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Great teachers work on building a sense of community in their classrooms all year long

They understand that helping students build relationships with each other is a key to creating an optimal learning environment.

You can support children's relationships in many ways. Let students share about their hobbies, interests, and passions at Morning Meeting or in connection with academic topics or assignments

As a teacher, you of course need to establish general rules of conduct for your classroom. But how do you make your students want to follow the rules?

Give them a hand in creating those rules!

Here's how to do it.

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Kick-Start Your Class: Academic Icebreakers to Engage Students

Research has shown that the use of icebreakers increases student motivation by creating an emotional connection between the student and school.

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free, online wikibook

We then have expansions of range and complexity as we move into the Baroque era. The Classical era gives us the emotional power associated with such composers as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Romanticism then transforms the rigid styles and forms of the Classical era into more individualistic stylizations. Tonality was at its peak during this period, then Impressionist music paved the way to the use of extreme dissonances in the music of the Modern era.

The first course carrying the name MOOC was offered in 2008, so this is new phenomenon. Second, the pedagogical style of the early courses, which we shall call cMOOCs, was based on a philosophy of connectivism and networking. This is quite distinct from the xMOOCs now being developed by elite US institutions that follow a more behaviourist approach. Third, the few academic studies of MOOCs are about the earlier offerings because there has been no time for systematic research on the crop of 2012 xMOOCs. Analysis of the latter has to be based on a large volume of press articles and blogs. Fourth, commentary on MOOCs includes thinly disguised promotional material by commercial interests (e.g. Koller, 2012) and articles by practitioners whose perspective is their own MOOC courses.

The term MOOC originated in Canada. Dave Cormier and Bryan Alexander coined the acronym to describe an open online course at the University of Manitoba designed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. The course, Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, was presented to 25 fee-paying students on campus and 2,300 other students from the general public who took the online class free of charge (Wikipedia, 2012a).

Can xMOOCs make money?

Break assignments into smaller, more manageable parts that include structured directions for each part.

Use a variety of assessment strategies, including performance-based and open-ended assessment. Balance teacher-assigned and student-selected projects. Offer students a choice of projects that reflect a variety of learning styles and interests. Make assessment an ongoing, interactive process.

Establish stations for inquiry-based, independent learning activities.

Students are empowered to learn on their own and even to teach one another.

Students served as instructors to their classmates, and together they worked toward learning goals more effectively than if they had been provided with the answer by the instructor.

In the meantime, I've written a book, from which this article is drawn, about all that I've learned from my research. In my book, I focus on what I identify as seven myths, or widely held beliefs, that dominate our educational practice. I start with the myth that teaching facts prevents understanding, because this (along with my second myth, that teacher-led instruction is passive) is the foundation of all the other myths I discuss. These myths have a long pedigree and provide the theoretical justification for so much of what goes on in schools. Taken together, all seven myths actually damage the education of our pupils. But here, let's focus on facts and the role knowledge has in our understanding.

Why Is It a Myth? My aim here is not to criticize true conceptual understanding, genuine appreciation of significance, or higher-order skill development. All of these things are indeed the true aim of education. My argument is that facts and subject content are not opposed to such aims; instead, they are part of it. Rousseau, Dewey, and Freire were wrong to see facts as the enemy of understanding. All the scientific research of the last half-century proves them wrong. The modern bureaucrats and education experts who base policy and practice on their thinking are wrong too, and with less excuse, as they have been alive when evidence that refutes these ideas has been discovered. Rousseau was writing in the 18th century; Dewey at the turn of the 20th; Freire in the 1970s. Research from the second half of the 20th century tells us that their analyses of factual learning are based on fundamentally faulty premises.

If we want pupils to develop the skills of analysis and evaluation, they need to know things. Willingham puts it this way:23 Data from the last thirty years lead to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that's true not just because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care about most—critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving—are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).

Try and make similar assignments as regular as possible, but don't try and fill up every day.

erms of what would fit on a phone screen for students to read while they're waiting in line for a latte.

Short virtual lectures of 10 minutes or less used to orient students to the course, to introduce a module, or to demonstrate how to solve a particular style of problem are efficient teaching tools that students can access again and again.

Similarly, assigning four different articles in one week might mean than they aren’t getting as much as they could out of any of them. Less can be more.

Novices and experts. Many of the above points relate to the fact that we read as experts while our students are still novices and are really learning how to read appropriately to build up their expertise.

The rubric does allow for that, but there is a strong sense that some of these dialogic purposes are not as highly valued as others, but I value them all as essential components to class community.

I feel good about what I have created and know that what I learned will help me and my students.

I feel accomplished!