I Took A Risk This Week

 

We have really been pushing learning strategies to engage students at our school the last year and a bit. 

• We have inserted them into our staff meetings, where we model the strategies and make the staff work through them
• We built our Implementation Day around student engagement activities
• About half of out staff have received Kagan Cooperative Learning training (1-5 days worth)
• Our Circle of Friends (grade 1-6, multi-aged) groups, who meet once per month, are working on a cooperative learning project with student engagement structures embedded into it
• We have had a Kagan coach come into the school
• Many staff are sharing ideas and resources, and restructuring their classrooms around the training that they have received

 I am so pleased with the direction that we are moving, and very proud of my staff.  Still, I really wanted to push the envelope.  I wanted to do something beyond what I (and we) maybe thought that we could.  So, I took a big risk this week and put my money where mouth was.

I used a cooperative learning structure to debrief our last Circle of Friends activity...with all 237 students--at once--during an assembly.  It was wonderful!  Sure it was noisy, we would expect that when 237 people are sharing ideas with each other in the same room.  Sure, it required a bit of set up and a bunch of help from my teachers;  I think that we would expect that too.  What we ended up with, however, was spectacular.  We had every grade, partnered up, sharing their ideas of what a sensible school was (what we would see, hear and feel).  That means, for each question exactly 50 % of the room was talking and 50% was listening.  We modelled appropriate greetings and compliments, we changed partners, and we were engaged!  When I was a student, the most common scenario was 1 teacher talking and 32 students listening.  Think back to what I just said happened in the gym where everyone was partnered up and taking turns listening and talking.  1 out of every 2 students was sharing, and 1 out of every 2 students was listening, and then sharing back (with compliments!).  That is a phenomenal improvement in both participation and accountability.

A move from this:

 

To this



And, best of all, it worked!