Hack my class

So i have being think about doing this for a little while now, just as a way to get ideas out there and also to reflect on my own practise for registration but also because my student deserve me looking at me and critiquing me. So I have being at the teaching game for 5 terms, I am considered the baby off the staff at school, I am the youngest member of staff, and it also seem the most injury prone, hence my nickname glass.
You will also notice I have a really bad habit of getting off on tangents, I do it in class and generally my students sit back for the ride, that are all based on what we a covering in class but delve in to other aspect that are not really relevant to what we are doing but are (well i think they are) interesting packets of knowledge. they have in the pasted generated some really good discussion with the students, and I am now developing a way to filter them, which is making them into really useful teaching opportunities not just time fillers.

So the main point of this blog (see me and my tangents) was to follow my attempts at #hackyrclass. This idea of hacking your class was put forward by Claire Amos (DP at Hobsonville Point Secondary), I stumbled upon this over the weekend after attending the BYOD conference on Thursday at Hobsonville Point. That day I was fortunate enough to go to the talk by one of her colleagues Danielle Myburgh. This presentation really opened my eyes in combination with an earlier talk to the idea of 21st century learning and means to go about it and some ideas and apps etc. to try out. It during this talk i jumped on twitter and looked Danielle up, and you could say the rest is history. That day lead my too Danielle's blog and twitter and to all the amazing things she is doing and to Claire twitter and her website via Alyx, another 2nd year teacher who was on prac at Rangi the same time I was.  They say all good things happen for a reason and I am certain of it. It was like the stars aligned and now here i am wring my first ever blog post about a challenge Claire set down for term 2.

So what is this challenge i speak of, well it is very simple it is to hack your classroom and to adopt the growth mindset.
When I first read through Claire post it did reminded me of something a lecture did say to me at uni and it resonated with the way I want to teach. So the school I teach in despite being a relativity new school it is very tradition, I mean really tradition. So trying to break out of this setting is going to be interesting, even more so since i share my lad with our physics teacher, so I cannot make any drastic changes that will effect him, but in saying that he is very open to me trying new things with the space which is awesome and very accommodating.

So the the first thing i did after Thursday was to go home and over the weekend completely reformatted the unit of work i have just started with my year 10, making it way more student focused and driven that teacher driven.

So after spending all weekend thinking about how I am going to adopt the growth mindset and hack my class I introduced the idea to both my year 10 science classes this morning after we had gone over there topic tests from the end of last term.

when we were going of the test I was consciously reinforcing how study and hard work was important and praising the student for all there shard working during the topic and in there study for the test. With all my topic test I get the students 1 week out to write down what they would like to get on the test. I do this to help motive them and also so they verbalise what there expectations are. It really seems to be having positive outcomes as I have noticed the amount of work and effort put in has increased dramatically as they all want to succeed for themselves.

So I introduced the idea of the growth mindset and hacking my class to my Year 10 this morning and explained to them what I was hoping to achieve and what we as entire group was hoping to achieve. Apart from a few smart comments from some of my boys they listened intently and i could see them possessing this new method of teaching we are going to experience together. After laying the initial ground work i dropped the bombshell i had spent all weekend working on. How this new type of teaching is going to look.

This is what i am doing with my Year 10s, we are starting our first physics topic of the year and instead of me teaching for the first week they are going to be the teachers of each other. I have 4 groups of 3/4 students in each class (yes i have a class of 16 and a class of 15) and each of them was given a topic that they will be teaching the rest of the class. The were given the topic notes I had prepared and a guideline sheet.

This is my first attempt at doing anything like this and the looks on some of the students faces was priceless, it was a real mix of shock, horror and disbelieve. The interesting thing was as so as they had all there instruction and had asked the initial question they got right down to business and re remainder of the lesson was really productive. The proof will be in the pudding on Friday when they do there presentation in the doubles.

Wish me luck