It's Simple: Ask Your Students . . .

I had the pleasure of hearing Shannon Miller speak a couple of weeks ago and her message was simple yet profound: JUST ASK STUDENTS what they THINK, NEED, and WANT. I re-shared this message as the keynote speaker at the Texas Foreign Language Association conference last week. Sensei John Cadena was listening and provided his students that very opportunity today. I wonder if you can use his graphic organizer for gathering student feedback to improve your class room tomorrow? I hope so. Thanks for sharing, John. Check out John's blog here.

An Amazing Student A-Ha! Moment: Sometimes You Have to Do Something BEFORE You Understand It

This afternoon, a group of adults, admins and teachers, and I met with a group of 5 students to work together to plan our Day of Code event. One of the young men told a story that I feel compelled to share. It really rocked my world. I'll paraphrase for you . . .

"I watched a ten minute YouTube tutorial about how to code in HTML; before that, I knew nothing about it. Then, I opened up Notepad and followed the instructions to type in some code in the way I learned from the video. After that, I opened up the text file I made with Safari, and that's when I understood what coding was. Sometimes, you just have to do something before you understand it."

And that my friends, rocked my world.