Ms De Jong's Diary of Discovery

As a staff, we've been talking a lot about rich tasks, success criteria, and student-centred learning lately.  For a while now I've been really trying to get away from Socratic lessons, and being the only expert in the room, and got the idea from The Innovator's Mindset to have my students create "X in 60 s" videos.  Long story short, the example in the book came from a biology teacher who returned to school after a leave and didn't want to just reuse the same overhead transparencies again.   She had her students create "Mitosis in 60 s" videos instead, and found that students understood the concepts much better because they'd had to learn it well enough to explain so concisely. Early in the school year, I tried this with my grade 12 IB biology class, and asked them to produce a video entitled, " Natural Selection in 60 s ".  The videos weren't explicitly assessed, and I loved that they didn't all produce the same video or ev...