This video shares how one educator in Santa Barbara Unified School District implemented #justmoveit5 with her elementary students to get them moving 5 minutes every single day and includes specific ways to implement it with your own students.
This video, made by a teacher who started Fitness Friday with her remote and in-person students in Santa Barbara Unified School District , includes key insights, recommendations, and examples to help with implementation with your own students.
As part of their pilot for Real-Time Redesign, one of the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District design team’s initial priorities was to orient students and teachers to their role as co-designers. The team designed a short training session in which they gave participants an overview of the liberatory design process and created space for interactive discussion, questions, and reflection. The design team also shared their vision and problem of practice (“How might we increase flexibility and personalization to build a sense of belonging and connection within the context of our labor and policy constraints?”) to prepare participants to create solutions that would build relationships and strengthen student belonging in the district.
Jamboard is a great place to align on next steps, based on what ideas were uncovered during a brainstorming session. As seen in this example, after brainstorming and noting favored ideas, the participants are then able to bucket based on an impact-effort matrix and gather consensus on next steps to start putting those ideas into action.
One way to use Jamboard to take collaborative conversations deeper after brainstorming ideas is to take those ideas and bucket them based on topic, commonalities, themes, or other relevant categories. The act of “bucketing” can be done virtually by moving the sticky notes around to bring common themes together. You can also take this one step further by circling and naming each group to underscore the information you’d like to highlight.
One way to use Jamboard effectively is to enable users to brainstorm, share, and support ideas as seen on this screenshot. In order to do this, you should first have participants populate various sticky notes (you can even color code by participant and include multiple “posters” if necessary). Once everyone has dropped in their ideas, participants can star, favorite, or otherwise show support for ideas by adding a star, +1, or comment. This two-part activity allows participants to first call out all of their ideas and then review their ideas with others to identify which are the most interesting, actionable, or best-fit for the challenge being faced – similar to what you would do in-person sticky-note brainstorming activity.
This video shows students in first and second grade working with their remote and in-person teams on a design challenge at Design 39 in Poway, CA.
This video shows students in fourth and fifth grade working with their remote buddies on a pumpkin launch design challenge at Design 39 in Poway, CA.
Monterey Peninsula Unified School District (MPUSD) sought to address a key problem in their district: “How might we increase flexibility and personalization to build a sense of belonging and connection within the context of our labor and policy constraints?”
The team decided on a solution that would engage students and teachers in a design process to design new systems for personalization, flexibility, connection, and belonging. Though Monterey Peninsula had engaged students and teachers throughout its design process (e.g., to identify the problem of practice), the design team knew that they also needed to be part of defining the solution.
This solution supports equity because it cedes decision-making authority into the hands of those closest to the problem. This solution supports resiliency because it requires the district to be positioned to respond to the solutions that teachers and students develop. It also introduces a new method: teacher- and student-involved design sessions, which the district can use in the future to address other problems.
School leaders mustn’t lose sight of the need for student agency and student engagement as they contend with the myriad challenges posed by COVID-19. In fact, they must reimagine what agency and engagement can look like in cases when students are learning virtually and also when they are unable to connect.
Mere Engagement: Reflections about the Connections Between Online Learning, Student Agency, and Student Engagement offers school leaders seven action steps to support students’ sense of mastery and ownership of their learning, along with promoting their sense of connection and belonging. They include:
The authors posit that in the face of the havoc wreaked by COVID-19 and all of the issues competing for school leaders’ attention, that concerns about student agency and engagement are being “backburnered” to everyone’s detriment. “Without considering issues associated with student agency and student engagement, all our work to prepare may be in vain,” they write. And furthermore:
During a transition to remote or distance learning, students need a renewed sense of agency. They must understand what they are to learn and how to demonstrate their learning. They must know how to ask for assistance and exhibit self-direction and efficacy when working on assignments. They own their work and put forth their best efforts. When these attributes of student agency are in play, authentic engagement is occurring.
