First Day of School Plans

Here's my contribution to the #iTeachCS movement for the time being!  Following #MTBoS, I decided to write about what I will do my first day of school.

My goals for the first day are to:

1. Talk as little as possible and have students talk as much as possible
2. Learn names
3. Build norms

With those goals in mind, here is the plan!

Everyone will make name plates - I did this last year and enjoyed reading what students wrote and it helped me practice names for the first week.  On the back, students write something they want me to know.  Read the blog post linked above for all the details, but here is my link to the document I used with students last year.

For AP CSA:
I am going to start students with a puzzle activity.  I did this last year as well and it went well.  Essentially students get a 100 piece puzzle for a group of 4 and they have to put it together in a short amount of time.  Afterwards we talk about what skills and strategies they had to use individually and when working with other people.  This gets folded into developing norms.  Last year, it looked like this:

Lots of movement, talking, thinking, etc.

This year, I think I am going transition from this, to logic puzzles.  From a facebook post someone posted a few logic problems.  My goal here is for students to reflect further on the norms they have set for themselves and also introduce the idea that we are going to encounter a lot of problems in class and after a while, we are going to start to develop strategies that are common across problems.  I am going to start this burning rope brain teaser and then have students do this hour glass problem - both of these are related so students should be able to see how the strategy could be re-used for #2.  If there is time we will do a problem about soldiers crossing a river brain teaser and then the animals crossing the river  which again are related.  I plan to continue to reinforce the norms during this time too.



For AP CSP and Concepts of Advanced Algebra:
I am borrowing from code.org's CSD curriculum and going to have students build boats to hold coins. You fan find the complete lesson plan here, but essentially it is a hands-on and collaborative activity for students that will force them to problem solve.  From here we will generate norms using post-its and then share out these norms as a class.  From there, we will reduce the norms down to 3-4 ways we will interact with one another in class.

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Then on day 2...

Everyone will make a Flip Grid saying their name, 3 hobbies they have, 2 words their friends would use to describe them, and 1 reason they took this course... From there, we will dive into our content!  I want to use Flip Grid to get to know students and practice name/face recognition at home.

I'd love to hear everyone else's plans!

Day 3 PD reflections: What story am I telling?

A few things have me thinking about the idea of story - a colleague and I had a little conversation about this during the school year, KSTF has us talking about the power of teacher stories, and what I am learning at Upperline PD has me thinking about the story each lesson tells while teachers are teaching their sample lessons.

Now I am wondering, how does each unit I have tell a story?  How do my lessons weave together a content story for students?  Is there a story arch throughout the year I can hang units and lessons on?

More recently, I have been thinking of the role of stories and learning targets in different types of lessons.

Traditional Instruction

When talking about traditional instruction, I think the story still needs to be there and learning targets provide key pointers at the beginning of the lesson to tell people where we are going.  For example, the move "The Breakup" is about, and results in, a break up.  You can still tell a good story if you know the ending.

In my upperline PD, I realized that if a teacher was teaching in a traditional way, I wanted to know exactly where we were going in their story.  I saw it needing to know the key checkpoints along the way.  It was somewhat like peeking ahead to the titles of future chapters in a book so I could see the story come together.

In traditional instruction, the teacher is the story teller.  Every student gets the exact same story from the same deliverer. Some teachers tell stories better than others here and I think there are some tricks to make the story still compelling for students.

• I have noticed when ever I am super excited about the content (even if in reality I am not super jazzed about it), students engage more.  Seeing story tellers excited about the story is one way to get buy-in from students.  
• Making the story feature key characters that are interesting to students gets a giggle from kids.  Including references to fidget spinners, Shakira, whatever is trendy or and inside joke at the moment includes students in on the story.

I get that some days even the most constructivst teacher needs to go to traditional methods of teaching.  That's OK.  That's not an excuse to forget about the story you want to tell or to skip a good hook. 

I wonder how else strong traditional instruction teachers are able to engage students in their classrooms.


Discovery/Inquiry Based Instruction

Inquiry based learning puts the student at the center of the story.  It also means that you might have 36 different stories being constructed in the classroom during a lesson.  Thus, it is the teacher's role to weave these stories together to make the picture clearer for all learners.

I truly believe that to give students the learning target at the beginning of an inquiry based learning lesson, you give away the punch line.  It's less fun to explore if you know how the story ends.  In fact, why explore, why take risks if you know the ending.

In discovery based learning, the storyline of a class is revealed by students and through students work.   However, I think we have all read something where the story wonders for too long (perhaps this blog post is one of them).  That's why the teacher is the ultimate architect of the story in these classrooms.  Being able to predict student questions and responses and guiding them to the "a-ha" moments takes a different set of skills.