The Agile Classroom?

One of the many habits I have throughout the school year, is to create a folder of links to articles and what not that I find interesting, but don't have time at that immediate moment to really "get into it".  When summer rolls around and I am watching the Reds, I will start to go through that folder and pick something that jumps out to me at that moment.

Since summer has started, my 5-year old girl has become nice and accustomed to waking up ate, leaving her pajamas on for half the day, and more general laziness than even I can tolerate.  So while the Reds were stomping on the Cubs, and the Spurs were stomping on the Heat, I decided to go through that list of links and came across this Lifehacker post about treating your kids like a team of agile program developers to lower family stress.  Already tired of saying the same things over and over to my daughter I watched the TED presentation by Bruce Feiler about a management method called agile development that has been in Silicon Valley for years, but he and other families have applied it to their daily family routines with some pretty positive results.  I could give you blow-by-blow details, but I think watching the video will give you a better understanding of how it works.

Overall, I think the overall messages from this talk are the most important.  Kids in my classroom are always looking to make a checkmark!  It is amazing the motivation a checkmark can do. Also, giving students input in how the classroom operates on a daily basis can empower the students to create meaningful accomplishments.  Lastly, I cannot stress the importance of "quick wins" in the classroom.  Testing culture has made students scared to do anything wrong in the classroom.  As an Art/Tech teacher, I want my students to embrace the "experimentation" aspect of my classroom and want to continue making students feel like they can push forward to try new things, knowing that wins and losses are fleeting, and that we can quickly move on knowing that we learned something in the process.

Some of the portions of this talk that I would like to put into place in my classroom might be a classroom manifesto, monthly meetings, and possibly checklists for each project that students can use to make sure they are focusing on the important aspects of the projects.  I'll keep you posted as I move forward with some of these ideas.

I will also keep you in the loop as I try this at home with a stubborn, but overall creative, sweet, and opinionated daughter who is always looking to make people happy.

Summa-time!

After what can only be described as the most hectic month in my life, May has ended and with the first of June comes summer break and my list of things I have wanted to work on all year is starting to take shape.

Business first.

Next year, the art department in my district is going to transition to OTES by creating Student Learning Objectives for visual arts.  My colleague and I spent a few PD days working on some ideas.  We are slowly going to transition by creating just one SLO for one class in one grade level.  This may sound simple, and I believe that it will be, but first, we must be able to generate baseline data from that one class to create a successful SLO that will show genuine growth from our students.  I have a lot of ideas which I will continue to share throughout the summer and beyond.

Along with the SLO's in visual arts, It will be my job to help the grade level teachers incorporate some of the common core standards that address technology into their curriculum.  I am blessed with having many tech savvy teachers in my building that are both willing to learn and also like to think outside of the box like myself.  Our first thoughts are to look towards interactive writing portfolios for the 3rd and 4th grades, but we will continue to discuss this over the summer to create some really interesting things for the kids to do during the school year.  More posts about that a certain to follow.

Now, on to my personal goals

My wife and I love to garden.  Our garden is getting bigger each year and now we are thinking about how we can get the most yield out of our small plots.  I am looking into creating an automatic watering system using Arduino micro-controllers and also continuing a woven sapling fence to keep the hordes of rabbits that like to eat our Swiss Chard.  Although, we really only plant the Swiss Chard because it looks pretty and it keeps the rabbits from eating the other stuff in the garden.  We are also looking into ways to arrange the garden to spend more time in it, like adding a seating arrangement or table where we can eat in the garden from time to time.

I started to replace all of the baseboards, trim, and doors in the house over spring break, but our busy spring schedule kept me from some finishing touches.  I hope to get all of that finished up as well.  There are lots of other small home improvement projects on my list that I won't bore you with here, but will share from time to time.

My daughter will be attending Kindergarten in the fall, and has a genuine love of books and wants to learn to read like right now, so some of the teachers in my building put together a little kit for me to start that process with her over the summer.  I want to capitalize on her intrinsic motivation now so that she enjoys reading as much as I do.  I also have several books myself I am hoping to power through this summer.  A healthy mix of education-related reading as well as some fun books that have sat on the shelf over the winter.  Ella and I will be spending the summer together for the first time (we had to keep her in preschool over the summer last year to save her spot for the school year) and we have a lot of just plain fun written out on our list to accomplish before school begins in the summer and I am looking forward to that the most!

In terms of my personal artwork, I am hoping to get back into some old school screen printing projects. Before I got my job with my district, I spent some time with several notable concert poster artists and created some of my own posters for bands.  I am thinking about building my own screen printing rig and getting back into the concert poster game because I have always been artistically inspired by music and the friends I made during that time were some of the most creative people I know.  Since moving back into education I have missed many of those creative conversations and look forward to re-igniting my creativity.

I hope everyone has a nice summer and I look forward to recharging the batteries and getting a head start to the next school year. I'll keep in touch all summer with everyone right here!