Hannah Emmanuele
App-smashing, co-creating artifacts of learning, fighting the boring monster, developing perseverance and grit–this teacher gets it.
Parents seeking to understand how modern learning culture presents in a public school setting will be richly rewarded by hearing London, Ontario elementary teacher Michelle Cordy. The video above effectively demonstrates the chasm between the traditional model of school and modern learning:
- creating the conditions for adults and students to actively learn together,
- modeling the iterative opportunities of failure,
- designing learning opportunities based on how people actually learn and not just teaching the “standards”,
- amplifying student voice and agency,
- helping kids discover their passion,
- bringing the teacher’s passion into the classroom (the trifecta of motivation: mastery, autonomy and purpose),
- developing the vital habits of mind such as courage, curiosity and creativity, deep thinking and growth mindset,
- no grades, peer to peer assessments, ePortfolios and so much more.
Accomplishing all this while delivering the state-required curriculum–only in a much more powerful way. As PernilleRipp advocates, it’s no longer enough to just be a connected educator anymore. We also have to let students reach out to the world as well. Hence, Michelle’s 3rd graders create ePortfolios to amplify their potential and enable them to make their mark on the world well outside the classroom walls.
Borrowing a term from hacker culture, Michelle is a self described “teacher on an urgent quest” to transform education. She blogs at HackTheClassroom.ca. Here’s a sample of this connected educator’s openness and generosity in sharing her own learning journey with the world:
What will change education is exposure to rich and meaningful hands on tasks that engage the heart, head and hands as Gary Stager suggested in his keynote. We need to empower and support a largely female-non-science-educated teaching force with tools, tool kits, guides and guidebooks to lower the barriers to equipment and increase access to making at any price point. We need to keep our vision locked on student learning. We must regain and maintain a laser sharp focus on the process, inquiry, problem solving, debugging and nurturing passion and engagement that I think FabLabs are more than capable of facilitating.
Read more here. To see how her thinking evolves with the input of her extensive network of collaborators, read the comments section here.
Cordy and thousands of others like her are working hard to create the conditions for children to experience powerful learning experiences, accomplishing far more than a thorough march through the textbook ever could.
Follow Michelle on Twitter @cordym.
