Who gets the credit? - Week #2

“There is no limit to what a man can do so long as he does not care a straw who gets the credit for it.”
--Charles Edward Montague

A cluster of students (started as two and has grown to six) is making a weekly video for our news site. I am bursting with pride for the work they are doing and the exponential growth in quality of their product from Week #1 to Week #2 (to be released Monday).

But I can't take the credit--which is my biggest slice of ah-ha from Week #2. I get huge gulps of identity from my students' learning (which, as their teacher, I'm in the habit of taking credit for). For example, when a parent says "My son learned so much in your class!" I have mentally twisted that to be "I get the credit for your son's learning!" 

SDL turns that on its head. I am still a teacher, and I'm working behind the scenes to soften a bump or rev an engine, but my sally into SDL requires me to relinquish center stage. #BlockThatMetaphor

Consider my Eye of the Needle news team. (Our news site is The Needle, a diminutive of our school's yearbook The Javelin, based on our mascot as Trojans...so yes, there is meaning in the name.) The team's first video was filmed, in part, from a laptop. This meant that all of the weather information appeared backwards in their film. And because they used a corner of the journalism lab for filming, there was an artificial tree and a hamster cage in the background. The student interview was a mixture of flat, bland, and fake.

What do these facial expressions say about learning attitude? Click HERE to watch their show.

Oh, my teacher-heart beat pitter-pat with all I was prepared to teach the team about improving their news show this week! But I never got the chance. Without so much as consulting me, they reserved the ICN room and lined up the technology integrationist to teach them to use the SmartBoard.  On two separate occasions Hannah gently told me we'd have to continue our conversation at another time because she was working on deadline. I happened to see a script for their MUCH IMPROVED student interview questions lying by the printer. My biggest contribution this week? I found them a better tripod.

On Friday the kids fill out a report to keep me in the loop, and in response to my question asking if he'd like to meet to discuss grade/productivity, Travis wrote: "Im to busy and im doing fine!" (Evidently he's also too busy for punctuation and capitalization, but that's another matter--)

The Eye of the Needle team is doing not only the learning, but the teaching too. Frankly, they get all the credit--which is how it should be.