Technolandy

Day 13 (of SOL 2025) Summer of Learning… Dear Dr  @chrkennedy  student led learning

In his annual year end blog, Chris had some good questions… here is question 

13. What happens when students lead the learning?

Student voice and choice is awesome – when they have ownership of the learning, that shows how much they really really know – had a ‘subtraction expert’ kids would regularly turn to when they were finding something in math tricky (before they came to me) she was awesome – but could not perform those on our tests (this was a long while ago, and we were working on doing testing differently…) and our discussions were that she knew what she was doing, but needed to work on her performance anxiety… she thought she was just dumb on tests… she was helping others to perform better than she was… that is the mark of a great teacher!

But if you want to see engagement and meaning increase, (and AI as a collaborator rather than see it just as a cheat machine) enable 4 key things:

1. Project Based Learning (now research supported!!) 
2. Descriptive formative feedback leading to the spoiler: assessment with learning (coming soon!)
3. SOLES (Sugata Mitras self organized learning environments )
4. Geniushour/20% time student exploration (don’t give deadlines and embrace the chaos aka trust the process) 

And give graduation credit where it fits best – imagine Inquiry Based Calculus 12… why not have students own one of their graduation credits fully… (all of them later…😎)

Embrace the chaos and soon you’ll…. Trust the process!