One Great Big Experiment

 Eyes glazed over, distant far away expressions, thoughts focused on anything and everything except what we were discussing.  This is what I was greeted with day after day after day when I would stand in front of my students 'teaching' them about various science and social studies topics.  We would read together from textbooks or worksheets and then complete worksheets to practice what we learned.  My students were bored, and I was bored.  There had to be a better way to do this.  Somehow I had to find a way to engage my students in order to make learning fun again.

This was two years ago.  Right about the time I started my Masters classes for Integrating Technology within the Classroom.  I had no idea where my Masters was going to lead me, but it had to be to something that was more meaningful and engaging then me standing in front of my students lecturing day after day while they just sit there 'learning' the information that I was dictating to them.  I wanted to do more.  I wanted to place the responsibility of learning into the hands of my students, but the dilemma that I faced was whether or not I could trust my students.  Trust.  The one concept that any adult struggles with when it comes to kids.  How could I trust my students to take control and be responsible for their own learning when I barely trusted them to do anything on their own without strict guidance from me?

While I knew that things were not going well within my class when it came to my students learning and engagement, I wasn't quite ready to make any drastic changes since I was still wrestling with the issue of trust until one of my students came up to me at the end of one of our classes.  At the time, we were studying space, usually one of our more engaging topics, so I actually thought we had a pretty good class until the student said, "I like learning about space, but I already know all of this that we covered today."  I was devastated.  While I thought we had just had a productive class, I had just realized that it was nothing more than a waste of time for this student.

That moment was when I finally realized that it was time for me to try something drastically different in order to ensure that my students were truly 'learning' and not just spending their time listening to me talk.  That was the moment when I realized that it was time for me to learn to trust my students and do whatever I could to make their time with me as meaningful as I could in regards to their learning.  That was the moment when I decided that it was time for me to take risks with the methods and approaches to instruction that were being utilized within my classroom.

That moment happened a little over a year ago and was when I decided that it was time to implement what can be described as a student-centered learning environment.  While not perfect, our current classroom environment is much improved over the teacher-centered environment that it once was.  Currently, I am trying to find the balance of having my students learn our required standards while feeling like they have some sort of control over their learning.  This past year has feels like it has been one great big experiment as I try to relinquish control to my students, yet still ensure that they are learning the standards that will be covered on our state mandated tests.  An experiment that I feel has been a success due to the comments and feelings of my students when they describe what they think about how we have changed our classroom learning environment.

Fifth-graders talk about technology in classroom