At the start of the school year, we simultaneously focus on building community in our classrooms, while fostering the culture of learning challenging curriculum. Being comfortable in a classroom does not exclude rigorous curriculum; in fact, the greater the safety, the greater the confidence to challenge oneself. By creating norms and processes for learning from mistakes, we encourage growth as well as a safe learning community.
How can BYOD support academically safe and challenging classrooms? In Identity Safety Classrooms, Steele and Cohn-Vargas, provide a few examples of how to “encourage students to ask for help” that we can adapt to our learning with devices as we provide challenging curriculum.
Encouraging Self-Assessment and Growth Mindset to Improve Performance
Steele and Cohn-Vargas describe one teacher who points out her own mistakes, a safe classroom norm that may be useful as we model “growth mindset” when trying a new Learning in the Cloud and GAFE strategy. Another teacher, they note in their chapter on Challenging Curriculum, has created a game which includes her students presenting errors to the class, followed by the whole class working to find and correct the “mistake in thinking”. This public analysis is is an indicator of and can promote a safe classroom.
Opportunities with Technology
One modification, more private and thus perhaps more appropriate at this time of year, would be to comment using our teacher device on a student’s work without walking up to the student. Many of our colleagues use this process, and students appreciate getting feedback without the rest of the class knowing they are getting help. And many teachers are differentiating their feedback process by both responding from a device and also walking around the room to monitor, support, and extend student learning with a face to face conversation. That dance between responding digitally and in person seems to create a safe, engaged, and challenging learning environment.
Using split screens can encourage student’s independent assessment and improvement. Using scissors and glue or other options described in earlier posts (add link here), ask each students to open their original work in one screen, and make a copy in a second screen. In the second screen they can make changes and explanations for the changes, possibly in a new color. Once they have completed their revision, they should paste their original work above their revised work and turn in that second document. If more useful, the shared or opposite screen can be the assignment's rubric that the student can use to inform their revisions.
If appropriate, students can do this revision process in pairs. I have allowed students the choice to revise their work on their own or do this work in pairs, getting feedback from a peer.
This second document, now with 2 versions of a response, can be kept as a part of a journal or learning log or turned in to you. You should have better work to review and both you and the students will have documentation of their academic skills and content growth.
Our Goals
Encouraging editing and improvement supports Autonomy and Competence, using pairs honors Diversity as a resource, and using devices and collaboration supports 21st Century college and career expectations.
There are many ways to use devices to support student peer and self assessments; watch for more posts and professional development opportunites. But for now, just using a split screen is an easy way to use devices for revisions.
In closing, here is another anecdote I just read that supports making mistakes to help us make something: From the ubiquitous Humans of New York and Iran:
“(My father)’d bring me to work with him and trust me with jobs. He’d take apart mechanical devices and ask me to reassemble them. If I made a mistake, he’d never punish me. He’d even help me hide my report card if I made a bad grade. He was mainly concerned with building my confidence to attempt new things, so that I could always learn by doing. Now as an adult, people call me crazy for attempting things that seem ‘out of my depth.’ This bridge is one example. Nobody is prouder of this bridge than my father. He collects all the newspaper articles.”- Leila Araghian
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Leila Araghian and Alireza Behzadi are the young designer and builder behind Tehran’s recently completed Tabiat Bridge. Construction of the bridge was completed in 2014 despite the difficulties of international sanctions. The bridge has become a cultural and physical centerpiece of Tehran, and Leila captured the imagination of the architecture world by winning the right to design it at the age of 26. (Tehran, Iran)
*a poster in a favorite Kindergarten classroom.
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