What is a Student Led Learning Walk?

"The Student Led Learning Walk (SLLW) is a highly interactive and social approach to learning in schools...a school wide collaboration...especially with respect to instructional strategies, the integration of technology, student achievement and well-being, parent/community engagement and leadership practices." 

Mirella Rossi, Education Canada/Canadian Education Magazine, Sept. 2015

On Thursday, November 3, 2016, Eric Harvie School will host our first Student Led Learning Walk from 6:00 - 7:30 pm.  This is an opportunity for all our students, Kindergarten to Grade 3, to celebrate with parents the intentional work we have done over the past few weeks to introduce the design thinking process (see Oct. 2/16 & Sept. 18/16 blog entries), which is a strategy for addressing the competencies outlined in Alberta Education Programs of Study and addressed in the 2013 #001 Ministerial Order on Student Learning:

"Streamlined Expression of Competencies (Alberta Education, May 2016)
Competencies are combinations of knowledge, skills and attitudes that students develop and apply for successful learning, living and working. They emphasize aspects of learning that apply within and across all subject areas. Alberta’s Kindergarten to Grade 12 curriculum promotes development of the following competencies, which are streamlined expressions of the competencies in the Ministerial Order on Student Learning (#001/2013):

Critical Thinking
Problem Solving
Managing Information
Creativity and Innovation

Communication
Collaboration
Cultural and Global Citizenship
Personal Growth and Well-being"

As students deliberately engage in design thinking processes they learn to think critically, solve problems, manage information, collaborate and communicate as they think creatively and innovatively to address a concern, problem or issue. This contributes to their personal growth and well being and helps build a sense of cultural citizenship in the school and in the community. 

So, as a parent, what can you expect when you attend the SLLW on Thursday evening?

First of all, we have taken up this work through an initial whole-school engagement project focused on using the design thinking elements at various entry points - what we are calling The Box Project (and I am confident every parent has heard at least the request to bring a box for school over the past three weeks!) The design thinking process includes phases of building empathy/discovery; interpreting/defining; ideation; prototyping and evolving/testing. 

Students and teachers have shared many excellent stories from our school literature collection about creative innovation involving engineering ideas or solving problems with box-based solution. Students have also been finding entry points into the work at various stages of the design process - although not all grade levels have worked through every phase in order since this is an iterative, flexible model that move back and forth and between stages quite flexibly.  We have been amazed - and think parents will be too - with the depth of thinking, planning, considering, empathy-building and defining that has occurred in all our classes - and with the high level of problem solving, prototyping and even testing that has taken place with the children as they have worked both collaboratively and independently to produce their box project designs. There were constraints placed on the project - no decorations or paint, use of tape only as fasteners, etc - which fostered great conversations and planning discussions.

So, when parents arrive at SLLW on Thursday, they will find a gym full of box projects, plans, reflections and literature examples demonstrating multiple levels of thinking, planning, cooperation, collaboration, defining and construction. Teachers will have document boards on display that depict a brief overview of the student work and there will be documents on display, as well, that demonstrate the expectations and goals set out by Alberta Education and the CBE to show how the students and teachers at EHS bring curricular expectations to life. 

Projects will be arranged beginning with the Kindergarten classes and progressing through to the Grade 3 groups. This invites parents to see the progression in complex thinking, fine motor skill development, design, planning, communication, problem solving and creativity that can be reasonably expected and experienced over the course of four years' learning - while also clearly depicting the enormous variances in student development and the significance of approaching all learning through a personalized lens from an instructional perspective.  

Students will have already experienced the walk-through and will be able to act as student guides for their parents, pointing out the characteristics of work that made an impression with them. One visible thinking strategy parents might want to use with their child is to ask them what they like, what they wish they could have done differently and what they are wondering about next (illustrated in the graphic below).

SLLW is part of the Eric Harvie reporting strategy for parents, but it is not an opportunity for a conference with the teacher about the student (these will happen in early December :). In fact, teachers act like 'greeters' at SLLW with students taking the role of leaders and curators of the collection.

Instead, SLLW provides a clear glimpse of how a child is able to implement design thinking processes, where strengths and challenges might exist at this point in time in daily classroom work, and offers a concrete learning experience for parents to discuss with children in the context of thinking about school (rather than asking what a child did at school on a particular day, for example, a parent might ask what discoveries happened that day - or what planning were they involved with on a particular investigation). SLLW also demonstrates clear connections between the written curriculum outcomes and expectations and the myriad ways learning happens in classrooms for children who clearly come with a wide variety of experiences, aptitudes, knowledge and questions as we work to support them in growing their brains' learning capacities.

We look forward to welcoming everyone to our first Student Led Learning Walk on November 3!

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal

Eric Harvie School