This week I'm attending the Creative Learning Environments Conference at Mid-Prairie. I will be posting my thoughts and reflections from speakers and work I've done this week here.
Day 1 Journal Entry - Speaker Kevin Honeycutt
There is a strong importance to tapping into emotions. Emotions inspire. Emotions make it memorable. How many teachers want what they are doing in their class to be memorable? That is the key to what motivates so many of us!
There are a few quotes that jogged some thinking....
...Why do we force students to “wait to think” with hand-raising? What if the environment of the classroom was not linked to an answer provided by a student who was brave enough to raise their hand? Do students think that they only need to come up with the answer if they put their hand in the air?
...tra-digital learners? Can students be both traditional and digital learners? Are they to the place where they can problem solve in real-world situations? What would happen if you unplugged the internet during class? Well, I know that all of them become completely helpless and they all look to the adult in the room. In this case, the internet is controlling them, they are not controlling the internet.
A key to this is to make it real for students. How does this become real? Kevin shared the story of creating an author in a student. That made it become real for the student the moment that they held their own book in their hands. What if students did make their own product, their own book and it only sold 1? Could a shark tank environment work in a middle school where they evaluate WHY it didn’t work? Could they give constructive feedback to each other? What if they studied sharks to understand how a shark tank works (video)?
