Capturing the Educational Journey of a Lifelong Learner

At the Newaygo County Career-Tech Center, I do not have to instigate the student’s “why”.  Every student in my classroom has chosen to be there.  My class is not a typical class that you must complete to get needed credits for graduation.  Students have an interest in the trades and select my program as an elective.  That makes learning so much more enjoyable in our culture.  Do we have room to improve?  Sure!  We all do!  I am in the process of creating/guiding a community where students learn together from each other.  Our class embraces failures as opportunities for growth, part of their pathway to success.  My innovation plan incorporates a blended model to aid in the self-exploration of their selected wing of the trades.  My job is to be their tour guide as they embark on their journey.

 

New evidence-based reporting will compliment this style as the “grade” will disappear.  Students will get feedback based on their benchmarks along the way.  All trades have similar big ideas that can be monitored and evaluated along the way.  Students will feel more independent, yet highly supported at the same time.  Their exploration online will be accompanied by real-world activities where they can actually “do” the tasks that they study. 

 

Adopting these strategies will require minimal change in our system.  I truly feel as though our organization is cutting edge in our State.  We have been the host to schools across the State that travel to learn our way of education.  We have been studying and implementing growth mindset, the power of “yet”, understanding the “why” and embracing technology as a fundamental concept in our learning environments.  We are not without faults though and continue to look for improvement opportunities.  I am blessed to be a part of an atmospheres that welcomes and shares new innovative ideas.

 

The Newaygo County Community Organizations bring their problems to our students and 2-4 students from each class volunteer to bring their talents together to solve these problems.  These “experiential service projects” are student led and have a mentor teacher there just to aid when needed.  In our construction class, students take a journey into the career path of their choosing.  They explore and report to the class their findings.  They become the “expert” in their field showing major concepts to their peers.

 

Many of the styles implemented in my classroom are reflections of learning that influenced me along my own path.  One of my favorite classes happened in a community college class on web design.  The professor began the classes with lectures and learned quickly that we had many more ideas and deeper questioning when she allowed us to work on our “projects”.  Her lectures dwindled to where she eventually just gave our class the period to work on our projects and she became the guide.  She was there to answer questions.  In some cases, she did not know the answers.  We would explore them and then teach her how we solved our own questions!  This, to this day, has been my favorite class because I was invested in my project.  We only had to develop a site with 10 pages linked in some way.  When I presented my project to the class it had over 50 pages!  It would have been cool to incorporate the “blog” except I do not believe that they were as big back in 2006! 

 

I do believe that incorporating these concepts along with the blended learning model will influence my own learning philosophy.  Autonomy with Collaboration, a peer led learning environment where your “grades” are not traditional they are simply documenting your proficiency progress.  Students must have the buy-in.  The main challenge will be to break them from their normal “sit-n-get” environment to allow them to be in control of their own journey!  I am excited to facilitate and share this new style in our classroom!