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Saturday, September 17, 2016

My Learners Are Amazing!

Every term, each team at my school has an assembly where the learners come up and share something they've done. Each term, I've been the "lazy teacher" and had my learners come up with what to share, prepare everything and then present, with very little input from me. The first two times have been pretty good, especially considering they've likely not had any guidance in doing something like this before.

This term, after going to CS4PS, I went pretty hard out with teaching coding and computer science. I have some students who have really enjoyed doing coding (through code clubs and some of the lessons I've done in class) and they decided to share some stuff they've done on Scratch. The group chose itself, and was inclusive of all learners who wanted to participate. For few days of their preparation, I did absolutely nothing, except remind them they had a deadline. They worked together, having arguments and discussions. Tears  were cried, but followed by talks to fix the tears (I may have nudged them to have those talks).

We had a practice on Friday morning and afterwards in class, we had a little critique to help them along. We first talked about all the great things they did (and there were a lot!) but then we discussed how we could improve. It was amazing to see how supportive and positive the rest of the class was in helping them along. They realized most of what we said anyways, so they were also being self critical (which, is yet another thing I want my learners to be).

Then this happened in the afternoon:


I'm so proud of them and I didn't even do anything, other than guide them along. This is all their doing. It's been a fun last couple of days in class with this and some other amazing things going on (hopefully I'll be blogging about another group that did another AMAZING thing this week, but we have to finalize some things on Monday).

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