learner profile – iLearn Technology

Building Student Agency: Multiple Intelligence Strengths

December 8, 2016Kelly Tenkely2 Comments7202 views

What it is: The Learning Genome Project started nearly 8 years ago in response to a sense of urgency to make education more about those it serves: students. In the process of building the Learning Genome, I came to a realization that even if this perfect tool existed, there wasn’t the infrastructure in schools to fully utilize it. This led to the start of a school, Anastasis Academy. Our primary goal as a school is to recognize the humanity in each of our students, to get to know them as individuals. Beyond the trendy “personalization” or “individualization” we seek to know identity. More than that, we want students to know and love their own identity.

It’s a large undertaking, but one that I’m proud to say that we do really well. Our teachers know who are students are on a deeply personal level. In turn, we are able to help our students know who they are, and love that person and the contribution they make to the world.

We don’t get it right in every moment, but it is a journey we are committed to as a community every day.

How do we do it? We start each year by building a Learner Profile for each student. This Learner Profile is the beginning of helping students build this kind of agency. It is the start of the journey. During this important meeting, our teachers ask interest/passion questions to help us get to know students better…you can download those for free here. Next, we go through the Learning Genome card decks. This is the first of the card decks. Through this one-on-one “game” students are able to tell us more about who they are. For shy or introverted students, the cards are a wonderful catalyst for opening up and sharing without feeling like they are in the spotlight. For those who have no problem sharing stories about themselves, these cards give those stories direction. The Multiple Intelligence Card Strength card set will help you to better identify the strengths that your student’s have as a learner, but my favorite part of using this card deck is all the incidental information that you get along the way. As students interact with the cards, they inevitably begin to tell you stories that reveal parts of their personalities, their family dynamics, their deepest joys, and fears. As they place cards, you will start to understand places where they feel weaknesses or vulnerabilities. You’ll see them hesitate over where to place a card and hear stories that fill in the blanks.

Before you even begin teaching these students, you will see them for the incredible, unique individuals they are. Rather than being “students” (as if we could categorize an entire population with one word!), you’ll see them. Hopes, dreams, and flaws. Learners. Students with names and identities.

If you are interested in the Learning Genome Project Card Sets, you can find them here, the Learner Profile spreadsheet I talk about is available as well!

Free Download: Learner Profile Survey

November 16, 2016November 16, 2016Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment7063 views

At Anastasis Academy, our year begins by building a Learner Profile for every student. Before we’ve even ventured into the school year, we know a tremendous amount about our students. This is the first step for building student agency. Our Learner Profile is made up of six parts:

The Learner Profile Survey (student’s interests/passions)
Multiple Intelligence Strengths
Learning Style Preferences
Brain Dominance
Parent/guardian hopes and goals for the school year (both social/emotional and academic)
Strengths finder results (we like Thrively!)

We get a lot of requests for our Learner Profile template. Today, I’m sharing the first piece: the Learner Profile Survey. These are the questions we ask our students each year to get a better understanding of who they are, what makes them tick, what their vulnerabilities are.

To download this resource for FREE, just enter your information below and you’ll receive an email with the Learner Profile Survey PDF!

The complete Learner Profile template is free with purchase of the Learning Genome Project Card Sets that help you determine multiple intelligence strengths, learning style preferences, and brain dominance.

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3 Steps to a Living Curriculum

August 4, 2016Kelly Tenkely9 Comments9401 views

Boxed curriculum does exactly that: it boxes in learning, narrows the scope of possibility, and leads kids to believe that learning is a chore. Living curriculum does the opposite: it unleashes learning, opens up possibility and adjacent possibility, and leaves kids excited to continue learning. Living curriculum grows and adapts for a richer, more meaningful learning experience.

3 Steps to a Living Curriculum:

Know your students! This seems like a really obvious first step, but honestly, if you don’t know your students it will be impossible to break free of the box(ed) curriculum. How do you get to know your students? At Anastasis, we dedicate our first days of school to getting to know our students and building a learner profile. We ask all kinds of interest and passion questions, we play a card game that helps us identify their Learning Style preferences, Multiple Intelligence Strengths, and Brain Dominance, and we build a Learner Profile. To take students beyond pre-fab curriculum, you have to know them first. What are their strengths as a learner? Where do they find struggle? All of this information will make you a better guide in the learning. It will also allow your students to understand themselves as learners and their classmates as learners. It will change the ecosystem in your classroom!
Break free of the box. You have to break free of the boxed curriculum before you can truly experience a living curriculum. Boxed curriculum is like teaching students through paint by number. Or like exploring the world via a map. Sure, maps are a predictable. You can see the whole landscape in a simple, two dimensional layout. They give us answers and a 10,000 foot look at a landscape. They allow us to gather some information about the world: where major landmarks are in relation to other major landmarks, what rivers/lakes/mountains we might encounter. With a map, we can chart a course and head a direction. But it isn’t living. Looking at a map is not the same as exploring the world. With inquiry, you may have a guidebook that helps along the way, but it is actually all about the journey. Where boxed curriculum is about answers, inquiry is about the journey to the answer. Living curriculum is immersive learning where students get to create their own map including the features and nuances that are important to them (this is why knowing them is step 1!). Learning is too complex and beautiful to be captured by boxed curriculum. When students are immersed in the journey, they can appreciate the scale of a mountain, the wildlife and ecosystem of a river. A living curriculum is not prescriptive, it is an autobiography of learning written by the student as they learn. A living curriculum uses inquiry because the path to learning is more about following a direction than arriving at a destination. Each year, I create a new set of inquiry guides for our teachers and students. The main inquiry questions stay the same every year (we love the PYP questions!): “Who We Are,” “Where We Are in Place and Time,” “How We Express Ourselves,” “How the World Works,” “How We Organize Ourselves,” and “Sharing the Planet.” Then, under each line of inquiry, I come up with a direction for our inquiry block and additional suggestions for different lines of inquiry that students could follow. Each block has a Pinterest board where we can collect resources for learning during the block. These are books, videos, apps, lesson ideas, articles, experiments, field trip possibilities, etc.
Invite teaching partners and students to collaborate. This is the LIVING part of living curriculum. This is where the curriculum actually comes alive and changes and adapts organically as the learning process unfolds. Pinterest is a great place for this to happen and, be honest, you are there anyway! Using our Pinterest boards, I start gathering resources I think might be useful, then I invite teachers and students to collaborate with me. As they follow a direction in inquiry, inevitably it leads their learning in unexpected places that I couldn’t have imagined. Inviting teachers and students who are doing the learning to collaborate, the curriculum comes alive. It adapts and changes and grows with us. Living curriculum. Our learning becomes fully immersive, and rich. Students are creating their own maps as they explore learning.

Want to see an example of Living Curriculum in action? Check out this example from Anastasis!

Where to find the card game we use to build our learner profile: The Learning Genome Project

Follow me on Pinterest to see our Living Curriculum grow!

Anatomy of a Learner Profile

June 10, 2016June 13, 2016Kelly Tenkely2 Comments9823 views

At Anastasis Academy, we’ve decided that above all else, we will value the identity of all of our students. Because this is a core value, we’ve built it into our school year. Before our first day of school, we hold two days that we call “Learner Profile Days.” Parents sign their child up for a one hour, one-on-one conference between the student and teacher. During this hour, our teacher’s job is to get to know the student. We ask a host of questions that inevitably come with nuance and supporting stories. Then the kids interact with Learning Genome card sets to identify their learning style preferences, their multiple intelligence strengths, and their brain dominance. The result is a Learner Profile.

This profile is our starting point for every decision we make. When you begin the year this way, it is impossible to think of students as data points. When you listen to their stories, you learn their feelings, and experiences, and values, and habits of mind, and gain a picture of who they are.

You can do this, you can make the decision to take time out of your first weeks of school and gain a picture of who your students are. What do you value?

The anatomy of a Learner Profile:

Student Name- In the whole of history, there has never been another one just like them. With this name comes unique gifts, passions, and a vantage point on the world. With this name comes unique genius all their own. The student name is a bold reminder of the identity.

Interests/Passions- This is where we begin to learn about student passions, their likes and dislikes, their hurts, and the things that make them feel alive. In this one-on-one interview, we hear stories, often these questions will lead students down a thought trail that gives us insight.

Learning Style Preference- Learning Style preferences do not indicate that this is the only modality that the student can learn with; however, when we know the preferences that a student has we can make better decisions about introducing new learning. We discover Learning Style Preferences through the Learning Genome Card Set.

Multiple Intelligence Strengths- Howard Garner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences details eight distinct intelligences. All learners have the capacity to learn and understand in a variety of ways, each learner differs in their strengths of these intelligences. Discovering a students unique mixture of strengths allows us to better direct students in learning and curiosity. We discover Multiple Intelligence Strengths through the Learning Genome Card Set.

Brain Dominance- Learning about a student’s preference in brain dominance allows us to make better decisions about how we design our classroom, how we design learning experiences, and how students will approach learning and assessment. We discover Brain Dominance through the Learning Genome Card Set.

Strengths Finder- This is where we gain insight into our students strengths and the way passion can collide with learning experiences. We use Thrively.

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CompassLearning Learning Profiler: Getting to know your students

April 9, 2013Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2657 views

What it is: At Anastasis Academy, we individualize curriculum for every student. We don’t purchase any boxed, one-size-fits-all curriculum. Instead, we create a learner profile for each student. I pulled together a variety of learning style inventories, multiple intelligence strength finders, and brain dominance predictors and mashed them up into a child-friendly teacher/student survey. Our teachers spend two days before the first day of school going through these inventories with students. I compile the information (along with their interests and passions) and put it all in an at-a-glance document. I’m just revamping the document a little bit to look more like a big baseball card with learning stats. We use these learner profiles all year long as a starting point for pulling curriculum, lessons and resources that will best meet the individual child’s needs. (Learning Genome 1.0)

Educators often ask if we can share this process, unfortunately right now it isn’t pretty or sharable in any meaningful way. When the Learning Genome is completed and launched, we will be able to share this process with the world.

Today, I ran across a tool that can help bridge the gap for teachers who are seeking a way to better customize the classroom experience for their students. CompassLearning has created a Learning Profiler that is free to use and the results are easy to share. While it doesn’t include all of the components of an Anastasis learner profile, it is a great starting point! Students (who are independent readers) can go through the online survey and learn more about their learning style, interest areas and expression style. This information would be SO helpful as a starting place for getting to know the students in your classroom better. It would go a long way in helping you pull resources and tools that will best meet the needs of the individual. When a student is finished going through the profiler, they can share their result “badges” with others through a link to the badges, through Facebook, Twitter, email or a printed report.

How to integrate CompassLearning Learning Profiler into the classroom: At the beginning of a new school year (or semester), students who are independent readers could complete the Learning Profiler on classroom computers in a center rotation, or in a computer lab setting. Results could be printed out or shared with the teacher via email. I’ve found it helpful to compile these results so that I can see overlapping interests and learning needs in the classroom. It would also be interesting to create a bulletin board with the different “badges” represented and with a picture of each student. Students can connect their pictures to the badges using string and push-pins or staples. It would be neat to have a web of information about your students visual for all students to see. This would be a good getting-to-know-you activity where students could visually see their similarities displayed.

For non-independent readers, the process would be a little more arduous. During a silent reading or independent work time, pull students one at a time to sit and interview them. I actually prefer the arduous method because you get all of the in-between commentary from the students which gives you a more complete picture of who they are, what they love, fear, get excited about, etc. Even with our independent readers at Anastasis, we create our learner profiles through teacher interview. There is something more personal and human about it. Using this method may take a few weeks to get through all of your students, the information you glean will be invaluable! If you teach younger students but have an older grade of “buddies,” it may be helpful to have the buddy help conduct the surveys and record the answers of the younger child. Again, this would be a great way for the students to really get to know each other.

After you have received the results, use the information to help you plan learning activities. If you have a student struggling in an area of learning, use the strengths and interests you know they have to come at the learning from a different angle. Education blogs, your PLN, and Pinterest are great places to find the perfect learning opportunity to help the students in your class. I promise you that when you connect with students this way, you will be showing them that they matter, that you care about them as an individual and that you want what is best for them. They won’t feel like a number! If you are looking for a specific technology resource, iLearn Technology is a great place to start the search. Over there —> in my right side bar you will find a multi category search. Narrow down the search by Bloom’s Taxonomy, resource type, subject area, etc. Click search and away you go! You can also search by keyword in the search box toward the top of the screen. I try to tag the bejeebers out of all of my posts so that no matter how specific the search, you will find what you are looking for. Full disclosure, I use that search box ALL the time when I am pulling resources for students at Anastasis.

Tips: Want to see what the future of personalized learning will look like? Check out the Learning Genome Project.

I’ve been nominated for a Bammy Award for Educational Blogger. I’d appreciate your vote to help spread the word about iLearn Technology. Vote here. Thank you for your continued support!!

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using CompassLearning Learning Profiler in your classroom.

FREE Learner Profile Survey Download