Teaching to Learn--Just one of the ways that students can own their own learning

One of my primary foci with implementing a 1:1 iPad environment was to establish a community where students took on the role of teachers.  This idea stemmed from my experiences as an undergrad in the Pioneer Leadership Program at DU where we focused on the impact of Service Learning and has evolved with the integration of tech into my classroom.


During my second year as a teacher, the juniors and seniors in my Conceptual Physics classes developed physics lessons to share with elementary students in local elementary schools--they used backward design and developed a short 10-minute station lab mini-lesson that they then got to implement and later reflect on. The experience was more fun than powerful, but my students loved getting to be the experts.

The following year, ING provided funds* for our students to visit the elementary students three times. Again, we began preparing for these experiences by investigating what makes a lesson successful, then exploring backwards design in which students had to first identify their learning targets, then develop activities to address these. The element that I add to the lesson design this second year was a focus on formative assessment--getting my students to think about what their students had learned, and what evidence they had to show their students' learning and/or growth.

In designing their first lesson (on Newton's Laws), students again focused more on making sure the students had "fun", and developed engaging, hands-on mini-experiments.  After the field trip to the elementary classroom, students debriefed the experience by participating in a summarizing discussion.  Students shared that they felt they'd made a difference, that their students had enjoyed the activities and were excited about science, and that they thought they'd learned something.  But when I again asked, "what did your students learn, and how do you know?", there was a shift in the atmosphere--suddenly, the elation that students felt about successfully implementing their lessons turned to confusion (and frustration) about not being able to clearly identify what their students had learned.

As my students embarked on preparations for their 2nd and 3rd lessons (on Energy and Static Electricity), they exhibited a clear shift in focus--from wanting to have fun, to wanting to make sure their students learned something.  With that came discussions and brainstorming about formative assessment and how to measure understanding.   Suddenly, my students were vested in the project in a very different way than at the onset--they felt they were agents of change and truly wanted to have an impact in their students lives.  Needless to say, students were much more intentional with their lessons and observant of their students during the next two field experiences.  And, they were much more vested in learning the content material themselves prior to teaching it.

The following year, I decided to try something new--rather than having them develop lessons to teach elementary students, I shifted my focus more to the work of the Learning Assistants at CU Boulder, and decided to establish a community where my students could instead contribute to teaching their peers.  To do this, I tasked my students with developing Screencast tutorials (voice- and written-video tutorials, similar to those of Khan Academy) to teach how to solve problems**.  With these screencasts, we began assembling a digital collection of content-specific student tutorials which we stored on Dropbox so that students could access them anytime, anywhere.

Importantly, the Learning Assistant model at CU incorporates 3 major activities: learning content; learning pedagogy; combining content and pedagogy to facilitate lessons.  Although students were learning content, then putting it into practice with their tutorials, I wanted to incorporate a focus on pedagogy.  To do this, students began watching and evaluating peer tutorials in order to answer the question, "What makes a good screencast?"  Individually, then later in groups and as a class, we began to identify exemplars, and to develop a rubric for evaluating these tutorials.  Students decided that it was incredibly important to integrate creative tidbits and sought novel ways of engaging their audience.  They focused on the needs and interests of their audience in shaping what information they provided, and in what ways to deliver it.  Similar to the shift in focus that I'd seen in my students when creating lessons for elementary students when challenged with thinking about what their pupils had learned and how they knew it, I again saw a shift in focus for my Screencasters--they now felt vested in a different way, and wanted to be agents of change to support their peers' growth.   And, again, I found that students were more concerned with learning the content material themselves in order to be able to teach it to someone else--having an authentic audience changed the level of accountability.  In both types of activities, students also had the freedom to be creative, they had choice over how to implement their lessons and they had reason (authentic audience) for deeper metacognition.   Through creation of their teaching tools, my students provided me with a much better understanding of what they themselves had learned.

But what brought these learning experiences to the front of my thoughts?  My friend and fellow 1:1 iPad integrator, Mary Beth Cheversia, and I have been preparing our workshop for the 2014 InnEdCO conference.  We've been working to align our iPad activities with both the Revised Bloom's (and Bloom's Digital Taxonomy) as well as with the NGSS Practices of Scientists and Engineers.  And, this morning, she sent along an article from Mind/Shift--"Four Meaningful Ways Students Can Contribute" by Katrina Schwartz.  The author shares the work of Alan November, who suggests four "jobs" students can take on in order to be agents of change within their learning community, hopefully leading to increased motivation and engagement.

These four jobs include:
1) Tutorial Designers
2) Student Scribes
3) Student Researchers
4) Global Communicators and Collaborators

While my students often take on the role of Tutorial Designers, I am going to focus on how I can integrate these other three jobs to engage more students.

How about you--what jobs do your students have within your learning community?  How do you make learning more meaningful for your students?


* If you are looking for grant money for a project, the ING Unsung Heroes program awards grants of $2000 (and more) to 2 teachers from each state each year.
** The app we use, almost exclusively, for creating screencasts is Explain Everything.  Initially, I'd chosen this app because, three years ago, it was the only one that would export tutorials as single movie files to Dropbox (and later, to the camera roll for export to anywhere)