Reflect Like a Pirate

Hi All! I'm back already for another blog. My original goal was to post only once a week, however, I'm just so excited that I knew I needed to reflect on my personal reading and capture my thinking before I start my next book.  It is summer after all and I'm not as involved being a mother of four now. My children are older and busy working or off playing. The youngest one is working on getting his driver's license, so I'll be even more obsolete when he finishes. So what better way to spend my time than improving myself.

Since I'm moving into a different mode of motherhood, I have more time for professional reading, planning, writing, and Twittering. That's how I was introduced to @burgessdave and his wonderful book. I was thrilled after reading Dave Burgess' Teach Like a Pirate. He really spoke to me when he wrote, "Provide an uncommon experience for your students and they will reward you with an uncommon effort and attitude." I easily embraced Dave's idea of presenting lessons with passion, enthusiasm, and something compelling. My teaching already had some "pirate like" qualities and I feel even more empowered to "pump it up!" I am already revisiting lesson ideas to pull in more drama or movement to engage all my students.

I've just finished my second PD book for the summer and I have to say, Learn Like a Pirate by Paul Solarz has my head spinning! I'm absolutely running off the plank here people! I'm totally embracing the student lead classroom. Again I found some common ground and similarities, and Paul's book gave rich concrete examples that will allow me to further hand off more "jobs" in my class and provide greater opportunities for my students to lead. I appreciated how Paul had QR codes embedded in his book to link you to a page in his website or connect to a direct source that he refers to. Amazing! Together both books are providing me with a new schema of what my classroom will look like and feel like in the upcoming year.

First change I'm making will be my "goodie bag" for day one. My first day of school always ended with a paper bag with about 6-8 things in it to get our year started. There would be an eraser because we all make mistakes. There would be a mint because the students are worth a "mint" to me and so the items go. This time around, I plan to start with the bag on their desk first thing in the morning and we are going to use the items in their bag throughout the day. Dave mentions his first day of class and how he has Play Doh out for each student. Something so easy, yet different to set the stage. I want to have an unexpected event to begin our year, a non-threatening experience that will welcome students and get them thinking and creating immediately. I love the idea of Play Doh, so much so that I already went out to get it for my students. That will be item #1 in the bag!

Item #2 will be a small bag of marbles. This is inspired by Paul's "Marble Theory" class meeting. Paul explains that every child is born with the same amount of marbles in their brain. They start out in one big pile and as we grow and learn the marbles are then placed into different cups. The cups are the skills and talents that we have or learn as we develop. I made an instant connection to Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers. In his book, Gladwell describes an expert is someone who has put in at least 10,000 hours of practice at their skill or ability.

A musician, an athlete, a mathematician all have put in well over 10,000 hours to excel at their given talent. I have used this example many times to explain to students that not everyone has the same skill or knowledge level. Ten thousand hours may not be equivalent to 10,000 marbles but the concepts are similar.  I am thrilled to use the "Marble Theory" to demonstrate how it might look using cups and marbles. I believe the combination will go a long way to help children understand that we all are intelligent it is just divided differently for each person.

This weekend I took to the streets to find every Dollar Tree store to find small bags of marbles. It only took me four stores to find enough, but now my marble trek is complete. Guess what? Along the way, I found my third item to be placed in my goodie bag, a micro terrarium from DuneCraft. These I also found at the Dollar Tree store and it took three more stops before I could find enough and of course the Dollar Tree store offered the better price. Yes, I'll admit, I'm a little zealous when it comes to my goodie bag items, but I really want my students to be engaged and create experiences that they will remember and be able to connect to as the year progresses.

Now the reason for the micro terrarium is to have the students connect to the "growth mindset" brought to us by Carol Dweck in her book, Mindset. This is a conversation that our grade level team started to discuss about three years ago and we introduced the concept in our Back to School Night meetings with our parents. We also continually use the understanding of growth mindset instead of fixed mindset to help both our parents and students understand that we need to be open with growth and understand that we are all in different places of our learning. I believe this terrarium will help students better connect with this concept.

Thanks to both Dave Burgess and Paul Solarz for their inspiring books. I love how both educators celebrate creativity, 21st century learning, and encourage taking risks. That is my plan to think creatively, take more risks, and provide the same opportunities for my students. I'm taking the first steps to implement my new changes. I'm excited to discover what will be next placed in the bag on my students' desks for the first day of school.