In Command, out of Control
Meeting expectations is boring. I’ve decided to allow my students to amaze me by relinquishing Control of my classroom and focusing on staying in Command instead. Could this shift in mindset work in your classroom?
How would you start the conversation?
After getting the opportunity to talk with a group of student-teachers who are just a month away from graduation, a few of their questions stuck with me:
“How do I approach a teacher in my same subject area or grade level if I want to try something new?”
“How do I let a teacher know that they’re doing something that seems like it’s not right for students?”
“How do I motivate an experienced teacher to make even a small change that will help students?”
How would you answer these questions?
Learning is changing. Are we?
It’s obvious that the way our students learn is changing rapidly and dramatically. As the capabilities of personal technology increase and personal devices spread, cheating is taking on a new look and feel. What are students doing to cheat? Find out what simple shifts teachers can make to engage students turn these “cheating” practices into powerful learning experiences.
Lessons from video games: Getting students invested in learning
In good video games, as in school, true learning only happens when students are able to situate learning with experience
Teach like a video game: Put students in the story
Dylan Mansur, a former student of mine who now designs video games, believes that both gamers and students ask themselves the same question early on in their experiences: “What does it mean that I’m here?” The question seems simple enough, but it took me completely by surprise. As a teacher, I’ve spent hours pondering what my [...]
Embrace failure as a pathway to understanding
When I talked to my students about playing video games, many of them had stories of tremendous feats of gaming endurance. Some admitted to sessions lasting over 16 hours at a time. Some talked about working on one gaming objective for weeks at a time. They read guides, collaborated with friends, hypothesized and experimented, learned, and endured.
Many teachers wonder why these students can work so hard for so long at something “meaningless” like a video game and not apply themselves in school the same way. One answer may come from another thing these students had to do in order to master their games.
They failed. They failed a lot. They failed in spectacular ways and they failed by a fraction of a second. They failed over and over again, and yet they progressed and never gave up.
