solar cars
- Velocity and parabolas
- More complex math
- Science
- I want to learn how to code and how to make food in home economics.
- I look at every year as an opportunity to learn from my colleagues. I feel as though so much of my growth has been aided by having terrific co-workers who I learn from by either observing them, asking questions, or simply through quick hallway conversations. I hope to continue to learn from them this year.
- More about government in social studies
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Take care.
Nat