Personalized Learning Notes
March 2021
What you'll find in this month's PL Notes
- A link to the playlist of the podcasts submitted to the NPR Student Podcast Challenge
- How to use First Chapter Fridays
- The importance of sharing student process as well as product
- Grading practices with an eye for equity
- How to be a warm defender
- Hexagonal Thinking Digital Toolkit
- Collaboration Classroom Toolkit
- Resources for teaching outside
Hear the NPR Student Podcast Challenge Entries!
- What Life is Like with CAH, by Josie Milla and Kayla McIntyre, 5th grade
- Animals and COVID: What should we know?, by Frida Hernandez, 5th grade
- 2021 Goals, by Nadia Lamin, Sumaya Hussein, and Gabriella Smith, 7th grade
- Understanding the Hijab, by Juwariye Barrio, 8th grade
Each podcast is between 3 and 8 minutes long.
First Chapter Fridays
Read the We Are Teachers article by Betty Potash here to find more ways to use this idea.
Share Student Process, Not Just Product
How Teachers are Changing Grading Practices with an Eye on Equity
Read the full MindShift article by Katrina Schwartz here.
Can Teachers Be Warm Defenders During the Pandemic?
Read the full Edutopia article by Chris Kubic HERE.
Free Lessons and Toolkits
Hexagonal Thinking Toolkit
Hexagonal thinking is a simple method that yields big critical thinking results. Kids take a set of hexagons with varied terms, concepts, themes, real-world connections, etc. that relate to your current unit of study, and then link them together into an interconnected web. In pairs, groups, or even alone, they must use their critical thinking skills to decide which hexagons link best to which others.
This can be done with paper hexagons or with hexagons online.
The key, in the end, will be that students are able to explain and argue for the order they have placed their hexagons in.
Collaborative Classroom Toolkit
- Collaboration Rubric
- Group Contract Template
- Skills Assessment
- Peer/Self Assessment
- Pre-Collaboration Self-Assessment
- Missing Tape Instructions
- Discussion Ground Rules Poster
- Collaborative Classroom Discussion Rubric
- Project Overview Template
- Project Management Log Template
- Cost for Collaboration Table
- Joint Write-Ups Template:
Ready-to-Use Outdoor Lessons
Let me know if you'd like help setting up some outdoor learning stations for your class, or check out the many curriculum resources HERE, available from Teach Outdoors! Minnesota.
- Short, interactive activities with ECO Cards
- Lessons from Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center, with supports for DL instruction
- and many more!
Personalized Learning at STRIDE
Personalized Learning (PL):
Develops self-reflective learners who actively participate in:
Setting learning goals
Designing learning paths
Deciding how to demonstrate learning and growth
Ruth Thom, Personalized Learning Coordinator