Reflection Questions:
What did you learn from the reading and videos?
How does it change your thinking moving forward?

The reading this week was from Chapters 1-3, from George Couros' book, "The Innovator's Mindset.  I learned several key ideas this week.  The first interesting concept is:, "If we ask teachers to use their own time to do anything, what we're telling them is: it's not important."  I located this on page 5 in the last paragraph.  This is interesting to me because how many times do teachers have to take their work home?  Many hours of nights I have researched new ways of teaching and emailed myself to remember the next morning.  Teachers also need time to learn and grow.  This was a powerful statement!  Another idea that spoke to my soul was, "Don't change for the sake of change.  Make changes that allow us to empower teachers and students to thrive." (Page 7, Paragraph 2).  I love that statement!  I have always believed in learning for myself.  I love to learn new things.  Sometimes I have learned something new, absorbed it, and then decided it wasn't for me and my classroom.  My whole career has been a "constant evolution to make things better for student learning."  Innovation is something I struggle with, and I wonder now if that is because schools have conformed students not to be creative and maybe that has affected me.  One video mentioned the need to learn from other teachers.  Who can you learn from best? Other educators in the same field/grade level.  The story of schools replacing the vending machines from junk food to healthy food was interesting to me.  I wholeheartedly agree with the fact, that kids just stopped purchasing from the vending machines and went to the gas station to stock up on junk food.  I learned that simply replacing one item with another is not innovation.  Innovation is using the skills that you have learned and creating something new with it.  It is important to ask the question, what can you do with what you know? 

Learning more about innovation helps change my thinking about my classroom and what kind of learning I want for my students.  I'm nervous about how to create problem "finders" in my classroom, the curriculum that I would need to design and the grading of this curriculum.  How do you assess personal learning in this way?  Reflections?  I will try to be the guide on the side instead of telling how to do something.  Last semester, I started a Robotics course for 9-12th graders at my school.  I began researching other schools with Robotics courses like mine-I couldn't find any.  The curriculum to support the Vex IQ Robotics program is very limiting.  So, I had to use some of that and my creativity to create the course.  But what I really loved-and I believe the students loved was after the first 9 weeks of "learning" about the sensors and building a robot and various tasks we moved on to them creating their own robot to meet a problem/challenge.  The challenge was 5 weeks away, and they had to create an engineering notebook with biographies, etc that they would do if they were actually competing in a world championship.  My guidance to them was only to the team leaders for the first 3 days.  Student team leaders led the rest of the weeks in their own groups.  They continued to work on designing their robot to solve the problem/challenge.  I created a field for the teams to practice the challenge with a final project date.  What was interesting to me is that, of course, there were a few kids that were not doing what they were supposed to, but most kids were invested and on task.  They were researching the best ways to create their robots.  They were seeking answers from other resources.  In this way, students were able to try to solve the challenge and learning.