A Teacher's Ruminations

My One Little Word (OWL) for 2015...drum roll, please...is..." confident "! I came about this word fairly quickly during the last two weeks of 2014. I started by making a list. The first word on that list was "confident". Then, came a stream of words and short phrases - assertive, confidence, be myself, just do it!, health, communication, exercise, and change. My methodical but slow search for the perfect OLW for 2015, made me realize that the word "confident" addressed or subsumed all the other words on my list quite nicely. In order to be assertive and stand up for myself, I need to be confident in my professional abilities and expertise. That way I can speak eloquently for whatever I want to accomplish in my job. In order to focus on my health during 2015, such as exercising more, I need to be confident that I can develop a daily 30 minute exercise routine, whatever shape or form that happens to take. In order to be myself, I need the confid...

Four weeks ago I implemented Genius Hour with my grade seven students. As is wont to happen when I implement something new in the classroom, I read and think about it a lot before I finally do it. But, that doesn't necessarily mean I have a well-thought out plan for how I'm going to do something! It's more of a skeleton of what we're going to do and depending on how my students respond - I am rarely prepared for what they will say or do no matter how long I've been teaching - I will make modifications as we go along. In order introduce Genius Hour to my class, we viewed a couple of motivational videos of  Caine's Arcade . Then, we talked about finding something you are passionate about and using Genius Hour to work on that interest. In my eyes, this was enough to launch the first Genius Hour work session, so the week following the Caine's Arcade videos the kids got to work on their Genius Hour projects. I would address any unforeseen events or problems as...