1. What resources/ideas did I share this week? One of the things I always find the most effective to share with others is my own personal experiences with something. It's not always the case that we are discussing something where I feel an experience I have had would directly contribute to making a point or supporting a point of view, but when it does, it seems that others appreciate what I have to share. I know this is the case with me as well - when I am learning about something new, and someone can tell me a story about it with a personal experience that really paints a vivid picture in my mind about how that can look in a classroom, that really stays with me.
2. What did I intend to be the impact of my resources on others' learning? I had hoped that by sharing my personal experience about how I brought the process of inquiry into my own classroom, and the impact it had, that they would have a better idea about how this kind of learning can really look in action. It seems that often when discussing inquiry learning, people still take away the idea that we the teachers are posing the questions and it is the students who have to find answers to them. Real inquiry means the students are asking the questions that guide their own learning.
3. What actual impact could I discern? It seems like people responded to this in my comments, expressing interest and enthusiasm that this is working well even with older students who are not necessarily used to it.
4. What will I do differently next week? Of course, I'd like to be able to say I have the perfect classroom experience story to fit every situation. Sharing these not only can help others, but it helps me to reflect on what I am doing, and then question it to see if I can take it further. However, I don't always have a good story, and often our topics of discussion are things I have only passing or very mundane experiences with - nothing particularly insightful or visionary! But what I want to do more of is thinking about how it could look if I really took the initiative to apply it.
5. What resources did others share that made a difference to my learning? Barbra always gets me to thinking about what we really want from good leadership, and this week her post made me realize that even our leaders are not always empowered to feel like true visionaries - to a certain extent, many are made to feel their destinies, and those of their teachers and students, are chained to test scores, and that's unfortunate. Andrea shared a couple of resources I really liked. One was 11 ways to make an inquiry-based classroom, and the other was a Pinterest board on math inquiry learning. Although I am the first to admit I am often scared by math, I really enjoy reading blogs by math teachers who have a passion for teaching math, and are willing to do innovative things - I'm always interested in her posts. Many of the ideas on the math Pinterest board were simple - I think she was looking for bigger ideas - but they could be applied to lots of things. I appreciate easy to use, flexible resources like that.
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