Personal Family of Models Assignment

Assignment 3: Personal Family of Models

Unknowingly, I have been utilizing the personal family of models to my teaching greatly this school year.  Most of this has to do my view on teaching and learning being more focused on the concepts and skills that students will carry on into other and future areas of their lives rather than on content.  Coincidently I have had the opportunity in my Design class to developing students’ metacognition, self-reflection, and ownership of their learning through the creation of Learning Blog Portfolios.  I have also been modeling some of the strategies they can use to take on self-directed learning.  Next term, designing their own learning will be the objective of their project. 

The whole purpose of creating the Personal Learning Blogs is to give the students a sense of ownership of their learning through giving them the individual choice of how they want to demonstrate what they have done and who they are.  In writing the blog posts the students develop their metacognition, sometimes purposefully and other times organically, by reflecting on the assignments and projects and assessments they have completed in their other classes.  When they go to post something to the web they inherently need to make some decisions, ‘does this look presentable?’ ‘What could I have done better on this piece?’ ‘What was my thinking when I decided to write that?’  With enough practice the students will develop the habit of thinking about these questions while they are working on their projects to then enhance the quality of the product (Duhigg). 

In the creation of the Personal Learning Blogs we have been working within the Design Cycle provided by the IB as seen here.

During the Inquiring and Analyzing and Developing Ideas stages, I modeled strategies to be used in the self-directed learning process.  I created a YouTube channel playlist with several How-To videos about Blogger, the platform we are using for our blogs, compiled lists of various blogs for the students to visit and analyze, provided opportunities for the students to collect and share videos and blogs that they found inspiring or helpful in developing skills, and have allowed for the students to express their own creativity and self expression through their choices of color pallets, themes, layout, and templates.  In providing a wide range of resources for the students it allows for individuals to approach the content in their own way, own their own terms, and at their own rate.  I am there to facilitate, encourage, and make suggestions to the students when they stray from the path or get stuck. 

            Next term the students will be choosing something to learn about.  In class we will be talking about different ways of collecting inspiration (Diigio, Pinterest) and resources (YouTube, Instructables, Personal Learning Networks or PLNs, online forums) to help them decide what they want to learn and how they want to learn it.  Then we will work on the organization and setting of the process they will complete to reach their learning goal by creating plausible timelines and ensuring students collect any physical materials or software necessary to complete their project.  This is an area that I see could provide good opportunities for learning in through a personal model of teaching.  This is where we will be able to look back and talk to the students about what possible problems may have come up that stopped their project from being successful.  Asking ‘You did not complete the building of your project, how did you feel when you were creating the timeline?’

Recently I was asked to introduce the initiative of our learning blogs to the teachers at our weekly staff meeting.  I decided to invite a few of the students to come as well to teach specific skills needed in blog creation and to act as the experts when the teachers were given the task of creating their own blog.  In doing this I feel like I helped create the dynamic of my students being in a partnership with me and hopefully with their other teachers (Calhoun, Joyce, & Weil).  The students felt great pride in themselves and really got the sense that they deserve to play much more of an active role in the decision making about their learning.

The personal family of models suits my teaching methods well.  They focus on the whole student, how they approach any task, and developing in each individual, strategies that work for them to succeed in learning.  The personal family of models aims to develop the students’ ownership over their own learning.

Bibliography

Calhoun, E., Joyce, B., & Weil, M. (2011) Models Of Teaching Eighth Edition. Boston: Pearson Education.

Duhigg, Charles. (2012). The power of habit: Why we do what we do in life and business. New York, N.Y. :Random House.

www.ibo.org