We as humans often get stuck in routines, even with our thinking. We do the same things, day after day, and expect things to change, to get better. As teachers, this happens with our teaching and it ends up extending out to our students. Sit in the same seats, take attendance, read this chapter, answer these questions, watch this video. While routines are healthy we need to change things up and DISRUPT THINKING.
Being new in the school I wanted to change things slowly. Every new change was slowly accepted. In my last post you can read how I changed the physical space by weeding books and removing furniture. Mid-year I also removed our physical sign-in and made it digital, this change took longer for students to adjust to.
My goal though is to disrupt thinking beyond the space and routines. Every day I write quirky quotes on a whiteboard as students came in. Quotes like “A doughnut is a bagel whose dreams came true.” and the ones below make students think and laugh. One day I forgot a quote and a student asked where it was 🙂
Inspired by librarians online, one week I created this for the board to start some interactions.
Last month I introduced monthly challenges and a library raffle. The library raffle encourages more engagement in the library media center.
The first monthly challenge was using Rubiks Cubes from https://www.youcandothecube.com. Instead of solving the cubes, which most students wanted to do, they had to follow the map and solve one side to match the current grid we were working on. Disrupting thinking! As the students solved the cubes we completed a mosaic.
This month students are interacting with me and each other on the whiteboard for National Poetry Month. Here is what has happened so far this week.
I look forward to disrupting thinking here a little bit at a time.