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These Books have inspired me along my journey and have influenced my teaching practice. I highly recommend them all. (The last three I am currently skimming and can't wait to dive deeper!)These TED Talks have inspired my teaching and practice:
These top educators have inspired millions. Sir Ken Robinson and Tina Seelig discuss the importance of creativity, attitude, innovation and environments. Carol Dweck and Jo Boaler inspire educators to develop a growth mindset or there will be no creativity. Dan Pink speaks about the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and what situations people find most motivational and models why. Ramsey Musallam speaks about sparking curiosity in our students and this trumps technology and why. Milten Chen has influenced education from his days at Sesame Street, to his work on Edutopia, and now from the George Lucas Foundation. He shares the importance of making education, relevant, real, and inspiring by sharing George Lucas' story. Angela notes differences in students attitude demonstrated by their grit and persistence. Roni Ellington speaks about the things that marginalize urban education and what leads to success for these students and the future of stem education needs to be inter-disciplinary.
The books, TED Talks, TPACK, SAMR model and new educational technology led me to my research and driving question.
I combined components of the flip model with PBL(project-based learning/Inquiry) and I truly believe it is a way to incorporate all these great ideas by these top educators. Not every lesson can do all things so it leaves the teacher as the designer of lessons and facilitator in the classroom.
I started out doing the traditional flip, but that was not working and I didn't feel connected to my students. Then I tried doing a project, then inquiry, then assessment...everyday was different trying to do a little bit of everything. This did not work for me either. Why? Some students did not always complete homework, so they were not ready for the next level. I moved to having centers. So depending on the students' progression through a lesson they would start at different centers. This allowed for more differentiation and personalized learning. Students and I felt connected. It would get loud as the discussions and collaboration would get more involved. I found that students do not naturally collaborate or even know how to collaborate. Next year I plan to give them sample "math conversations" and a word list/sentence frames to help them learn how to collaborate. By combining the flip model and PBL/Inquiry, I was able to offer my students variety. This is important to me and based solely on my 20 years in education. No one wants to do the same boring thing day in and day out no matter what grade level, the same is true with adults, so I wanted to give my students' work legitimacy where they felt proud and confident with their learning of mathematics with authentic tasks to increase student agency. |