My Pedagogy
|
My favorite part of teaching is designing interesting projects for the students. I partnered with our local Microsoft store and office for the Hour of Code, a HoloLens experience and an afterschool movie event. They have talked with animators at Pixel, software engineers at Microsoft & Google and designers from Amazon and Facebook. They also built relationships with district nurses, webmasters and data scientists. The students have provided ideas and potential solutions for bike safety, high-burden tuberculosis, school schedules and traffic patterns.
I teach problem-solving which includes design, computational thinking, computer science concepts and data analysis. |
Design Thinking
|
Design Thinking caught my attention in 2018. In December of that year, a guest teacher led my students through a 10-day Design Thinking experience on how to improve bike safety in the community. This was a powerful experience for the students, and they emailed me from high school to tell me how much they enjoyed the opportunity to share their solutions with adults.
I completed the Stanford d.school Design Thinking Workshop for Educators and have regularly included a 10-day unit with my students. They have solved all kinds of problems, even during the remote learning phase of the pandemic. I used the Design Thinking model to help develop a new student incentive program this year. Building empathy is a great first step in solving any human-centered problem. Common-sense ideas for improving bike safety in Naperville come from Aurora middle school kids (chicagotribune.com) Design Thinking in Education. “Website” | by Patty Hicks | Medium |
|
Computational Thinking
|
Reading Dr. Jeannette Wing's article on Computational Thinking for the ACM was a moment for me. It gave me direction and words to share with colleagues as we were looking at refocusing our curriculum from productivity-tools to computer science concepts. I kept a copy on my desk for years. It was my guide when I was asked to provide training for all teachers on our Institute Day. Computational Thinking is a critical skill and one that should be incorporated in all content-areas. I was really excited for the opportunity to build this website and share it with the 31 district schools. Coding 101 |
Ideas on Improvement
|
Teaching is a challenging career. Thinking about my own experiences, talking to colleagues and reading articles led me to write an article on how to improve the teaching experience. I think improving the teaching schedule, pay and pension and mobility would greatly improve career satisfaction. I have been reading about the shortage of teachers along with different ideas on how to fix the… | by Patty Hicks | Medium |
