Week Five Reflection

I am enjoying the opportunity to explore innovative ways to teach.  We all know that we are capable of being innovative teachers and creating experiences in our classroom.  These past two weeks have allowed me to examine the way I teach in my classroom and look into new ways to engage all of my students.   Through reading all the other blogs their are endless ways to be innovative in the classroom.  Sara L and I discussed the power of project based learning and the benefit of it in the classroom.  I really like the ideas of project based learning and trying to find a way to incorporate them into the classroom.   I really enjoyed what Donna said about not giving up on something so easily.  We don't want our students to do this with challenging work, so as teachers we should practice what we want our students to do.  If we try an innovative lesson and it seems to be failing we should not give up on it right away.  And lastly Tiffany made a wonderful statement of how we are teaching students how to think not what to think.  This reminded me the research I had done on Montessori schools.  The idea of students learning through their own questioning taps into their natural ability to be inquisitive.   With all of this I wonder how to make it work in my classroom, through out the years students have been told what to do and learn and culturally my students are not always comfortable speaking up or explaining what they did.