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’ve long used Instagram as a way to reach out to my students.  It started back when I first got an iPad through DonorsChoose at my previous library (before I had a personal smartphone).  Some of my former students (now adults) still follow that account and keep in touch.  When I started at Tampa Prep, I created a new account for the library (@TPrepLibrary) separate from my personal account (@dianalrendina) to help conform to the school’s social media policies.  

During the lockdown and virtual learning time in the last quarter of the 2019-2020 school year, the library Instagram account became an essential way for me to keep in touch with my students and share with them.  During this time, I also had more time for PD, so I watched several AASL conference sessions on Instagram and took the fantastic eCourse, Dare to Grow: The Instagram Lab (called Grow Your ‘Gram at the time).  While that eCourse is geared more towards solopreneurs and not everything applied to the school library, I found SO many actionable tips in this course that I’ve utilized in my school library Instagram account.

After years of testing out various talks in the classroom, I finally found a few that always go over well with my high school students. Of course, it has a lot to do with the talks being funny. Who doesn’t like to laugh? But there’s also a deeper meaning and positive message with each that resonates with the students. There is no particular order to this list. They each are awesome in their own right.

What is the difference between a teacher-centered and learner-driven classroom?

We’ve taken a look at examples of student-centered teaching before. It’s both a subtle (in theory) and dramatic (in function) shift in the entire ecology of a classroom, curriculum, and sense of student identity in the process of learning. This idea isn’t new in and of itself. John Dewey espoused many of these same ideas century ago. It’s an idea that continues to pick up steam with proponents of ‘progressive education.’

Sylvia Duckworth–who has created dozens of useful, minimalist sort of sketch notes/illustrations that convey ideas in education–has taken the thinking from Barbara Bray and Kathleen McClaskey  and created a complimentary visual. (In fact, you can go straight to the source and read more from Bray and McClaskey on Choice is More than a Menu of Options.)

What happens when you empower students with choice and purpose? What do the new roles and responsibilities look like? The overview below (from the image above) offers some clarity on what changes. The biggest takeaway might be the change in focus from content delivery to purpose discovery.