Category: student driven learning

Many people have asked me recently about my push to make my classroom more student driven. For some, it is a large step and can be potentially scary to think about relinquishing control of your classroom to students. In an effort to help and also reflect on my journey, I provide the following phases of […]

As the Reform Symposium is only a few days away I thought it best to give a brief introduction to the topic I am going to be sharing which is Student Driven Learning. Here is a short video I put together on the topic as a teaser.  As a result of both action research and […]

“My brother has Cerebral Palsy” This was a statement that one of my 6th grade students made to the class today during a presentation. As we near the end of the school year, many students are presenting their “big” research projects to the class. I always like these days because the kids work so hard […]

This is yet another update from my Language Arts classroom. For those that have yet to check this blog list out, you can read about my initial motivation for a student driven classroom, how to “give it up”, an initial class update, and updates titled “It’s About the Learning”, “Learning Should be Viral”, “One on […]

If you are like me, you dread being away from school. Sure, it is nice to get out of the classroom and take a break from the madness. However, it is often more work to write detailed sub plans where you predict every possible outcome that might happen in class while you are gone. You […]

First of all, this is a picture I took this afternoon in my backyard. My sons were coloring the bricks on our patio and this is what they produced. This is veeeery loosely connected in that this was some one on one (two) time with my sons this afternoon. This is my latest update from […]

This is my latest update in my series about changing to a student driven classroom. There are two things that happened in the past two days that caused me to reflect and reevaluate some of my thinking. The first was a rather remarkable thing that happened this afternoon in class. Students were working on a […]

“It’s about the learning, not about the grades.” That was a statement that was shared with me by one of my students this past week. I was meeting with two girls in my class that had recently finished reading Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life by Wendy Mass. They scheduled a “meeting” with me […]

A few weeks ago I wrote about my venture to hand over the learning decisions in my classroom to my students. I promised I would provide an update so here is my first update. At this point in time, students have determined their syllabus and learning activities based on the Language Arts standards required by […]