Revelation reveals the truth (Bob Marley)

This one will sound like a no brainer but, what the hell... it turns out that building a culture of collaboration, respect, and trust is key to a successful blended learning/ student driven inquiry classroom. 

I'm finding after a term of a blended learning classroom that the key word in there (apart from 'culture') is TRUST. 

I operate on a high trust model in my classroom. Until a student abuses that trust - I will go the extra mile for them.

Now, clearly: computers (BYOD), Schoology and blended learning methods have the power to transform the classroom but it won't do much without the right culture of trust. In fact, it is the change in culture that will make the difference.

I saw the following acronym recently on the Mind/Shift web page: each letter stands for an important part of the blended learning classroom culture.

T = trust

R = respect

I = independence
C = collaboration
K = kindness

I'm not a huge fan of acronyms (hahahahaha he said through gritted teeth) but I liked this one because IT BEGAN with trust.

Trust in this case means the students trust each other to help in the learning process and I trust the students. The boundaries need to be established early. The key to building trust is to actually trust the students. If they let me down - well that's a learning moment for both of us! 

All this means putting students in situations requiring them to think for themselves. They may stumble and have difficulties, but the key is to support them in their efforts while letting them solve the problem themselves. This builds trust in themselves, in the class as a whole, and between me and the students.

Sounds simple right? Well that's because...it actually is!

What if the water and wishes appear? (Bob Mould)

I've spent a lot of the last week thinking about our senior English courses for next year.

It became time to finally move from the theoretical to the practical and actually design the courses with my colleagues.

We ended up introducing a potential student inquiry/thematic aspect to the year's programme (and deliberately separated internal NCEA standards and external standards so that all the internally assessed work is done early in the first half of the year).

I like our aim for these courses: 

This course aims to cater to student diversity, creativity, collaboration, and to foster and reward student curiosity. A student driven inquiry in Terms 1 and 2 may be used to include the internal standards.  

With that in mind I have now turned my attention to creating a framework to help students engage their creativity and curiosity. I found this cool diagram via Twitter:

It's that first column- posing real questions, that I'll be working on next week at school using, as a starting point, a powerpoint that a colleague is designing to help students understand the possibilities on offer. 

My excitement and own creative juices are flowing!