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"Open with a question or two. Another favorite education writer of mine, the cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, argues that teachers should focus more on the use of questions. "The material I want students to learn," he writes in his book Why Don't Students Like School?, "is actually the answer to a question. On its own, the answer is almost never interesting. But if you know the question, the answer may be quite interesting." My colleague Greg Weiner, an associate professor of political science, puts those ideas into practice. At the beginning of class, he shows four or five questions on a slide for students to consider. Class then proceeds in the usual fashion. At the end, he returns to the questions so that students can both see some potential answers and understand that they have learned something that day. What did we learn last time? A favorite activity of many instructors is to spend a few minutes at the opening of class reviewing what happened in the previous session. That makes perfect sense, and is supported by the idea that we don't learn from single exposure to material - we need to return frequently to whatever we are attempting to master.But instead of offering a capsule review to students, why not ask them to offer one back to you?Reactivate what they learned in previous courses. Plenty of excellent evidence suggests that whatever knowledge students bring into a course has a major influence on what they take away from it. So a sure-fire technique to improve student learning is to begin class by revisiting, not just what they learned in the previous session, but what they already knew about the subject matter.Write it down. All three of the previous activities would benefit from having students spend a few minutes writing down their responses. That way, every student has the opportunity to answer the question, practice memory retrieval from the previous session, or surface their prior knowledge - and not just the students most likely to

"Close Reading and Argument Writing - Authentically Across the Curriculum 7/16/2015 0 Comments Close reading of informational texts and non-fiction articles is not - and should not be - reserved for language arts classes. Every content area would be immensely enhanced if science teachers, social studies teachers, physical education teachers, welding teachers, woodworking teachers (in other words, "all technical subjects," as Common Core states) would not push aside the textbook, but instead embrace it, along with content area and trade articles. Students would then simultaneously learn how to dissect the readings while gaining knowledge in these content areas. What often happens is that teachers feel that students can't handle the text books or can't read the articles independently - and often that is true. However, when teachers instead go into a survival mode, of sorts, and read aloud the whole chapter or article or summarize it with a slideshow, it ends up doing a disservice to students - students are not learning HOW to read these complex texts. They are not learning how to acquire the information on their own. They are not being given the skills to read the sometimes intricate information within a particular content area or even within their possible future trade. They are not being given the opportunity to read, understand, articulate, and discuss or even debate topics within their area of study. Teachers sometimes feel that they can't do these things with students because they are not language arts teachers, or because they don't have time, or simply because they don't know how. Alternatively, a simple solution is to let go of the control and let students do…..with the guidance called close reading. Close reading is a guided reading approach. It is guided because 1) the close reading strategy is reserved for complex texts that are often too high for students to be left with independently and 2) students don't use close reading strateg

1) the ways they currently implement Twitter in their teaching and learning, 2) ideas for future development of Twitter-based assignments and pedagogical practices, and 3) issues concerning the integration of Twitter and other digital media into both traditional and non-traditional pedagogies. Collaborators should feel free to add material to these pages, to comment on existing material, and to share links to relevant external readings and resources. It may be helpful to tag your contributions with your Twitter handle. Collaborators are asked to please respect this space as a forum for open and respectful dialogue and networking. Let's fill up the pages below with great ideas!  Share the ways you currently implement Twitter in your teaching and learning: Students in my course New Information Technologies do an "Internet Censorship" project, focused on a specific country. I ask them to follow a journalist who tweets on that country as part of their research to understand the state of Internet freedom in the country they select. -- Lora Since shortly after Twitter was launched, I've experimented with various iterations of "The Twitter Essay," an assignment that has students considering the nature of the "essay" as a medium and how they might do that work within the space of 140 characters. -- Jesse (@Jessifer) In my fully online classes, I've started using Twitter to replace the discussion forum as the central location for student interaction. -- Jesse (@Jessifer) Show Tweets that have gotten people arrested and prompt discussion on whether it is fair that anyone be arrested for any Tweet in the US, who is likely to be arrested for their Tweets, what kinds of Tweets are likely to prompt arrest, etc. Students in my First Year Seminar course "The Irish Imagination: Yeats to Bono" developed a platform for digital annotation of Irish literature. Embedded in their platform was a twitter feed of relevant individuals/groups, m

1) the ways they currently implement Twitter in their teaching and learning, 2) ideas for future development of Twitter-based assignments and pedagogical practices, and 3) issues concerning the integration of Twitter and other digital media into both traditional and non-traditional pedagogies. Collaborators should feel free to add material to these pages, to comment on existing material, and to share links to relevant external readings and resources. It may be helpful to tag your contributions with your Twitter handle. Collaborators are asked to please respect this space as a forum for open and respectful dialogue and networking. Let's fill up the pages below with great ideas!  Share the ways you currently implement Twitter in your teaching and learning: Students in my course New Information Technologies do an "Internet Censorship" project, focused on a specific country. I ask them to follow a journalist who tweets on that country as part of their research to understand the state of Internet freedom in the country they select. -- Lora Since shortly after Twitter was launched, I've experimented with various iterations of "The Twitter Essay," an assignment that has students considering the nature of the "essay" as a medium and how they might do that work within the space of 140 characters. -- Jesse (@Jessifer) In my fully online classes, I've started using Twitter to replace the discussion forum as the central location for student interaction. -- Jesse (@Jessifer) Show Tweets that have gotten people arrested and prompt discussion on whether it is fair that anyone be arrested for any Tweet in the US, who is likely to be arrested for their Tweets, what kinds of Tweets are likely to prompt arrest, etc. Students in my First Year Seminar course "The Irish Imagination: Yeats to Bono" developed a platform for digital annotation of Irish literature. Embedded in their platform was a twitter feed of relevant individuals/groups, m

Web centrada en una variante de la Indagación que pone el foco en la argumentación. Estrategia que cada vez recibe más atención por su gran potencial en el aprendizaje. "The ADI Instructional Model ADI lab activities consist of the same 8 stages. Each stage is designed to give students an opportunity to participate in one or more science and engineering practices. The stages of ADI are the same for each investigation so students have an opportunity to use the same science and engineering practices, but different disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concepts to figure out how thing work or why things happen. This instructional approach also gives students an opportunity to learn how to propose, support, evaluate, and revise ideas through discussion and in writing."

"... Hay una frase contundente, que si no mal recuerdo es de Juan José Arreola, "Si no lees, no sabes escribir. Si no sabes escribir no sabes pensar". Una sencillez aforística que debe ser el fruto de la labor intelectual de un buen lector. Edmund Husserl escribe en su Lógica formal y Lógica trascendental: "El pensamiento siempre se hace en el lenguaje y está totalmente ligado a la palabra. Pensar, de forma distinta a otras modalidades de la conciencia, es siempre lingüístico, siempre un uso del lenguaje". Así que si no tenemos palabras, si no tenemos lecturas en nuestra memoria que enriquezcan nuestro lenguaje, nuestro pensamiento será muy pobre. Las personas toleran no ser buenos lectores, pero si se les dice que no saben pensar, esto lastima su orgullo y, sin embargo, una condiciona a la otra. Así, la lectura es una herramienta de desarrollo fundamental. Y donde mejor se desenvuelve esta herramienta es en los libros, no en los pequeños artículos que dominan la circulación de la Web; el encuentro con el lenguaje merece un espacio de concentración -el medio es también el mensaje-, un encuentro a fondo con la mente de un autor que puede haber muerto hace cientos de años pero que vive, al menos meméticamente, en el texto que se trasvasa a nuestra mente. ..."

"¿Cómo impacta la escritura en el individuo? Cuando enseñaba a niños muy pequeños, de seis años, en barrios muy difíciles -en los que a la mayoría no les gustaba la escuela-, a unos pocos les gustaba leer y solo algunos podían expresarse por sí mismos. Pero podías ver cómo, una vez que empezaban a aprender a leer y escribir, de a poco se iban involucrando y vinculando más a las actividades de la escuela. Quienes no lograban leer y escribir se vinculaban más a actividades en las calles, no escolares. A los que aprendían, leer y escribir los transformaba en individuos diferentes. Al vivir como adultos en un mundo de construcción simbólica, quienes tienen mayor dominio de la lectura y la escritura son los que pueden participar en ese mundo, pueden hacer oír su voz e, incluso, modificarlo. Y quienes no saben leer y escribir, son puras víctimas que reciben lo que los primeros determinan para ellos. Un ejemplo ¿Cómo sabemos acerca del calentamiento global y el cambio climático? La lectura y la escritura, incluso la forma en que nos vinculamos con ellas, los textos que decidamos leer y escribir van a determinar cómo interpretamos el mundo. Para algunas personas, que pueden leer textos científicos, modelos en la computadora y hacer aportes científicos, el calentamiento global es un fenómeno que podrán entender. Mientras que el resto simplemente estarán atentos a la lluvia de hoy, las aves o el sol de mañana, y no podrán proyectar un fenómeno que está mediado en el tiempo. Entonces, más allá de estos 5000 años de escritura -que es cuando creemos que se inventaron los primeros registros-, vivimos en un momento donde hay oportunidades de desarrollo, y muchas veces la posibilidad de participar o no en ellas estará relacionada con las oportunidades de formación en lectura y escritura. Además, en otro nivel, la escritura también organiza nuestras mentes. Por ello, una persona altamente formada pensará de manera distinta de algui

One of my B2 ESL learners became an adventurous cook over the Halloween weekend and has come up with this yummy recipe!