Friday, September 19, 2014

Brit Lit CPI: Reinventing Brit Lit

Today we explored a few ways we could transform Brit Lit CPI into the sort of course we look forward to taking.

Using Edutopia and MindShift, we investigated several progressive learning processes that put a new spin on what school can look like.

We used this chart to do it.


We investigated gamification, 20% time, genius hour, project based learning, design thinking and maker education.

We decided that adopting 20% Time would give us the best opportunity to explore passion projects while still having a structured chunk of time for Mr. Ryder to teach the skills and understandings necessary to create effective passion projects.

Next class, we will focus on determining our passion projects for 20% time.  There will be ways to go about doing this determinations.  Folks should be committed to a project by Sept 26th.  

Humanities: Whole New Mind & Empathy

Today we dug into the empathy sense from Dan Pink's Whole New Mind. Pink believes that better understanding others, can better help us solve problems and meet client/customer/employer needs.

We started with a quick improv pattern game to help us keep names straight, but more importantly, to find out how one another are feeling about the start of the school year so far.

We then set up our Google Drive inboxes for Humanities.

From there, we watched this video about a hair stylist in Manhattan, Mark Bustos, who provides homeless folks with haircuts on Sundays.


That led us to complete a I Notice/I Wish/I Wonder activity to help us better share our thinking about this video.







We noticed that a lot of folks wish more people demonstrated the brand of empathy and took the types of actions Bustos takes each week.  

Thursday night, folks were asked to look through the Empathy Portfolio section of Whole New Mind.  We'll be completing a Three 4 Thinking or I Notice/I Wish/I Wonder experience about that section on Friday morning.

HOMEWORK.

Explore, Read, Skim:  Empathy Portfolio Section in Whole New Mind.
Due: Friday, Sept 19

Past Due Work: Three 4 Thinking: Whole New Mind Intro; Text Features Analysis Maatrix, Signature sheets, Resumes Fro 10 Years in the Future, Design Kits, Remind sign ups
Due: ASAP