Group items tagged

"Editor's Note: Paul Bogdan was once an old-fashioned lecturing teacher centered secondary math teacher who left teaching for 14 years to build computer systems. He has come back and is reborn as a student-centered teacher trying to make a difference and trying to figure out what works in today's classroom."

"A while back, I was asked, "What engages students?" Sure, I could respond, sharing anecdotes about what I believed to be engaging, but I thought it would be so much better to lob that question to my own eighth graders. The responses I received from all 220 of them seemed to fall under 10 categories, representing reoccurring themes that appeared again and again. So, from the mouths of babes, here are my students' answers to the question: "What engages students?" "

"This is how evaluation and reporting works in the student-centered classroom that I like to call a Results Only Learning Environment (ROLE). There is no room for numbers, percentages or letter grades in a ROLE. Instead, students collaborate with each other and with their teacher, in order to demonstrate mastery of various objectives contained in yearlong projects. Learning is a conversation built on a system of summary, explanation, redirection and resubmission - something all stakeholders in the classroom come to know simply as SE2R. If a report card is required, the student and teacher agree on what that final grade should be, based on how all feedback was handled throughout a grading period."

"The end of the school year presents us with an opportunity for reflection at Envision Schools. We take a final measure of students' progress throughout the school year, celebrate the many Envision graduates that will be heading off to college in the fall, and consider how we can incorporate those lessons into improving our own work to best enable, encourage, and ensure student learning."

"As a student, I would study for a test (most likely the day before or, I confess, even the period before), take the assessment, and then, much like a person who is done with a document on their desktop, my brain would simply "Empty Trash." To avoid this same scenario happening to my own students, I use assessments formatively. That is, I have designed a series of activities that routinely follow each test that help guide my students to learn from the results of their formal assessments."

"Education has to focus on learning how to learn - metacognition. School will still be important, but not to impart what happened during the Revolutionary War or to teach the quadratic formula. School, he said, should focus on teaching young people the intangibles, the things that make humans unique: relationships, flexibility, humanity, how to make discriminating decisions, resilience, innovation, adaptability, wisdom, ethics, curiosity, how to ask good questions, synthesizing and integrating information, and of course, creating. "

Voice of the Educator Guest Blogger 3 ways to infuse 21st-century skills into instruction By Sandy Merz on February 8th, 2016 | Comments (0) 10 inShare Pixabay SmartBlog on Education this month is exploring 21st-century teaching and learning. Join us for original content in which experts explore the trends and highlight best practices that can help prepare students for their future worlds of work and living. All teachers seek to prepare students for life after high school. These days that means equipping them with the skills it will take to survive in the 21st century workplace, while also covering other curriculum requirements. What concrete examples of 21st century workplace skills like communication, self-management, collaboration, motivation and inquiry do you focus on in your classroom? As an interesting parallel, how do your examples compare with these actual comments from employees and their supervisors who participated in the Arizona K12 Center's Lesson2Life professional development?

Having devices in your classroom for students to use, whether you have carts of computers, iPads, or Chromebooks; a 1:1 program; or a BYOD initiative, can be exciting and overwhelming at the same time. Using these devices to provide content support and differentiation for each student is not hard to do. You have long been supplying material for your students at all levels to both remediate and expand their knowledge base. But what about designing formative and summative assessments that use technology and target higher-order thinking skills? Teachers should ask themselves this question, as well as how to develop tasks that transform what goes on in the classroom.

Children in the Mehlville district may have the chance in two years to attend an elementary school with an alternative curriculum - one that uses real-world problems to help students learn and without the restraints grade levels sometimes place on learning. It would be a school that parents would choose, and there would be no admission requirements. If more children apply than there are seats available, the district would hold a lottery. That kind of competition for classroom seats has largely been limited regionally to the city of St. Louis. There, district magnet and choice schools, along with independent charter schools, offer language immersion education and schooling that focuses on science, engineering, technology and math. Mehlville Superintendent Chris Gaines received preliminary approval from the district's School Board last week to move ahead with a "Choice School of Innovation" that would be the only of its kind in St. Louis County.

"'We must reimagine middle school science and math not as a way to prepare students for high school, but as a place where students are inventors, scientists, and mathematicians today.' So say Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager in this exciting guest article about the Maker Movement and its implications for kids, schools and STEM studies. Martinez and Stager are the authors of a must-read book, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom. In this informative post, they encourage STEM educators, school leaders and teachers across the curriculum to transform our classrooms into centers of innovative thinking and experimenting. ~ Anne Jolly"

The New Year is a wonderful time to start trying some new things. "You've spent a good amount of time with your students and feel more comfortable exploring new strategies and practices that are more tailored to their learning needs. I want to share some great ideas that you can use to change things up for the second part of the year -- and that can also help beat the winter blues."

"Who Says You Can't Replicate Another School's Success? In this package, we show you how a rural school district in northwest Georgia transformed the way its students learn, using the inspiration and mentorship provided by San Diego's acclaimed High Tech High."

"SMART is an acronym that often stands for goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. They're written by many organizations to set actionable goals commensurate with the group's vision and mission. While these types of goals have saturated staff meetings around the country enough to make the term a little cringe-worthy among adults, my third graders loved dissecting the acronym, and I found them more highly engaged in writing goal/resolutions than I can remember in recent years. This week, I'm happy to share with you how my students got started writing their new year's resolutions this week. "

"To help teachers do PBL well, we created a comprehensive, research-based model for PBL - a "gold standard" to help teachers, schools, and organizations to measure, calibrate, and improve their practice. This term is used in many industries and fields to indicate the highest quality process or product. Our conception of Gold Standard PBL has three parts: 1) Student Learning Goals (in the center of the diagram below) 2) Essential Project Design Elements (shown in the red sections of the diagram), and 3) Project Based Teaching Practices (which we explain elsewhere)."

"Sprinkled throughout the newly reauthorized version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act are references to an instructional strategy that supporters think has enormous potential for reaching learners with diverse needs. The next thing to do, those proponents say, is getting more educators to understand just what it means. Called universal design for learning, or UDL for short, the strategy encompasses a wide set of teaching techniques, allowing multiple ways for teachers to present information and for students to engage in lessons and demonstrate what they know.

"On April 1st, a sold-out crowd of 250 students, teachers and civic, business, philanthropic, nonprofit, education and technology leaders flocked to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco for STEMposiumTM - a celebration of excellence in K-12 STEM education innovation presented by the nonprofit EnCorps Teachers Program with co-host Citizen Schools. "

"Amazon.com is launching a national movement to eradicate the fear math imparts in many U.S. students. The initiative orbits around the slogan "With Math I Can" and an eponymous website. It was developed by an Amazon division devoted to providing tech-based resources for K-12 education. TenMarks, an online math instruction company that Amazon bought in late 2013, is getting top billing in the campaign's launch: Amazon says that teachers using that company's services helped inspire the initiative."

"It seems a waste. Millions of educational apps, millions of lesson plans available online, millions of laptops in the hands of students. Yet only a small segment of teachers nationwide find ways to infuse technology into their lessons. "There's a real hunger out there, about how do I get better at my craft?" said Jeff Liberty, the senior director of teacher development initiatives at BetterLesson, which trains teachers to use technology in class. 'But there aren't clear mechanisms for that to occur in a dependable way.'"

"What is the best approach teachers can take towards homework? I think the guest responses today, along with numerous reader comments, provide a great perspective on the topic. If you'd like to read more research and discover additional ideas, you might want to explore my collection at The Best Resources For Learning About Homework Issues. Todays guests are educator/authors Dr. Cathy Vatterott and Bryan Harris. Reader suggestions follow their contributions."