Warlick's CoLearners
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Practical Actions for Teachers
Here are a number of actions that might be taken by teachers to begin to retool your learning environments for helping students to become future-ready.
Learning
- Select two or three other teachers in your school to form a professional learning club and agree to meet outside of school twice a month for pizza or coffee to talk about what you have learned and learned to do.
- Each member of the team should set up a blog that only other members of the team can read, and promise to write at least two entries a week reflecting on what your are teaching, how you are teaching it, what is working, and the tools you are using (or would like to use).
- Find two educator bloggers and set aside some time every day to check them and read their latest experiences and ideas. Share your findings with the members of your learning club. Use the following links for lists of potential educator writers:
- Set up a Twitter account, follow the members of your learning team, and find five other educator twits (Tweople) to follow, and devote a little time each day to scan the Tweets that have come in. Use the following list for potential educators to follow:
- Find ways to celebrate your passions at school. Set up a bulletin board in your classroom devoted to your passion (gardening, hockey, Argentina, etc.) As you learn new things about your passion, add them to your bulletin board. Talk to your students about what you are learning and how you are learning it. Celebrate your "learning Lifestyle."
- When you attend professional development events, do not go without your laptop.
Teaching
- Do less of it. Give fewer instructions. Do less lecturing. Include far (FAR) fewer bullet points in your PowerPoints. Be a passive teacher and promote active learning.
- Give fewer instructions. Rely on your students' resourcefulness to question their way beyond the barriers that you have sometimes placed in the way of their learning.
- Help your students become more creative (inventive) by being creative. Use (invent) resources that they have never seen before. Take approaches that are new to them. Surprise them. Surprise is great pedagogy.
- Inspire value in students' work. Make them rely on each other knowledge, skills, and products for success. Contribute to the school library with your students' work. http://lulu.com/
- Celebrate each students learning. Add their learning to their identity.
- As often as possible, ask your students, "What do you think?"
- As often as possible, tell your students, "Surprise me."