When I was in the fifth grade, I kept a journal for class. My teacher would give us fifteen minutes to write whatever we wanted. I pretty much only wrote about baseball — and the Giants, in particular. For me, those fifteen minutes felt like…
Picture this. I’m standing up front at the front of the class, an awkward high school freshman new to Arizona. I’m shy. Painfully shy. I don’t know anyone in my class. Every part of me wants to crawl up into a ball and hide. The…
We often hear about the need for students to learn how to program in order to be ready for STEM fields and the Information Economy. It’s what we’ve been hearing for over a decade. However, there’s a fascinating piece from the Washington Post that explores…
Student ownership sounds like a great idea but what about the standards? How do we teach all of the standards while also empowering students with voice and choice? How do we accomplish this when we have a curriculum map? Rethinking the Curriculum Map It…
About a decade ago, I had a group of students who had a great concept. They would make a paper mural. It would be shaped like the U.S.-Mexico border and it would have a picture of the Statue of Liberty in the middle with a…
This article is part of a larger series on design thinking. Students begin with Look, Listen, and Learn, which is all about awareness and empathy. They move into Ask Tons of Questions, an inquiry phase. This leads to research in the Understanding the Process or…
This article is part of a longer series on design thinking, a flexible framework for empathy-driven creative work. Previous articles addressed awareness, inquiry, research, and prototyping. This article is about the Highlight and Fix stage, where students revise their work. The Critical Role of Revision I…
This article is part of a longer series on design thinking, a flexible framework for empathy-driven creative work. You might want to check out other articles in the series first. The Importance of Research in Design Thinking The LAUNCH process starts with awareness, where students…
We often focus on student engagement, but student empowerment is a step further. Here, we focus on the seven shifts toward student empowerment. Two years ago, I was a chaperone for my son’s fourth-grade field trip to a hands-on pioneer museum. Students learned how to…
