A great friend of mine recently sent me a message asking me if I'd like to participate in a new diet challenge. It was promised to be a "diet hack that actually works." Here's how it goes. Get your friends together to form a network of healthy eaters. Take a picture of everything you eat throughout the day and share with your network.
I suppose the idea is that you'll think twice about eating that large slice of double layer chocolate cake if you are not only recording the calories, but also admitting to your friends that you ate it. From what I know about dieting, they say you'll do better if you join a network of others that are eating healthy, exercising, and providing encouragement to each other. This diet "hack" has combined the network idea with p365, another program of discipline, in which photographers take a picture everyday and upload to a designated website or share on their social networking sites with the hashtag #p365.
This got me thinking - if using p365 with our eating habits was supposed to make us eat better, could we use the p365 idea in our classrooms to help us teach better? One of the most valuable experiences I have had as a teacher was setting up the camera in my classroom to record a lesson, then viewing and reflecting later. It served as a gauge for how well I was differentiating, engaging students, and monitoring both the behaviors of my students and myself.
The difference between this practice and what I did in my classroom is that I specifically chose a lesson to record. Often, I even chose the class I wanted to record. So I was reflecting, but it wasn't a completely authentic process. But what if I took a picture of my classroom everyday? What would I gain from that experience? Would there be days that my colleagues were patting me on the back with encouragement? And similar to taking pictures of oneself to document and record weight loss, could I look back over a length of time to see how my students had grown and what they had accomplished?
It occurred to me that using the ideas of this diet hack and p365 in my classroom could really be a benefit and a challenge for teaching with fidelity. From my blogpost a few months ago, I discussed that we should be challenging ourselves to "teach with fidelity," to have high expectations for our students, to personalize instruction, provide challenges, and not allowing failure or second best. We get there through rigorous, relevant challenges, providing authentic feedback, and by developing relationships with our students. But I wonder, would there ever be a time, like my picture of the chocolate double layer cake, that I decided I didn't want to take a picture? What would I figuratively be saying to my students if it was one of those days that I decided to skip the picture?
So, as we begin to prepare our classrooms for the start of school, let's also prepare to share what we're doing. Here's the challenge. Take a picture of your classroom everyday and post to Twitter, Instagram, Vine, or ShutterCal with the hashtag #teach365. Develop a network with other participating teachers to challenge students, to learn, grow, and raise the accountability and fidelity of our teaching practices. Just like in our own lives, our kids can't move forward if we take too many "cheat days." And as a bonus, you'll have a visual representation of the journey your students have taken.
Challenge accepted?
