As a full-time education consultant, Allison Zmuda works with educators to grow ideas on how to make learning for students challenging, possible and worthy of the attempt. Over the past 19 years, Zmuda has shared curricular, assessment, and instructional ideas, shown illustrative examples, and offered practical strategies of how to get started.
How do you create an experience for students that is both captivating and challenging? That pushes the boundaries of what is possible and what they are capable of? That opens up doors for creation and action? That when students reflect back on the experience, they appreciate the false starts, dead ends, breakthroughs, and accomplishments that made their journey their own?
Here’s the secret: you need the students to show up as learning partners. This type of journey can’t be developed and implemented by the classroom teacher alone; students need to ante up for the experience. When writing The Quest For Learning with Mike Fisher and Marie Alcock, I was humbled as I learned and continue to learn new dimensions of the learning experience. Taking a deeper look at how game design and networking can transform students’ perception of what’s possible has been stunning. The camaraderie that comes from pursuing a problem, seeking support, creating a world of your own design … I am describing both what we were trying to inspire in contemporary schooling as I am the authorship experience.
This newsletter shares ideas and actions that came out of the collaboration. Mike, Marie, and I continue to share how timeless pedagogies can be updated for a contemporary world.
- In Meet Generation Alpha, we describe what learners come to us with and expect to be part of an engaging learning experience. We offer eleven quiet questions educators can ask themselves in Modernizing Your Instructional Practice to spark ideas and explorations for themselves and their students.
- In Engaging Inquiry and The Power of Questioning, we describe four types of questions and how they can be developed to launch and guide meaningful learning.
- We explore the power of a game in Game Design Theory in how it connects to engaging and impactful learning experiences. Want to take action? Contemporary Curriculum with Game Design Lenses offers key steps for teachers who want to get started in game design.
- In Simplified and Personalized: Formative Assessments, we focus on the development of streamlined descriptive rubrics to focus teacher-student conversation on progress over time.
So if you are at the ASCD National Conference and want to be part of the conversation, you can join us on Sunday morning. If you want to hang out with us virtually, you can follow on Twitter: @allison_zmuda, @fisher1000, @mariealcock. I’m sure we will be blogging about it after the session. If you are interested in purchasing the book, click here.
Thank you for continuing to read and share!
Sincerely,
Allison Zmuda
Educational Consultant and Founder of Learning Personalized