The grade three students (10 classes) are learning about energy – specifically about its transformation from one form to another in order to be used by people. At the same time we, as a team of teachers, are working at transforming our practice in order to promote deeper understanding for ourselves and our students. It’s this last point that I will focus on for this post.
Co-evolving is this year’s initiative for our primary school faculty. How do we collectively improve our practice? Teaching requires a great deal of energy. How can we make efficient and effective use of our energy? At least for me, part of the answer lies in shifting more responsibility to the learner. When students have more ownership, choice, and engagement with the concepts and content of the unit, deeper understandings are made. It can be tough for teachers to let go of some of the control, but the benefits can be remarkable. I’ve found the makerspace has been a great catalyst for shifting some of this control and responsibility away from the teachers. Seeing every student engaged in making something – something that will help them to better understand the concepts and content of the unit – helps some teachers see the benefit of this more open-ended and student-centred approach.
What do you see as the teacher’s role in this?
STEAM Teaching and Learning 
Hey, I feel like I was just wondering this. My thoughts were changing how we approach our environment. Like we consider teaching work, work takes up energy, so you have less of it. We think of it as work, partly because of school work and the metaphors our society has created around the idea of education.
What if we changed our metaphor, and school was play (still takes energy) but how does that empower your learners, how does that “shift the responsibility” towards them.
I think a lot of what our makerspace does is empower those students, but how do we transfer that energy to the class right?
Anyway, liking this week’s thoughts.
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I feel that we aren’t there yet – some classes have shifted, and the energy has been transferred from the makerspace to them – but we are on the right path. Not sure where the answer lies… maybe if we reach some sort of critical mass?
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