Life-Long Learners

Last week in Staff PD we discussed what Hoover's values and vision should be, in regards to staff expectations of student outcomes.

We came up with 5 focuses and broke each focus down to really determine what we should be able to see and hear when we walk through the building or classroom.

This week, I kept seeing examples of the life-long learners we are creating here at Hoover through our teaching, each and every day, based on the definition the staff came up with.

By this definition I found examples across all grade levels that I will share below.

Self-Regulated:

 A second grader was reading independently, while Ms. Rieck worked with a small group of students.








A first grader worked independently on Lexia to improve his reading skills while Ms. Daley worked with a small group.

Both of these student showed they had the ability to self-regulate on learning tasks to improve their skills.

 Two boys in Ms. Grasz's room were motivated by the engaging math activity to use cards and manipulative to find sums of 20.
These students were able to tell me that "they were finding sums of 20 in order to quickly see if numbers added together to equal 20. Then they got to move on to bigger and bigger numbers as they got better at their math facts."\




In Ms. Elmarouani's class, they were working on Number Talks when I came in. A word problem was presented on the board, and students were to determine how to solve this problem and be able to share how they solved it. This was a real world problem presented to them, asking students to figure out if they had three dogs, how many total legs did all of the dogs have. Students were given time to consider the problem and think about the solution. Then share out their thinking with the class. Here is the conversation I heard:

Teacher
"While you are thinkingm if you come up with an answer, see if you can think of another way to solve this same problem."
"Who has an answer?"

Student
"I think the dogs have 16 total legs."

Teacher
"Walk me through your problem solving to help the class understand."

Student
"Well first I did 4+4 which equals 8. Uh oh, I think I messed up."

Teacher
"That is ok. Continue to share your thinking with us, and then tell us how it just changed."

Student
"Well I did 4+4 =8 and then I did 4+4 = 8 again. And then 8+8 equals 16. But I know I added too many 4's. Because the problem only had three dogs. So I just need to add 4 three times."

Teacher
"So you are saying instead of doing 4 +4 and then 4+4 again, you would just do 4 + 4 +4. So who can explain what he just said and then tell us what you think the answer is."

By not telling the student they were wrong right away, Elmarouani allowed the student to notice their mistake and make the correction on their own. By learning from our own mistakes, we retain the knowledge and lesson for much longer than if someone else corrects us. We also have the skills needed to solve future problems on our own.
At the end of the lesson, the student felt successful, and his relationship with Elmarouani was intake, since he was not discouraged for answering incorrectly, or embarrassed in front of his peers.
When students are given the capacity to learn and reflect on their learning, we are instilling the ability to be life-long learners beyond the lesson and classroom.