- What is important to me in education for my students? What are their non-negotiable needs? I feel it's important to give them as many rich, challenging, and engaging opportunities to learn as possible. It's also important to me to allow them the use of technology during these opportunities since tech is and will be a constantly ingrained piece of their lives.
- What life-long skill(s) will my students need to be successful adults that I am passionate about as well?
- Math. Seeing my third graders pick up skills and techniques in the subject that they will be able to use for the rest of their lives is one of my favorite things from the whole school year. In third grade we hit multiplication/division and fractions hard: two focuses that are used daily in everyday adult life.
- Technology. Teaching these little ones about "simple" things like copy & paste, Ctrl + Z, right click features, etc. is just the beginning of them unlocking potential with using services like Google Drive, Schoology, and the plethora of other tools that are offered online.
- What could be offered to my students through design thinking that would help seed the potential for great growth in math and technology? Opportunities in which the students can participate in hands-on learning and real world connections; one in which their interests are sparked in wanting to know more, pursuing those interests, and achieving authentic learning.
This is the point in which my clarity of thought began to haze. After brainstorming this week and last, I feel that my project should revolve around our district's learning management system Schoology and activities in which all my students can participate in low-floor, high-ceiling learning. Low-floor, high-ceiling represents math problems in which every single student can jump into a given problem, working at their proximal zone of development and tackling tasks that are a good fit for their abilities. The other piece I've been thinking about is: If we are able to complete these cool activities in my class, wouldn't it be even cooler to be able to share those events and results with my team, my school, or even my district of 55,000+ students?? What if all the teachers and students had access to opportunities like this that they could then apply in their own classrooms?
For example:
We began using Bridges for our math curriculum last year (it replaced an aging EveryDay Math). Right off the bat, I noticed my students' number sense and fluency within math skills increasing steadily. One of my favorite lessons that spanned across a couple days was that of Wally the Window Washer from Watertown. The students need to help Wally figure out how many windows he'll need to wash by studying the arrays that they observe on each of the buildings. The tricky thing is that some of the windows are blocked by trees and signs and the students must be detectives and find the total number of windows. I've been brainstorming an activity that could help support this (and other) Bridges curriculum.
What if the students had to come up with a strategy to best clean the windows here at school? What if they were given access to different cleaning tools like cloths, squeegees, spray bottles and other tools and had to choose which setup would be most effective? We would be outside filming and timing each other (to later construct a kid lead educational video that could be shared with other classes/schools via Schoology or Google) to see how long it'd actually take to wash our windows here at school. Some of the high fliers could then take that data and predict and test their ideas as to how long it might take to clean an entire side of the building's windows and so on. Window washing may not seem like the most thrilling activity, but my gut tells me that my students would love something like this and could gain some very valuable math thinking.
Like I said, though, I feel like this idea is still in its infancy stage and I know that this process is supposed to be iterative. To be perfectly honest, I don't know if this idea fits design thinking or not; my design is still trailing my thinking I believe...
