Moodsaic

These thoughts are mine, and aren't representative of Mosaic as a whole, but I do know that I'm not the only teacher in Mosaic that's feeling this at least a little:

Many (or at least some) students aren't doing much. They're not getting our content. We compare them to the students in our "normal" classes and their progress, and as content specialists, we're frustrated. We air that frustration and try to fix the problem by starting to create a blended learning environment (using the district supported Moodle LMS) where we can get our content to our students online without the formal classroom setup of traditional schooling.

Are we being too impatient? We "knew" about what Shawn Cornally calls airlock before we even started, but is our frustration evidence of not really knowing about airlock? Before the year even started, I worried about what I have seen to be the tendency of many teenagers to prefer to "not do" than "to do," and I was always comforted by the airlock idea. I thought, They will not do and not do and not do until they organically come to the realization that not doing is not fulfilling, and then they'll get off their butts and do. Is 4 or 5 weeks enough time for students to come to that realization? Have we filled their time with doing that isn't quite meaningful enough so that they're not given the chance to come to that realization? Or is that comforting thought I had in the first place foolish and really it is our jobs as their teachers/coaches to light a fire under them?

Mosaic is not Iowa BIG and it really can't be as part of a public high school starting with more than 10 times the students BIG did. They have to hit all of their core standards and get almost all credits to graduate through their projects, through Mosaic. No matter what, Spanish is hard to work into their projects (especially with most students starting at very low or 0 proficiency) without instruction outside of their projects. I'm encouraged by being able to help students increase their proficiency at their own pace through personally designed online courses blended with my instruction.

Mosaic is quickly evolving and I am lucky to work with so many great thinkers, problem solvers and hackers. We're going to get this going, and it's going to be as great as we imagined because the team of teachers working on this are pros at modeling the resiliency that we hope to impart to our students. I think we (and by we I mostly mean I) need to model some extra patience at this point, too.