So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part IV

   It seems to me that we see more and more of these students all the time. Students who are hurting, who need help, who have challenges of all sorts. Or maybe we are just more aware of it than we used to be.

   In my small school we have limited resources for our special needs department. It's always a challenge to allocate time and resources. We see all of those students who so desperately need help and try to figure out how best to spend the resources God has given us. Inevitably it's the gifted students who don't get the resources. We say, "The don't need it, the classroom teacher can enrich their program." And those of us in the classroom strive as best we can to deliver, sometimes we even do it well.

   This is where I had my brainstorm. If we could offer a service to families of gifted children they would probably jump at it. What's more our experience with the Arrowsmith program told us that if we offered a worthwhile program parents would be willing to pay extra.

   So I took everything I had been learning about online education and packaged it up in a program for students who needed an extra challenge. I centred it around authentic projects that were as diverse as I could dream up.

   Then I started sharing my idea.

   You know what surprised me? They didn't think I was crazy! What's more they signed on and helped make it real! You can visit this site to read all about the things we did.

   We ran the program for a year and it worked remarkably well! Not perfectly, and we learned an awful lot, but in the end it was a great experience for the students and for me. Feel free to check out these parent testimonials to hear their point of view.

   So why aren't you doing this now?

Well, that's a story for another day.

So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part I
So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part II
So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part III
So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part IV

Silos

My dad tells stories of how he built silos to pay his way through university.

Sometimes I build silos too, but I'm not supposed to.

My principal often phrases it as "being Kings and Queens in our own castle".

It's too easy for us as teachers to go into our own classrooms, close the door and teach all by ourselves. To build silos, to build our own castle and not let anyone else in.

And that's why I want to say thank you to Martha and Jennica, two amazing teachers that I got to spend a day with earlier this week.

These two brave souls were interested enough in the work I had done last year in the online pilot I led to respond when I went looking for other teachers to collaborate with.

They came to my workshop on GoogleApps this past summer to learn the tools we would use, and then the three of us met before school started to dream how we might work together as 3 teachers from 3 different classrooms from 3 different schools. We each headed back to our own classrooms to get the ball rolling and have been in frequent contact to solve all sorts of issues as we moved forward. This past Monday we met again to plan the second phase of our collaborative project between our 3 classes.

What an amazing experience that day was! I got to spend a whole day with two other passionate, inspired teachers bouncing ideas off of each other, learning, growing, and stretching. Ideas that if I had dreamed them up on my own would never have been half as good. I came home from that day exhausted, but exhilarated and inspired. I can hardly wait to find our which of our ideas work and which ones don't! What's more I learned so much from these two teachers that will flow into the rest of my classroom and I look forward to continuing to communicate with them throughout the rest of the year.

Dad, you may have told me stories of how you built silos, but I hope to tell my children stories about how I broke them.