Day 11 Reflection

How tightly do we hold on to what is ours? Among the first inductees into a child's vocabulary hall-of-fame is "mine". We live in a selfish world. Does that differ when participating in an intellectual community? Do we claim "mine" over our ideas and "makes" as educators and learners? What does this do to our intellectual community? When we share our thinking, don't we all benefit? This got me thinking, in what ways do I encourage and facilitate intellectual sharing among my students?

So I wanted to take inventory of ways in which I am planning on engaging my students in intellectual sharing and combating the "mine" mentality that is so ingrained in their fiber.

1. Reading circle discussions. Every Monday/Tuesday students will spend (roughly) the first 20 minutes meeting with their common reading groups to discuss various ideas surrounding their texts. Additionally, students will-following their weekly discussions-engage in person a Schoology discussion with their classmates. My hopes in doing this will be to allow students to see other students' thinking surrounding reading.

2. Tonya's demo today! I loved the collaborative and tactile nature of her cut and past revision strategy. What a great way to engage student writers in a dialogue with their readers. (I plan to post a digital copy of her demo to this blog post so anyone interested can adapt it for their own classrooms - I'm thinking senior project papers!)

3. Creating a real audience so students have a real purpose for writing. I am excited to jump on board with a TC First Year Writing partnership next year and initiate an inquiry into college readiness. I want to rattle students' thinking and encourage them to allow other ways of thinking about college readiness into their intellectual "mine" sphere.

I would LOVE to hear ways in which you break students' "mine" mentality through collaboration.

AND... Jenny made each of us this amazingly cute mini-daybook cover. How awesome is she?!