Fearlessness at Turning Point Learning Center

The word of the day is Fearless. In an interview with Ginger this morning, she mentioned the importance of students being Fearless. We are not talking about the fearlessness of a warrior going into battle. This is the fearlessness that comes from a genuine desire to learn and not being held back by your own insecurities or a fear of being wrong.
So today I am watching for examples of students being fearless and what the teachers do to encourage this. Before school even starts, a few students are trying to figure out how to contact McDonalds to ask if they will include plant seeds and a mini-terrarium in Happy Meals. Next I visited the piano class where students were exploring the various sounds available when connecting their keyboard to Garageband. They explore with a sense of play and wonder, not worrying about making a mistake, but maintaining a sense eagerness to explore. The next activity involved students taking a virtual tour of Greece through Google Earth. Previous lessons have taught students how to use Google Earth, so their prior knowledge was developed before sending them out on their own. Students start the afternoon writing news articles about the happenings around the school. Ginger shares a link for an online new article that is used for a class discussion about paragraphing and quotations marks. The use of a real world example gives students a model that they can return to when working on their own. Next Charlie shared a lesson introducing GarageBand to the 5/6th grade group. During the lesson Ginger put herself in the place of a learner since she hasn’t had many experiences with GarageBand. She asked questions that were likely the same questions that students would have had. By anticipating their learning needs, both teachers set students up to have the confidence (and fearlessness) to explore the program and begin making their podcast. During Spanish, Eric prepared students to create a conversation in Spanish including important phrases that a person would need if visiting a Spanish speaking country. To anticipate their needs, she listed some of the key words that would be included in a conversation, such as why, where, left, right. This scaffolding gives students a bit of structure so that they are less fearful of creating a conversation and trying it in the class.

Being a fearless learner, having the confidence to try to solve learning problems on your own, does not sprout up overnight. It’s built through the stringing together of conversations, interactions, modeling, and attitudes. I believe it stems from a belief that students should be responsible for their own learning – something I have seen every minute of everyday I have been at this school. This attitude of independence is really taking hold for me as I think about how I can incorporate it into my own teaching. I am guilty of doing way too much handholding for my students – and even my own children. I have to remind myself I am not doing them any favors!