How are you planning to celebrate learning?

One of the reasons I love Twitter is that it is entirely on your own terms. Sometimes I have more time than others – and that determines how much time gets dedicated to perusing the latest tweets of those I follow and posting tweets of my own.

After work tonight was action packed. Race home, change, fill up my four-year-old’s soccer ball with air, and jet to her first soccer practice. Get home, bedtime routine for both girls, then an opportunity to eat dinner and relax on the couch for a bit.

All that said, Twitter was not going to get my undivided attention tonight. The cool part is that you don’t need to give it undivided attention to find its value.

The first tweet I looked at was question five of a Twitter chat (tweet is below).

I knew that was going to be my Twitter interaction for the evening – jumping into a chat I had never heard of before. As you know, we have been excited about our passion project PD we are doing this year, and that’s what I wanted to share. So I did.

That’s when I was reminded of the power of Twitter. I quickly got a response from a Principal in Michigan stating that they were doing something similar. We started chatting and he asked me a very important question. One that I had thought about a little but had yet to formally commit to anything.

“How are you planning to celebrate learning?”

This is a hugely important question that can’t be addressed flippantly. The minute celebration of learning becomes an afterthought (or worse, omitted) is the minute you lose the effectiveness of establishing a “clean ending” (or a well developed wrap-up to your learning).

Celebrations can and will look differently. They take the form of whatever the situation calls for at the time, so pay attention to the needs of the students with which you work as they will tell you, in one way or another, what they should celebrate and what needs some extra work.

Whether it’s with your students or with your staff, developing a plan to celebrate learning (even if it’s just a reflection) is essential.

How do you celebrate learning?

(Bonus points if you share how you would celebrate staff learning through our passion projects!)