Hey! I recently joined the amazing Tara Martin on a Facebook Live to describe my Teach Like a Pirate 5 Word GPS professional development activity and I wanted to share it with you! 

In Teach Like a PIRATE, I have an activity where I encourage you to write a letter as if you are a student in your own class that explains what it feels like to be your student. I did this and included my original version in the book. I see this as setting a goal for how you would like a student to feel about experiencing you as a teacher and being a member of your class. It is something to use as a goal to shoot for as you develop your class. 

Since publishing TLAP, I have streamlined this activity and made it more approachable and easier to do in a professional development and collaborative setting. I call it the Teach Like a PIRATE 5 Word GPS. I explain it in the embedded video (fast forward to about 4.5 minutes in to miss the intro and greetings of people as they enter the Facebook Live comments section) but the quick version is this:

A GPS system needs 2 pieces of information: Our destination and our current location. It MUST have both to be effective. I believe the same thing is true in education. We must create a destination for where we would like to take our class, our school, our district...whatever level you want to look at. But not only that, in a self-reflective and honest way, we have to be able to determine where we are now in relation to that destination. 

Inspired by a lesson idea from Explore Like a PIRATE author, Michael Matera, I transformed this concept into a professional development activity. Imagine that your students on the last of this coming school year are asked to write down FIVE WORDS to describe their time with you. FIVE WORDS to best describe the experience of being a student in your class. Now imagine you created a word cloud (again an idea from Michael) so that the more times a word was used by students, the BIGGER it appeared in the word cloud. What words would you love to see HUGE in your word cloud? What words would you love to see POPPING off the page based on these student generated responses. Choose FIVE that you would love to see the biggest. That’s your new GPS destination!!! Commit to them!! Print them out! Put them in your planner...post them if you want to!

Okay...but now the second part of the GPS kicks in. Look at your lessons. Look at your units. Would kids write down those 5 words? Uh oh. Recalculating….recalculating. Intentionally design the type of lesson experiences that would allow you to live up to those GPS words. 

Can this be done virtually with a staff? Absolutely! Can your team do it? Yes!! Can you do your own? Of course! 

You can do it as the leadership/admin team for how you want staff to experience being a part of your school. Do you support principals? Make a 5 word GPS for how they feel about the leadership and support you provide them and how if feels to work under your mentorship. Are you a teacher coach? Make a GPS! How do you want parents and/or the community to feel about their experience with your school? 5 words!! Let’s go! 

A business can do this about their customers/clients. How about a family GPS? Can significant others create a mutual GPS for how they want the experience of their relationship to feel? Yes! 

How will you use it????? Enjoy the video! More importantly, I hope you create a 5 Word GPS for something significant in your life and get value out of it. By the way, Tara goes live on Facebook every week! Be sure to follow our Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc Facebook page and sign up to be notified when we go live! 

Thank you! 

Dave