Rebel Educator: Create Classrooms Where Impact and Imagination Meet

Rebel Educator

Create Classrooms Where IMPACT and IMAGINATION Meet

Tanya Sheckley

copyright © 2022 tanya sheckley

All rights reserved.

rebel educator

Create Classrooms Where Impact and Imagination Meet

isbn

978-1-5445-2980-6 Hardcover

isbn

978-1-5445-2981-3 Paperback

isbn

978-1-5445-2982-0 Ebook

isbn

978-1-5445-3094-9 Audiobook

Contents

Introduction

1. The Teaching Quandary

2. A Century of Passive Learners

3. The Biggest Challenge Students Face

4. What Is the Purpose of Your Lesson?

5. Engaging All Learners

6. Skills, Concepts, and Knowledge

7. Move from Good Student to Good Learner

8. Educating Your Parents

9. The Future of Education

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Introduction

A Rebel Educator understands the driving forces behind education and sees a better way. They resist tradition in teaching, seek innovation, and are constantly learning.

Rebel Educators understand the importance of engaging curriculum that has real purpose. They don’t teach because they want their students to get good scores—they want their students to be good people. Rebel Educators seek to become more than granters of knowledge and wish to draw out the light in every student. They engineer learning experiences and facilitate student growth.

Regardless of how long you have been teaching or what constraints you have on your lessons and ideas, it’s never too late to become a Rebel Educator. In this book, you will encounter stories and quotes from educators, writers, thought leaders, and students that will inspire your teaching, rekindle your joy in the classroom, and provide context for challenges in the educational system. Whether you teach in a classroom or a forest, a commercial building or a home, you will find methods to enhance your craft. It will encourage you to embrace a project-based and student-aligned philosophy of teaching. I hope it will help you begin, or continue, to build inquiry and experience in your classroom.

The ideas inside Rebel Educator will help you build classroom relationships, ignite creativity, nurture curiosity, and turn your classrooms into places of wonder. Your students will love coming to school and, more importantly, so will you.

When we start making changes and working together toward a goal, we can make real change within our educational system. This book is for teachers starting out and searching for ideas. It’s for seasoned teachers looking to shift the culture of their classroom, and it’s for school leaders who want to create better learning environments and experiences to support the emotional and academic needs of their students and teachers. Really, it’s for anyone who works with children.

This book discusses project-based learning and experiential learning; I will often use these terms interchangeably, although there are subtle differences. A project is a multi-subject collaboration that works on understanding a concept through seeking solutions to a driving question. It may include research elements, knowledge-building elements, activities, experiences, and deliverables. It is a series of events, experiences, and lessons designed to offer the student a pathway to solutions while creating open-ended questions to explore areas of interest within the concept and theme.

Experiential learning encompasses each experience we create for our students throughout their learning. Each time they experience something new, whether it is creating, building, listening to an expert, taking a field trip, or presenting their learning, they are experiencing learning in action—experiential learning. Project-based learning is inherently experiential. There are many experiences within a project, but experiential learning can take place in any subject on any day at any point in learning. Experiencing our learning helps us to learn and remember better.

The information you will find in this book isn’t particularly new, but it is put together in new ways. This is not a deep dive into any one theory of learning—inquiry, project, concept, forest, Montessori, Reggio, personalized, differentiated, among others. Rather, it works to tie many of these together in the best possible ways. That is what we have done with our school, UP Academy, and it is what I challenge you to do in your classrooms. Create your own method. Build your own curriculum. Find ways to bring joy to the classroom and support students in making a difference in the world around them.

The Author’s Story

I never liked kids. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties and my best friend had a daughter that I changed my mind. One day, this little girl was learning to walk; three weeks later she was problem solving how to run around her mom’s legs to reach the toy she wanted. Seeing how quickly and joyfully she learned finally convinced me that kids were alright.

I didn’t intend to start a school. I got an MBA in Entrepreneurship with the intent of starting a business, not a school. I spent almost a decade in sales and marketing, selling beer. But after having three children, all with different needs, and not finding a school that could include and support all of them, I saw an opportunity. I could build something new and different that would support the needs of my children and so many others that had been forgotten, left behind, passed over, or put in the wrong classroom.

My oldest daughter, Eliza, was born with cerebral palsy. She was bright, observant, and social, but needed extra support to gain independence and to be successful in her academics. Our school tried its best, but she wasn’t getting the therapeutics or academics she needed to successfully navigate the world. I talked to other parents and realized many had the same frustrations I did. I could see another way and decided to work towards starting a school.

Within six months, we had articles of incorporation, bylaws, and a board of directors. We received 501(c)(3) status in December 2015, and I started actively searching for locations for the school. Then we had an unexpected tragedy—at only six years old, Eliza passed away. Our family did a lot of soul searching and decided we had learned so much from Eliza that we wanted to share it with other families and make a difference in the lives of other children. We sought to find purpose in our grief. We believed that Eliza taught us how to be kind, strong, and to always do our best. We continue to hold these values in the school and in our family.

We believed that by including students of different abilities in the same classes, all students could thrive. This approach would build social and emotional skills, empathy, and creativity, and create a generation that saw all people as capable. It would give students who hadn’t been given a chance a new one, and students who had been passed over, more attention. This huge project has taught me more than I ever expected and given me more meaning and joy in my life. But this book is not only about inclusive education; it is also about shifting our classrooms to respect and honor the intelligence and capability of all students. It focuses on creating experiences, building projects, inviting community involvement, and creating safe spaces for creativity, collaboration, and growth.

We created UP Academy to give every student the opportunity to reach their Ultimate Potential. This is where the UP in UP Academy comes from. We chose to open an independent school free of the bureaucracy, policies, and procedures that make change difficult in large structured organizations—a school where we could mold and create a new method of education that we could share to support countless children around the world. This book is the beginning.

I share my story because I wasn’t trained as an educator. I learned what I know about education through doing, seeing, and replicating other educators I met and respected. This gives me the perspective to disrupt education as I see it—to be a Rebel Educator.

In addition to the many experiences, discussions, and interviews I conducted for this book, I also rely on the work of Barry G. Sheckley, Ray Neag Professor of Education, Emeritus at the University of Connecticut, and recipient of national awards recognizing his research on how students learn best. I read What to Do with Reclaimed Instructional Time, which summarizes, with specific examples from classroom applications, how teachers can structure experiences that foster students’ learning by enhancing their agency as learners.¹ As I wrote this book, I used examples from this summary chapter to support key ideas. (Full disclosure: Barry is also a helpful father-in-law who served as a valuable resource to me as I developed the ideas outlined in this book.) He has given me and UP Academy countless hours to help us shape the most research-based and experiential elementary experience possible. Barry’s research shows that when we experience the concepts we are learning, our brains retain the knowledge and we gain deeper understanding. He has taught UP Academy’s leaders and educators how to shape our school’s environment, how to talk with students and trust them with agency over their education, and when to provide structure. Much of what I share in Rebel Educator I have learned from him, and some of his stories appear in these pages.

I have also been fortunate to be surrounded by exceptional educators who create classrooms of agency and have shared their knowledge with me and UP Academy to make these ideas and our school a success.

It’s not what we can teach our students to be when they grow up—it’s how we support them in learning to solve the problems that matter most in their worlds, and ours.

Create a classroom where impact and imagination meet. Be a Rebel Educator.