Saturday, June 8, 2013

Starting to think about the STEAM Lab

Start 12:00

ABOUT THE BLOG


I'm a terrible blogger. I try to write because I fully appreciate the benefits of being a reflective practitioner/parent/learner, but sometimes it's just easier to keep the ideas in my head. I like the look of this, my former blog, so I've hidden all the ranty education posts and am now using the blog to try to provide a space for the STEAM Lab I'll be piloting in the fall.

As part of an action research project, I'm also collecting data on how frequently I blog and how I felt about it at the time of writing. I'm hoping that I'll maintain the "Woohoo, I love my blog!" feeling. If the past tells me anything, though, this feeling usually has a shelf life of about 5 days. Then it quickly transitions to "I should really post something", which is quickly followed by "What blog?"

So, I'm setting a goal of writing daily for ten minutes. I'm rating how much I looked forward to writing (and/or enjoyed writing) based on this scale:


A score of 0 will be reserved for days I did not write.

ABOUT THE STEAM LAB

The STEAM Lab I will pilot in the fall will be located at a rural primary school where I work as an instructional coach. I will see children in 1st and 2nd grades for a 45 minute block just once a month. My ideas are grand, but they are being tempered by two facts: 1) most of my ideas are more suitable for 3rd - 5th grade, and 2) 45 minutes a month is a short time in which to serve students. Right now, I'm planning for large scale projects that span a semester. I'm hoping that as I get the ideas on paper (well, blog), that I can see if they coalesce into a workable plan, or if I really need to think about each class period as a discrete lesson. We'll see what comes from this as I force the ideas out of my head and into the world wide web. 

Time stamp: 12:22

ACTION RESEARCH DATA

12 minutes, 3 rating

22 minutes total, but approximately 10 minutes of that was spent looking for a font for the scale. (I couldn't find the one I wanted.) Formatting images is pretty typical of how I avoid a task at hand, so I'm rating this event as a 3 and recording 12 minutes of active writing. 

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