My goal at the beginning of the summer was to read 12 books that I had bought and shelved. As I began reading, 12 became like 24 until my husband said I had to stop buying books until I read the ones I had. It’s the end of summer. School started back today and I only am through 10.5 books. Three of which were not on the original list of twelve.
But I’m okay with that. I’m actually more than okay. The amount of learning that took place, the amount of energy and momentum I gained, the changes to and ideas for lessons, and best of all the changes to and ideas for my personal life make not reaching the twelve positive. I was attempting to sprint through a vast amount of great material but am slowly moving toward the marathon mindset.
I developed better routines and am working on my fear of routines as a result of Mindset and Drive. *including reading as I walk on the treadmill every morning (Carol Dweck & Daniel Pink).
As I’ve planned lessons, I’ve begun to ask better questions and intentionally think about incorporating technology – thank you Dave Burgess, Alan November, & Matt Miller (Teach like a Pirate, Who Owns the Learning?, Ditch that Textbook).
I’m implementing Genius Hour every Friday because of Creating Innovators (Tony Wagner) which lead to wanting to know more and thanks to Inquiry & Innovation and Pure Genius (AJ Juliani, Don Wettrick) I have more ideas. It was also one of those books (and without going back to look, I think it was Juliani’s book) that lead me to interview Alex Baack at the Altadena Free School (a Sudbury type school – more on Sudbury here)
I’ve planned out overarching projects that will encompass my units thanks to ideas from Setting the Standard for Project Based Learning (Larmer, Mergendoller, and Boss) and Invent to Learn (Libow-Martinez & Stager).
The current books (the point five) is called Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I feel like someone mentioned it sometime ago and I wish I could remember who so I could thank them. It’s actually been shelved the longest, but has been one of the most interesting and challenging books yet. More on this at another time.
All in all, it’s been one of the best and most productive summers of my life. I look forward to what the school year holds! What are you most looking forward to this year? What books did you read or do you plan to read? (I’d love more suggestions for future reference 😉
***For a look at lessons and such I came up with to start year, click here.
***For a look at the overarching projects for each lesson I created, click here. (some of these are from my district’s curriculum!)
***For a look at the Hero Project I designed for the beginning of the year, click here.