Genius Hour Blog - Week 6

Hello Friends! 

Welcome back to 'Teaching with Miss G'. As always, it is so wonderful to 'see' you again! While I wrapped up my Genius Hour Series last week, I thought it might be beneficial to come back one final time (for real, this time!) to do some self-reflection and comment on some areas of improvement. Before getting into this, I highly encourage you go check out the other five posts in this series on my blog - you can start with post one by clicking here. Reading these posts and looking through my Genius Hour Series Project will provide some helpful context prior to reading this post. So without further adieu, let's jump into my final week - week six!

As many of you already know, self-assessment is crucial to educators. As we encourage our students to reflect and engage in 'assessment as learning', we should be doing the same throughout our teaching journey. This was my driving thought for completing another post in this Genius Hour Series. I learned a great deal about myself and my project topic while completing this series. Mainly, I learned how significant the idea of supporting all learners is to me as a teacher. Given that most of my work up until this point has been with students with learning disabilities (e.g., Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, etc.), I have seen the ways in which these students require greater support in the classroom and most importantly, I have seen a lot of situations where these students are not getting this support. Throughout this project, I became even more determined to support these learners (as well as learners with other exceptionalities) and provide useful resources for other educators to support these learners. In addition to this, I have learned even more about the concept of 'Universal Design for Learning' and how this is crucial to support a variety of learning needs, strengths, and interests within the classroom. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the process of researching 'Universal Design for Learning' (UDL) and the concept of 'Differentiated Instruction' (DI). This process of researching these concepts, furthered my knowledge in both areas and I believe will make me a better educator as a result. I also really enjoyed putting together resources to use to support these students and testing them out with the young learners I tutor over the course of the past few weeks. I believe taking the time to test these resources out really provided that reassurance that the learning activities I selected for my final product were effective. 

I do believe my final product is a success however, this does not mean that there were not any challenges along the way. The process of creating and gathering learning activities for my final product, an educator's resource guide, definitely came with trial and error. I had a few activities I tried out with students along the way that were not necessarily as effective as I hoped and this did become discouraging at times. Fortunately, I was able to come out of this experience with six literacy activities relating to phonics and sight word development (to support reading fluency) that I could include in my final product. Each of these activities were tested and effective with the students I had trial them and I was very happy to be able to include them in the final product, my educator resource guide. 

As I mentioned in post 5, there are a few things that I would like to add and change in my final product that I hope to continue to work on over my time in Teacher's College. The first area that I would like to build on is 'digital learning'. Given that the pandemic has led to the growth of virtual learning and classrooms, I would like to adapt the activities in my guide to include a virtual option. I believe this could support students in furthering their growth and knowledge at home (by being able to practice after school hours) as well as provide useful tools for teachers who may have no other option then to teach online during the pandemic. In addition to this adaption, I would love to add more sections to the guide to include writing activities, comprehension activities, and more. I really do hope to do this and intend to come back to update you all once I have had some time to build on this project!

So you may be wondering, "What's next?". I have found myself asking that same question over the past week and I think I have determined where I would like to go from here. Over the course of the next few months, I would like to work on building the writing and reading comprehension sections for my guide. I will start doing this by researching some writing and reading comprehension activities that could be adapted under UDL and incorporate DI. Once I have found a few activities to include in each section, I will go through the same process of testing these activities on students that I work with and ensuring their efficacy before including them in the guide. After I have completed the testing phase, I will include only the best and more effective resources in my guide (just as I did this time around!). I look forward to getting started on this and updating you all after I have this done.

This Genius Hour Series has been such an amazing journey for me to reflect on this past week. I feel very proud of the work that I have put together and I am so thrilled that I was able to put a product together that I can share with colleagues that will hopefully benefit them in the long run. If you have taken the time to read each post and follow along, I want to say thank you so much for your time and commitment to this blog! I hope that this journey has benefitted you as much as it has benefitted me. 

Wishing you all the best on your education journey. As always, please leave your comments and questions below. I would love to read them!

Until next time,

Emily