Makerspace learning at Proctor Elementary In this final post of our series on how maker-centered learning can help students develop transferable skills, we take a look at Integrative and Informed Thinking. During EMMA’s visit to Proctor Elementary School, in Proctor VT, the potential for maker-centered learning to support students’ integrated and informed thinking really came …
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Responsible and involved citizenship in Grand Isle We’re looking at how maker-centered learning and makerspace activities can help support students in developing Vermont’s five transferable skills. We’ve looked at clear and effective communication, self-direction, and creative and practical problem-solving. In this post, we recount EMMA’s visit to Grand Isle School, where teachers and students used …
Continue reading “How making supports service learning”
Making as evidence of problem-solving It’s quite easy to see how making often takes students on new journeys, where their imagination provides opportunities to exercise the transferable skill of creative and practical problem solving. After a visit by EMMA, students at Malletts Bay School, in Colchester VT, were inspired to use their new skills to create …
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The Maker Movement & Transferable Skills, Part 2 We’re looking at how maker-centered learning provides opportunities for students to develop the Vermont Agency of Education’s five Transferable Skills, starting with Clear and Effective Communication. Today we continue our series with more examples. Our mobile making lab’s visits brought forth evidence of students taking charge of …
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Making as evidence of transferable skills around Vermont During the past year, EMMA has visited schools around Vermont to fuel the conversation about maker-centered learning. As we reflected on each of EMMA’s visits, we continually noticed that maker centered learning provided evidence of students applying cross-disciplinary transferable skills.
This fall, we’ve been talking about everyday courage in schools. We’ve written about the courage it takes to start a new team, using technology to open up communication with students and to open up our practice. We’ve shared examples about how teachers are showing up, engaging in hard conversations about race, their own practice, about …
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The #everydaycourage of doing nothing As we cultivate more self-direction in students, their lives get more complicated. They have a greater responsibility to themselves and their success. How can we nurture the whole student as they grapple with becoming agents of their own education?
Seeing failure as iteration A trio of students at Crossett Brook Middle School, in Duxbury VT, have spent the past two years building a go-cart. When their first cart snapped in half on its maiden voyage, the students took that incident as a challenge, and the next year, they figured out what had gone wrong, …
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Feedback often feels like criticism. But what if we used it as an opportunity to grow? In third grade, I had my own time-out chair in the principal’s office. My exuberant chattiness, combined with an 8-year-old’s lack of social filter frequently earned me a trip to that chair that sat in the corner facing the …
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The #everydaycourage of being seen Take the iconic back-to-school prompt for students — what I did on my summer vacation — and give it a twist. Imagine how students might respond to the prompt What I think my teacher did on summer vacation. A lot of us wish other folks knew how hard we work during summer: the …
Continue reading “4 ways Vermont educators are sharing their practice”
How will your students prepare for active engagement in democracy? Last spring Christie Nold, a 6th grade teacher at Frederick H. Tuttle Middle School, was at Burlington’s Jazz Fest listening to student musicians when she got some disturbing news: someone had spray-painted racist hate speech on her school’s campus. Overwhelmed by her own emotions, Nold …
Continue reading “The #everydaycourage of talking about race in Vermont schools”
Think middle schoolers are too young for a QSA? Think again At the Queer Straight Alliance (QSA) at Crossett Brook Middle School in Duxbury, Vermont, young adolescents have carved out a space where they can be their authentic selves. While that’s critical during middle school, it’s especially crucial for LGBTQ students. As we kick off …
Continue reading “The Crossett Brook Queer-Straight Alliance”
The birth of a YA teacher’s book club “Sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. You’ve just got to keep doing right.” –Starr’s mom, in The Hate U Give by Angela Thomas
“It really is nice being able to teach others. I know that I had an effect on them.” The Essex STEM Academy, at Essex High School, lets students pursue their passion for tech and science with support from the Vermont STEM community. They also let the students teach. We spoke with Ian, an Essex STEM …
Continue reading “What it looks like when students teach”
School leadership in turbulent times As schools prepare to welcome students through their doors, many educators are researching how to talk with their students about the attacks in Charlottesville or Barcelona. Or how to respond to student concerns about diversity, tolerance and equity. Or, ulp, how to address this recent article by Wired, revealing that …
Continue reading “#vted leads the way with #everydaycourage”
Or, What to Bring to the First Staff Potluck Opening up to fellow educators can be hard. We all know we’re doing the best we can, but many of us also feel like we could be doing better for our students. We want to do the best we can and sometimes we get terrified that …
Continue reading “Laying the groundwork for effective teaching teams”
It’s time we celebrated it in our schools. When we walk into Vermont schools, we see it. It’s there, every time, when our eyes scan the hallways, the classrooms, and the shared spaces. It’s #everydaycourage, and it lies at the heart of innovative education.
Personalized, proficiency-based PBL or bust During a faculty meeting in late December of 2016, educators and staff talked about the need to provide personalized learning options for students at their small, rural Vermont school. They wanted do so in a way that honored the students’ need for passion-based, independent projects, as well as the desire …
Continue reading “J-Term at Hazen Union”
A student-led conference (or SLC) can be a magical opportunity for teachers to engage deeply with a student and their family. It typically involves a middle schooler gathering some evidence of their learning, strengths and challenges, and possibly their goals and aspirations. They assemble that evidence along with reflections into some format; many use a …
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Service learning Creating teaching and learning opportunities where students identify, research, propose, and implement solutions to real needs in their school community as part of their curriculum. Ponder these other definitions. What do they have in common? Why do service learning? Read researcher Shelley Billig’s take on why service learning benefits students in many ways. …
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Scheduling The continued movement towards the middle level concept has put tremendous pressure on how schools choose to organize their time. For good reason! The remnants of the junior high days of past still exist. However, emerging schedules that support student-centered learning and best middle level practice are having a greater presence every year. Innovative …
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Negotiated curriculum Negotiated Curriculum is the process of intentionally inviting students to be co-constructors of the curriculum and co-designers of the learning opportunities. This process, based on James Beane’s questions of self and world, yields a curriculum of greater relevance and invites students to take responsibility for the outcomes. Most importantly, this democratic process changes …
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Young adolescents are compelled to explore various aspects of their identities, including values, beliefs, social identities, learning profiles, interests, cultures, and aspirations. When teachers provide opportunities for exploring and expressing identities, they will be able to strengthen relationships and provide personalized support to students’ academic and social emotional learning. As students seek to understand the …
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Guiding Crossett Brook PLPs with student voice The Crossett Brook PLP student leadership group presented their recommendations on PLPs to the teaching staff at the end of the school year. The educators received the students’ ideas well. It was pretty cool to see a roomful of teachers rapt on a hot afternoon during the last …
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Every May for the past 10 years, Lamoille Union Middle School’s Team Extreme launches an integrated unit. This year found them shifting and building upon past successes to include the goal of giving students access to their growth and skills progression in a brand new way.
Standard 3-part story-driven post: 1) what it is, 2) what it looks like in a school, 3) how to do it in your school
Let students help you transform your school Creating sustainable systemic change is hard work. Yet there are readily available, free, renewable resources right in your classroom. Students are embedded experts, creative geniuses, ruthless truthtellers, and intrinsic futurists. Here are four examples of students as partners in school change: partners in building a makerspace, redesigning PLPs, serving …
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Standard 3-part story-driven post: 1) what it is, 2) what it looks like in a school, 3) how to do it in your school
Standard 3-part story-driven post: 1) what it is, 2) what it looks like in a school, 3) how to do it in your school
What advice would your 7th grade self give you about teaching? Remember when you were first starting out as an educator? The ink on your certification barely dried, and there you were, standing in front of your first class, 30-some pairs of eyeballs staring back at you, waiting for you to lead. We hear from six …
Continue reading “What we can learn from brand new educators”
Standard 3-part story-driven post: 1) what it is, 2) what it looks like in a school, 3) how to do it in your school
Standard 3-part story-driven post: 1) what it is, 2) what it looks like in a school, 3) how to do it in your school
Expand your classroom and keep kids engaged The weather is getting nicer. The sun is finally out. And you are in charge of keeping your class engaged, focused and …inside? Ha! Any teacher who has experienced spring in Vermont knows that students get a little wiggly this time of year. What’s a great way to harness that …
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The middle school team at Rutland Town School in Rutland, VT have been working on a more fully integrated implementation of personal learning plans (PLPs) at their school. They’re also passionate believers in student choice and learner-centered classrooms. Given some flexibility to change the school schedule, they came up with iLearn, a model of student self-direction and …
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How do project-based learning and makerspaces fit together? Making and PBL may look like two completely different educational movements, but in reality they work well together and each strengthens the other. That’s because they share a common fundamental underpinning: they honor students’ innate curiosity about the world.
Wondering how to blend project-based learning with STEAM? Yes, STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math. Earlier this year we profiled The Cabot School’s amazing public exhibition of sound sculptures highlighting water conservation. They were a big hit with the Cabot community, the students who made them and, it turns out, a fair number of …
Continue reading “The great Brian Eno-powered STEAM PBL caper”
Standard 3-part story-driven post: 1) what it is, 2) what it looks like in a school, 3) how to do it in your school
Standard 3-part story-driven post: 1) what it is, 2) what it looks like in a school, 3) how to do it in your school
Practice makes proficient What’s special about a proficiency-based environment? Practice, that’s what. I know, it sounded weird to me too. As a former math teacher, I thought of practice as the mind-numbing repetitive stuff that students had to do in order to attain fluency. Practice was for straightforward procedural skills. But Sam Nelson, a social studies …
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Standard 3-part story-driven post: 1) what it is, 2) what it looks like in a school, 3) how to do it in your school
Keys to innovative school change We all want students to engage more fully with school by experiencing it as a place that facilitates relevant, meaningful experiences that encourage growth. But what does that mean for educators and administrators? We’ve gathered resources, definitions and tech-rich, student-centered examples from Vermont schools to help educators and school leaders …
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Personalization for school-based service learning Looking for a way to harness students’ energy while giving them meaningful work that appeals to their personal interests? One model for service learning I’ve used is iLead: a “job-based” program that channels student interest into meaningful positions around the school. School community improves, students learn responsibility in a way that …
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Student exhibitions of project-based learning At this point we all know how important it is for students to share project-based learning with an authentic audience. It shows students they have power in the world, and that their research really makes a difference. But how best to design an exhibition that empowers students and provides a …
Continue reading “Student TED Talks, sound sculptures and a funk band”
Why digital composition matters I’d like you to think back to your days as a student. What kinds of writing did you do? Who read it? What made it important to you? And what made it important to the world? If you’re like most people, you’re probably drawing a blank right now. Some of today’s …
Continue reading “Beyond the audience of one”
Vermont’s new leading role online In today’s podcast, Mark Olofson talks with Joshua Rosenberg and Spencer Greenhalgh, education researchers from Michigan State University. Their research focuses on the state-level twitter conversations among educators: who is doing it, and what they’re getting out of it. And, spoiler alert, when they looked around the country, Vermont emerged …
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Strategies for starting a research project Whether the inspiring teacher examples from my last post roused your inner researcher, or you’re just one of those continuous improvement people (as most teachers are), it’s exciting to think that we could have some potential new knowledge creators out there. So let’s take a look at how to make …
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5 benefits of doing action research in the classroom Teachers are constantly tinkering, creating, learning, and growing. Action research is a slightly formalized version of what skilled teachers do every day. By honoring action research as systematic professional inquiry, we empower teachers to improve their practice. It’s easy to get started undertaking a small, powerful …
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For exit tickets, student support & action research Using Google Forms and Google Sheets together can streamline your process and make all your tasks feel just a little more manageable. As an educator, it can be a bit overwhelming trying to keep all your different data streams organized, not to mention the finding the time …
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Ways to support project-based learning Some people have the mistaken idea that PBL is just when you point students in the direction of a project and say, “Go for it!” Um, no. If your students have a culture of doing project-based learning and are very independent, it makes sense to give them a lot of …
Continue reading “Scaffolds to support PBL learners”
Community conversations about education What would you tell your neighbors about your school? What do you think they’d say in return? The Washington West Supervisory Union has set out to find out, by hosting a series of community conversations. Life LeGeros, a Tarrant Institute professional development coordinator and WWSU community member, is taking part in …
Continue reading “Tackling school change as a community”
Author and educator Katy Farber has a new series of posts looking at what makes project-based learning engaging, relevant and powerful for students. She breaks down each stage of PBL planning and includes templates, rubrics and actual student examples to set you up for success. Let’s get rolling. Get your brainstorms runnin’ Head out on …
Continue reading “The PBL Highway”
#vted = #vtexcellence A number of Vermont educators have been in the news lately, achieving and being recognized for the amazing work they do inside the classroom and out.
You’ve done an engaging entry event. You have a plan for your PBL unit with a focused driving question. Sweet! Now it’s time for the students to embark on research. But the world of information is a vast wilderness fraught with danger: the danger of misinformation! Before we can research, we need to brainstorm: What …
Continue reading “Brainstorming and Research in PBL”
Students themselves tell the best stories of their learning We wish we could hand you the one right way for students to reflect on their personal learning, on a silver platter. It sure would make the rest of the year a lot easier, right? But there are as many ways for students to reflect on …
Continue reading “How can students reflect on their PLPs?”
Staying grounded in best practices Research in the middle grades shares a common goal of understanding and improving teaching and learning. Best practices in middle grades education underpins everything we do here at the Tarrant Institute: the professional development we provide partner educators, the action research projects we help those educators undertake in their classrooms, …
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It’s about time I am fascinated with master schedules! This is certainly a massive understatement. I love the challenge of putting all the pieces together, showing how everything is connected. My mind is wired to think through a systems lens. I am always asking myself, if I change this thing over here what happens over …
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Outcomes, process and automaticity I worked with a group of teachers this summer to re-think goal-setting with their students. We know it’s a key component to developing Personalized Learning Plans (PLP), but students reported little engagement in following through on and reflecting about their goals. In our attempts to think differently about goal-setting and reflection, …
Continue reading “3 visualization exercises for proficiency-based learning”
Resources to tackle project-based learning Welcome to the PBL Highway, my new series aimed at helping you on the road to project-based learning! Setting up a student-driven, rigorous, community-focused project-based learning (PBL) unit can feel daunting, so the best way to tackle anything this huge (it’s yuge!) is to break it down into manageable steps. …
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Test the waters with “Genius Groups” Start by turning your class over to students. You heard me. Set aside classroom time to let your students design their learning. If you’re not quite ready for a full-on Genius Hour (where each individual student pursues their own learning passion), think about dipping a toe in the water …
Continue reading “Looking to try more student-directed learning?”
“I don’t believe you can be an educator committed to student voice and not be a powerful advocate for equity.” This past August, the University of Vermont played host to an international conference focused on ways to amplify student voice and increase student partnership in the classroom. Attendees were lucky enough to hear an address …
Continue reading “VT Secretary of Education speaks on equity in Vermont”
Structures & examples for student filmmakers Many students love working with video. Students can create videos for any subject to show specifically what they’re learning, how they spend their time and to demonstrate proficiency. But it’s not always obvious how you, as an educator, can help students see the connection to specific content areas. Let’s …
Continue reading “3 types of videos for showcasing content areas”
Achieving escape velocity with students as partners Congratulations for making it through the first month of school! Whether it’s your first year as an educator or your thirty-first, the launch of the school year is a special — and especially challenging — time. It’s worth taking a moment to reflect and imagine how to build …
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There is no tired like teachers at the beginning (or end) of the school year are tired. Establishing routines, procedures, community and trust takes time and lots (and lots!) of energy. How can you create classroom routines and norms so the class feels safe, comfortable, happy and ready for learning? Here are eight ideas.
