Students Taking Charge in Grades K-5

Inside the Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom

Nancy Sulla

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351858359
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Education General

Discover how to design innovative learning environments that increase student ownership so they can achieve at high levels and meet rigorous standards. Students Taking Charge shows you how to create student-driven classrooms that empower learners through problem-based learning and differentiation, where students pose questions and actively seek answers. Technology is then used seamlessly throughout the day for information, communication, collaboration, and product generation.

You'll find out how to:

• Design an Authentic Learning Unit, which is at the core of the Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom, aimed at engaging students;
• Understand the structures needed to support its implementation and empower students;
• Build the facilitation strategies that will move students from engagement to empowerment to efficacy.

This new K–5 edition offers a more detailed look into elementary school implementation. With the book's practical examples and step-by-step guidelines, you'll be able to start designing your innovative classroom immediately!

1
The Why for Your Instructional Design Journey

Change the World!

“Since we’ve been doing so many real-world problems, I feel like even though I’m in fourth grade I can change the world.” This student’s words sum up the “why?” of the Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom: positioning students to change the world. Students deserve an education that positions them to tackle any challenge, pursue any goal, and be outfitted with the skills to meet with success. Before schools can consider what that should look like, they need to identify the why, their purpose. Why should we put all this energy, thought, money, and time into teaching children? My answer to that question is: efficacy!

Efficacious people can identify a goal, build a plan, and put it in motion; and if they don’t achieve that goal, they can reflect on why and make adjustments for the next attempt. Efficacious people are driven by their passion to make a difference in their own lives and the lives of others; they make life happen rather than letting life just happen to them. Efficacious people can take steps to lead a happy life, be a productive citizen, and, moving beyond themselves, change the world! What would it take to create classrooms and schools that produce efficacious human beings and world citizens?

Imagine a learning environment in which students pose questions and actively seek answers, pursuing solutions to problems they want to solve. They decide how they will use their time, take charge of setting and achieving goals, and work individually to build skills and collaboratively develop solutions to real-world problems. Technology is used throughout the day, seamlessly, as students and teachers need it—from handheld devices to tablets to laptops to virtual-reality headsets. Students walk to a flat-screen monitor on the wall and talk to students in another part of the world. Teachers move around the room, sitting with students, who share their accomplishments, asking probing questions and gathering assessment data that will shape tomorrow’s instructional plans. You hear students talking about content; their vocabulary is sophisticated for their grade level; their thinking processes are evident through their discussions and reflections. They are intent on the task at hand, yet not everyone is working on the same thing at the same time. No one is off task. Every now and then you hear a cheer or a student exclaim, “I got it!” as they excitedly dive into the next phase of a project. Students shift from current activities to others without the prompting of the teacher. No one watches the clock; no one wants to leave. This is a snapshot of the Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom. Students in this classroom take learning seriously and pursue it vigorously. Teachers in this classroom masterfully craft and co-create learning experiences with their students that emanate from real-world situations; they facilitate learning, ensuring that each student achieves at the highest level. Parents are partners in the learning process, often via the Internet, working with teachers and students as one cohesive unit to ensure that the students are given the best foundation possible for the rest of their lives.

You may recognize aspects of your own classroom or those of your colleagues. Pockets of innovation exist in schools; it’s time to stop celebrating pockets of change, incremental improvements, and isolated innovative teachers. It’s time to take bold steps to secure the future of our students and the world.

School and Society

Schools both serve and form society. They serve society by building in their students the skills, concepts, and information needed to thrive in today’s world. When the sundial gave way to the analog clock, people needed new skills. When the slide rule gave way to the calculator, school curriculum changed. The school community must continually consider changes in society, particularly technological changes, scientific breakthroughs, and historical events, and ensure that the curriculum is designed to shape successful world citizens.

In addition to critical subject-area content mastery, students need to build skills in creativity, innovation, critical thinking, problem solving, communication, collaboration, information literacy, technological literacy, initiative, self-direction, socializing, cross-cultural engagement, productivity, leadership, flexibility, adaptability, accountability, and responsibility. How do you build “ility”? Most of these skills cannot be approached as a subject. A student cannot take a class in flexibility and adaptability. These skills that fall outside of subject-area content are acquired based on how teachers teach more than what they teach.

“If schools serve society by what they teach, then they form society by how they teach.”

If schools serve society by what they teach, then they form society by how they teach. Schools that place a great emphasis on individual competition develop citizens who are well suited for that but may not be as able or willing to work collaboratively. Schools that place a great emphasis on project management, time management, and resourcefulness develop citizens who are better prepared to lead self-reliant, productive lives. This is a connection that schools often fail to realize, and it is why teachers and administrators must very carefully develop an ongoing, purposeful, instructional design plan that not only considers the written curriculum—the what—but also shapes the teaching and learning process in the classroom—the how. Both should connect to a powerful purpose, in the case of this book, positioning students to change the world.

In today’s society, an event in one part of the world affects others around the world. Countries around the world comprise a global, interdependent system. Our economies, commerce, health, environment, and more are interconnected, which presents both opportunities and challenges. Beyond the realm of Earth, countries are engaged in a new space race to colonize Mars.

In order for schools to meet the needs of a global society, they must prepare students to be problem-finders, innovators, and entrepreneurs.… Today’s students are ready to make the leap from passive recipients of information to active participants in a classroom that will prepare them for their future.

(Sulla, 2015, p. 5)

Moving Beyond “It’s Always Been That Way”

Consider this anecdote I once heard. A mother is cooking a ham dinner. She cuts off the end of the ham, places the larger piece in the pan, and begins to roast it. Her young daughter says, “Mommy, why do you cut off the end of the ham?” Mom responds, “You know, I’m not sure, but my mother always did that. Go ask Grandma.” The young girl goes into the living room and asks her grandmother the same question. The response is, “I don’t know; my mom did that so I did too,” and the girl turned to her great-grandmother and asked why. The elderly woman responded, “Well, otherwise it wouldn’t fit in my roasting pan!”

What a wonderful anecdote for the ills of perpetuating the dominant paradigm of schooling. Teachers always stood in the front of the room when I was in school, so that must be where you stand. We always had textbooks, so they must be a necessary part of school. We’ve always had students write and solve problems on the board, so that must be a necessary component of mathematics instruction. It’s time to think through what schooling looks like and make some significant adjustments to past practices. That’s not to say you discard everything you currently do. Rather, you keep what works and make some adjustments. The important thing is to keep your mind continually open to change and be willing to shift some of your beliefs as to what the teaching and learning process could look like.

Shifting your belief system is not an easy process; it requires unlearning some of what you’ve learned in the past. Authors Ron Heifetz and Marty Linksy (2002) distinguished between technical and adaptive change. Technical change focuses on implementing known solutions to problems. For example, if students are not performing up to your desired level, use a rubric to offer them clearly articulated expectations. You learn how to use a rubric, implement its use, and teach others. That’s technical change, and it is the focus of most professional development and college courses today in the field of education. It is a transaction of knowledge. Adaptive change, on the other hand, focuses on developing solutions to problems for which none yet exists. It represents an underlying transformation of thought and action. Designing classrooms to meet a new, emerging generation of learners is a problem for which there can be no available solution, given that students and society are continually changing. Adaptive change requires a change in one’s belief system.

From a Compliance Model to an Efficacy Model

When you walk into a Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom, you immediately notice how engaged students are. You look around the room and note that all students are on task and look very focused on whatever they are doing. Conventional classrooms are based on a compliance model of education: the teacher has rules, goals, and assignments and wants students to comply with those. The understanding is that through compliance, by following the teacher’s lead, students will learn; and while that approach might produce temporary test score results, it will, in and of itself, fall short of producing long-term retention of learning and will do little to produce efficacious learners. Thus, a different model of education is needed to produce efficacious citizens who can change the world.

The first step toward an efficacy model is positioning students to engage with content at deep levels. This is one of the key goals for instructional design, as you’ll read about in the next section. As students build the ability to engage in activities and with content, they will be better positioned to be empowered to take charge of their own learning. In the Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom, many structures and strategies are put in place to empower students. With engagement and empowerment as the foundation, shifting focus from being empowered by others to empowering yourself leads to efficacy. The Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom is an efficacy model of education.

Achieving Instructional Equity

A wonderfully diverse world means diverse learners with diverse needs. The equity discussion has schools challenged to provide not an equal but an equitable education for all by giving each student what he or she needs to succeed. At the core of equity is opportunity and access. Imagine classrooms in which students have myriad opportunities to thrive academically and access to the instructional approach they need and desire.

In his book, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… And the Rest of Y’All Too, Christopher Emdin (2016) defines reality pedagogy as:

An approach to teaching and learning that has a primary goal of meeting each student on his or her own cultural and emotional turf. It focuses on making the local experiences of the student visible and creating contexts where there is a role reversal of sorts that positions the student as the expert in his or her own teaching and learning, and the teacher as the learner. It posits that while the teacher is the person charged with delivering the content, the student is the person who shapes how best to teach that content. Together, the teacher and students co-construct the classroom space.

(p. 27)

In the Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom, student voice and choice are at the forefront. Students work with teachers to identify problems they wish to solve and ways in which to learn what they need to achieve their goals. Teachers facilitate through small-group and one-on-one conversations with students to gain a better understanding of students’ abilities, successes, challenges, and needs so they can be a powerful resource in their students’ learning journey. It is a classroom in which all students thrive. The Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom is an instructional equity model for education.

Three Critical Goals for Instructional Design

At the core of the Learner-Active Technology-Infused Classroom lie three critical goals for instructional design: engage students in learning, build greater responsibility for student learning, and ensure academic rigor.

Engaged Learners

Busy students are not necessarily engaged students, nor are seemingly happy students who are working in groups. Although “hands-on” activities are wonderful, what you truly want are “minds-on” activities. If you assume students are engaged in learning, take a closer look to see if what they are doing is directly related to academically rigorous content and if they are understanding and thinking deeply about that content. Suppose third-grade students are learning about the food chain. Consider the following scenarios as we peek into three classrooms:

• Students are locating information on the food chain from books and the Internet and creating charts to illustrate the food chains of various animals.
• Students are designing a computer presentation on the food chain and are working on adding sounds and transitions to make it more exciting.
• A group of students is developing a “what if” presentation, as they were interested in determining what would happen if a member of the food chain were to become extinct, under what conditions that might happen, how that would affect the rest of the food chain, and is there anything we can and should do about it?

Although all three scenarios cover the content of the food chain, it is important to consider how students spend the bulk of their time. In the first scenario, students are most likely engaged in finding and reporting information. Doing so will lead them to some level of knowledge of the food chain, but the work is primarily “regurgitation” of content: copying and pasting, taking data in one form and presenting it in another. This is a prevalent activity in the compliance model of education. The second scenario assumes students have already found their information and are reporting it using a digital presentation, sharing “known” information with others. Their engagement, however, is now in the digital presentation software. Again, although the students are focusing on important skills, as the teacher, you must consider what content is the goal of instruction. In this case, students are engaged in the use of software, not understanding the food chain. The third scenario has students “grappling” (Sulla, 2015) with the content itself—understanding the cause-and-effect relationships that exist and using higher-order thinki...