This summer, I have been looking at my teaching from a different perspective.  Specifically, how am I preparing my students for success in their lives and work after college?  This question was largely sparked by reading the book Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era (by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith), but also by college searching for my oldest son, who is going to be a senior in high school this year.  The book mostly addressed the middle, high school, and college levels, but had definite implications for elementary school.  The main ideas that I distilled from it were that we need a decrease of fact-based, static learning, and an increase in learning that emphasizes problem solving, student empowerment, and authenticity.

I also read two books by John Spencer and A.J. Juliani, Launch and Empower, which addressed the same themes and applied it to younger students.  These books certainly connected to my work with elementary dispositions.  The COVER dispositions - Collaboration, Optimism, Visualization, Experimentation, Reflection - in tandem with the Chappaqua Design Process (see below) give a frame and common vocabulary to this work.  I am feeling more comfortable with this disposition format, and am looking forward to using it to support my efforts to move my classroom in a more innovative direction.

Chappaqua Design Process

One other element of my planning for next year comes from the Make Writing Camp I am currently participating in with Angela Stockman.  This experience has convinced me of the value of treating writing as part of the design process and utilizing building ("making") as a way to spark ideas and play with words, phrases, and concepts.


I now plan to make some significant changes to my 3rd grade classroom for the 2017-18 school year, and look forward to seeing how they transpire.  All of them link to exercising and developing the COVER dispositions.

1) More flexible classroom set-up

I will be experimenting with making multiple work spaces around the classroom, instead of individual desks.  My hope is that this will encourage greater collaboration and allow for more opportunities to experiment and problem solve, especially in math, writing, and social studies.

2) Beginning math and writing with "challenges"

One aspect I felt my math teaching lacked last year was consistent opportunities for the students to problem solve in a way that developed collaboration, visualization, and experimentation.  I decided to begin my math lessons this year with a chance for the class to address an open-ended math problem in partners.  An "open-ended" problem would be more like: how many pizzas should we order if we had a class pizza party?  And less like: if a pizza has eight pieces, how many pieces would nine pizzas have?  My district currently uses Math in Focus, but I decided to go through some "math minute" materials I had saved from a number of older programs (like Math Land and Investigations).  I was able to find a number of "challenges" that met my criteria.  I plan to record and evaluate these as we go along.

Possible build materials

My work with Angela Stockman and "Make Writing" this week has convinced of the value of extending this thinking to my writing lessons.  An important aspect of this approach is to conceptualize writing as making (using the building blocks of words, phrases, and ideas).  Another aspect is to provide students a variety of avenues to tinker with writing concepts.  One way to do this is through "challenges" - opportunities for the students to build or draw based upon a prompt connected to a writing outcome.  For example, students could build their character in a way that shows a trait, or they could examine an object and draw a specific detail.  I plan to add these kind of challenges (also called "firestarters") to the beginning of my writing lessons.  I expect that this will develop the dispositions of Visualization and Experimentation.  It may also increase the Optimism that the students feel towards writing.

3) Move towards greater Authenticity

An area I continue to struggle with is finding authentic tasks and audiences for my third graders, especially audiences beyond the students' peers and parents.  I am inspired by Launch to renew my commitment to this aspect of the design process.  This will affect all areas of my classroom.  For example, I will attempt to choose authentic problem solving challenges in math; point towards more extended authentic audiences in writing; create authentic coding exercises and outcomes; and encourage authentic research, observation, and application in social studies.

4) Strive for increased student Empowerment

Page from Empower

The book Empower (see top) is interesting in that it is a call to give students more ownership and choice in their learning.  Part of this connects to their previous book, Launch, in that they encourage us to help students pursue their own interests and projects (and launch them).  However, they also extend this concept to all aspects of learning - including assessments, lessons, learning standards, etc.  While they recommend starting with a single project or Genius Hour format, they also encourage teachers to do a "choice-audit" of their classroom day to determine which elements allow for more student input.  It is this aspect that I intend to pursue this year - to look for ways to better
 include my students in the process of learning.