Week 3 Post

Jeff Hopkins is such a motivational and engaging speaker. I am lucky to have been able to visit his school and start to think about his methods early in my career. You can visit my previous blog post here. Having seen the process of the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII) through my brother experience. I knew it could make a positive impact on students learning. Something that stood out to me was the idea of Individual Educational Plans. In a perfect system and world, wouldn’t be powerful for every child to have an IEP. In Schools like PSII there is No need for IEP as the model is built on it. Ultimately, my brother who has an IEP was very successful as it was his own personalized learning journey. All in all the inclusive design needs no adaptations as it is all personalized within the structure. This model is something, I wish all schools could follow. There are many useful resources such as their competency assessment framework.

This week between Jeff’s presentation and Jesse’s presentation. I also got to attend a session of teacher burnout by Morgane Michael. Morgan is such a inspirational speaker. She gives out strategies of dealing with anxiety and feeling overwhelmed in a busy profession. She brought back basics of 5,4,3,2,1 technique. To simply just making a list of your passions. These exercises although not directly related to my Masters project, helped me in terms of balance. I am currently working 3 jobs, while doing a masters and trying to find time for my passions such as dance. Also I think that with my Masters project on 3D printing, I am really diving into one of my passions and these skills presented in this workshop help me consider some useful exercises that may help ground educators in that overwhelm state and feeling of they can’t do 3D printing. Now I will continue to foster my passions and balance by continuing to read her book “from burnt out to fired up”.

Based on one of the articles I read, this idea of connection and power to learning is seen through these many ideas of inquiry and personalized learning. Notably “teachers need time -and a community- to support their capacity to organize sustained project work.” (Barron & Darling-Hammond, n.d, p.12). This is true for learning new things and connects to the time and community needed to implement 3D printing. Aligning with twenty first century skills is a key component as well that both inquiry and 3D printing puts forward. Working on problem solving, collaboration and many other BC core competencies aligns with my masters project and the benefits of learning styles that many students have according to this article.  This ultimately makes learning accessible as it is said that “Students who may struggle in traditional instructional settings have often been found to excel when they work in a PBL context.”(p.5).

Finally I wanted to share this youtube video as it discusses the reason Why teachers should bring 3D printers into the classroom. I will discuss this more next blog post but some of his ideas follow nicely with this weeks articles