Celebration Design Task

For the Flat Classroom course I am completing I have been asked to design a celebration of learning. Some people are really good at celebrating learning journeys and some of the people I work with are particularly good at ensuring that milestones are celebrated.

I think that it is as important to celebrate the process as the destination. Philosopher R.S.Peters stated that, “Education is not a destination, it is travelling with a different view.” Sports coaches seem to be particularly adept at celebrating the process, like when a new skill is learnt, and the destination, like a personal best.

Over the past few years I have learned a great deal about how to encourage students to reflect on their learning and I have written previously about the Visible Thinking approaches. One routine that I have developed for regular use with students uses four prompts:
I learned…
I liked…
I wish…
I wonder…

It is always fascinating to see what they comment on and what moments have sparked an insight for them. I love the Reggio Emilia-inspired approach of documentation. When you document student learning, their learning often increases simply through the process of the documentation. I have been trying to use speech bubbles to capture interesting thoughts that students have during class and then post them on the walls so that we can reflect on how our learning as a group is developing. I would like to start developing the habit of taking photographs of things that pique my interest during a lesson and posting them as well, or maybe even showing a video clip of a previous lesson before I begin a new lesson. Similarly, with staff professional learning meetings, I’m thinking of starting a rotuine of showing a short video clip of student learning at the beginning of meetings.

We have begun conversations about using our school website to display examples of student work. This is an edited version of our draft protocol:

DRAFT – Student Work on Website Protocol
1. The purpose of displaying student work is to provide a global audience and visibility for student work. Marketing considerations are not the primary purpose of displaying student work.
2. Suitable digital work might be: scanned excerpts of written work, video clips, and photographs.
3. Work may consist of finished products/outstanding work or be more process-oriented/reflective of a student’s best effort.
4. A brief commentary should appear alongside the thumbnail of the work, which can be clicked on to enlarge.
5. Only first names should be used when identifying students and group photos should be used rather than individual photos.

Years ago I started to collect samples of outstanding student work and I like the concept of developing a ‘library of learning’ based on this.

Maybe next year I will develop a class blog with a rotating student journalist responsible for documenting weekly learning.

The idea of using Wordle to capture student learning is also interesting.

I run an annual week-long film festival for our 200 Year 10 students and we have prizes for the top films and there is always a student choice award. I wonder if the concept of planning celebrations of student learning might be a good discussion topic for our Student Voice Think Tank?

Lots of thinking aloud here. I seem to be mixing up the idea of celebrating learning with documenting learning. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing?

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