Empowerment
The 5C Formula For Igniting Student Empowerment
Intro In today’s ever-changing world, educators are no longer mere purveyors of knowledge. We are shepherds, guiding our students toward becoming thinkers, creators, and innovators. Today, we’re unveiling a path-breaking formula for igniting student empowerment. We’ll explore the 5C’s and offer questions to help you kindle self-guided learning in your classrooms. Student Empowerment = Context…
Read MoreGrowing Student Choice – Spectrum of Choice
The Spectrum of Choice is an artifact to help answer the following questions: Think of it as Bloom’s Taxonomy for student choice, categorized into five levels, The Spectrum of Choice describes how the students and the teacher are involved at each level. By selecting the appropriate level for each routine of the Learning Sprint, classrooms…
Read MoreElement 5: The Journey
There are 5 Elements to an Agile Classroom. This post will describe the Fifth Element, ‘The Journey’.Growing an Agile Classroom where students are learning iteratively in self is a journey. In any journey, it is useful to have a map. Just as map uses the degrees of latitude and longitude, an Agile Classroom uses the…
Read MoreElement 4: Empowerment
There are 5 Elements to an Agile Classroom. This post will describe the fourth element, Empowerment. Agile Classrooms defines empowerment is the process of enhancing learners’ capacity to make choices towards achieving positive learning and life outcomes (1). When learners are fully empowered in choosing what and how they learn, we say they are self-directed.…
Read MoreDesign the Learning Alliance: The Why
When we see students not behaving in the way we desire, we naturally focus more on classroom management practices. Careful. This paradoxically increases the poor behavior we do not want. By managing student behavior more, we reduce students’ ability to self-regulate and self-correct. Increasing classroom management and behavioral interventions, although sometimes needed, treats the symptoms…
Read MoreSpiral Dynamics and the Classroom
The Modern Classroom Paradox We can all agree that there is a need for deepening learning and developing 21st Century skills for academic and life success of learners. Teachers at conferences, blogs, and Twitter are echoing the need to release control over to students and more collaboration. For the teacher to move from the “sage on…
Read MoreThe Journey
The Journey The path to a self-organizing classroom (where students are empowered, collaborative, and aligned to meet their goals) is often not a leap, but, a series of steps. It is a journey. Four Learning Zones Like in any journey, a map helps us to get there. The 4 Learning Zones maps out the terrain. As…
Read MoreThe 15% Principle
Empowering students and staff sounds great. But, what do we do when we feel disempowered? There are so many constraints in some schools that seem to close all options but the ones prescribed from up high. So, empowerment sounds great, but, how? Most of us have at least 15% autonomy in what and how we…
Read MoreGrowing Self-Direction: A Scaffolding Model
How do we differentiate and scaffold self-directed learning? How do we meet students where they are, yet, continuously stretch them to become more self-directed? Empowering Boundaries You know how you grow a plant. Growing self-direction is like that. At first, you need to plant the seeds in a container. The container provides structure to support…
Read MoreStudent Empowerment Levels
Daniel Pink, in his book Drive, says that Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose (MAP) are what really motivates us to our highest levels. Autonomy, or self-directedness, is a critical 21st Century Skill. Yet, we give so little of it to our students, and sadly, not enough to teachers. It can be scary for some of us…
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