Student Empowerment

Every day my students are becoming more and more empowered, and it is so exciting to watch. Today I have two small, yet exciting stories that illustrate this point. This morning three students were working on fundraising ideas to help defray the cost of international travel for our team who will be going to Nicaragua to meet our partners in March, and they came up with an idea that tied into homecoming. I asked them who was in charge of homecoming and they told me, so I put the ball back in their court and asked them to write an email to that teacher explaining what they wanted to do and why. Within 45 minutes, that teacher was standing at our door saying how exciting it was to have gotten an email directly from the students and how thrilled she would be to tie that fundraising idea into homecoming. The three girls were proud and the teacher was excited to be involved too . . . score #1!

This afternoon I was teaching a different group of students, when one of my UNLOCK students bounced in the door and said "I have something that we have to watch in the morning." I asked her what it was and she showed me a preview of a spoken word poem that is being released tomorrow and it ties directly into our work. She was super excited and after I saw the preview I was excited too. When my students are the ones bringing the content to me, that is pretty amazing . . . score#2!

I'd say today was a pretty great day :)

A Day To Remember

I am in way over my head teaching a PBL class with a bunch of kids who want to change the world - daunting, but since I am always talking about the importance of taking risks, I figured I really couldn't not take my own advice here. We've been in school for about 3 weeks and there have been some really good days (as well as not so good days). We have accomplished A LOT, but there was something missing that I didn't know how to fix. PBL is supposed to be all about students driving the learning, and as much as I tried not to, I was really in the driver's seat . . . until day.

Today started out as a normal day. It was Friday, everyone was tired (including me), so we did a little exercise to get us warmed up. We played a silly game that was fun and made everyone laugh, and then we started a very serious conversation about where our work needed to be taking us. I laid some things out to my students about what wasn't happening that needed to happen, they laid some things out for me about why things were going the way they were and what they needed from me, and then it happened.

We had 5-6 next steps written on our very cool dry erase wall, and one of the students just got up and said, "Alright guys you all tell me what you're gonna work on and I'm gonna write down your name beside it." So students started calling their names out and he wrote them down. A few things were not being worked on and a few students had not volunteered for anything, so this student said, "You have to work on something, so tell me what you're going to work on." They listened. Once everyone had signed up they all went straight to work and came up with some amazing ideas. Then they started sharing their ideas with each other and that sparked even more great ideas. I left the class still brainstorming different things because I was so energized by their creativity.

I don't know where our work is going to lead us exactly. I don't know how our success will be measured by others, but I do know that today is the day that my students took over their class and it became their own. That, in and of itself, is a mark of success to me, so this is a day I want to remember!