Group items tagged

Of paramount importance is ongoing checking for student understanding (minute by minute, day by day, week by week) and adjusting instruction based on assessment insights. This is especially important for project- and problem-based learning.

“To succeed, students simply need vastly more time to purposefully read, discuss, and write about worthy, substantive literature and nonfiction across the curriculum (as often as possible, in the interpretive and argumentative mode)

“this should occur in a climate that emphasizes helpfulness and growth, rather than evaluation.”

“Nobody has a growth mindset in everything all the time,” says Dweck. “Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets.

When students fail, teachers and parents should say things like, “Okay, what is this teaching us? Where should we go next?”

With praise, focus on the process that led to success – hard work, good strategies, effective use of resources. “Be matter-of-fact,” advises Dweck, “with not too strong or too passive a reaction… Effective teachers who actually have classrooms full of children with a growth mindset are always supporting children’s learning strategies and showing how strategies created that success.”

U.S. elementary teachers spend an average of about 32 hours a week with their students, secondary teachers about 30 hours, out of a 38-hour contractual week. Daily planning time ranges from 12 to 80 minutes for elementary teachers, from 30 to 96 minutes at the secondary level. The paucity of contractual planning time in most schools pushes a lot of teachers’ work into late afternoons, evenings, and weekends; including that time, the typical teacher’s work week is about 52 hours.

Teachers need two types of planning time, Merritt believes: (a) Individual time every day to prepare materials for upcoming lessons, assess student work, and communicate with specialists and parents about their students; and (b) common planning time once or twice a week with same-grade/same-subject colleagues to plan, implement, reflect on, and modify instruction.

The 30-32 hours U.S. teachers spend with their students each week compares to about 20-21 hours in other countries.

Shorter days for students

No-student days embedded within the school year

The number of such days ranges from two to 18 per school year.

Increased staffing – Core subject teachers can be given more planning time within the school day if their students go out to additional physical education, art, music, science, environmental education, and other specialty subjects – and also by increasing supervised recess and using instructional assistants and parent volunteers.

“we should trust teachers who are asking for more time, and make planning time a high priority in budgeting decisions. Instead of implementing costly interventions that yield minimal results in schools, we should pay more attention to the repeated requests from teachers about how to support them in their daily work… They need more time to identify problems they see in their schools or classrooms and work individually and collectively on solutions.”

Using inquiry protocols, they asked each other What do we want students to get out of the curriculum? and How can we get them there? -   They collaboratively developed model curriculum units and adapted them as needed; -   They used a fishbowl approach to observe colleagues teaching new curriculum materials; -   They watched outside curriculum experts modeling appropriate classroom strategies. -   They looked together at student work as students grappled with the new expectations and thought about the implications for unit and lesson planning; -   They jointly figured out ways to support students in material that at first seemed too hard.

Meaningful data – Static assessment results from benchmark assessments are not enough. To have truly high-quality discussions about their work, teachers need (a) open-ended assessment items from their ongoing instruction to identify student strategies and uncover their mathematical reasoning; (b) feedback from classroom observations; and (c) video clips of their own instruction and that of colleagues.             • Supportive tools – These include classroom observations and videos and having a facilitator with deep pedagogical content knowledge. It’s also crucial that the PLC sinks its teeth into one or two substantive and actionable math concepts or strategies.

• Supportive colleagues – Dissonance is not enough, say the authors. To truly improve instruction, teachers also need a collegial group that will hold their hands as they deal with their students’ struggles and criticism from observers:

“It is likely,” say the authors, “that repeated video recording and written feedback motivated Ms. Walker and other teachers to try out new instructional strategies and continuously  assess and refine them so that they could demonstrate improvement in subsequent observed lessons.”

-   Within-class grouping (teachers differentiating instruction among several small groups) had moderately positive effects.

-   Cross-grade grouping (students from different grade levels brought together to learn a particular subject or unit – e.g., the Joplin Plan for reading) had small-to-moderate benefits.

-   These two forms of grouping benefited students with high, medium, and low achievement.

-   Special grouping for gifted students (pullout or honors programs) was very helpful for those students.

-   Acceleration (students skipping a grade or taking courses at a younger age than their peers) was the most beneficial of all.

In short, every child starts out with a natural interest in art, but for most it is slowly drained away until all that’s left is a handful of teens in eyeliner and black clothing whose parents worry they’ll never move out of the basement.”

As of 2015, only 26.2 percent of African-American students have access to art classes.

Gregory has a startling suggestion: take the “art” out of art education and replace it with creativity education. Why? Because creativity is something that almost everyone agrees is vital to success.

We need to make sure that the kids of today (who will need to be the creative problem solvers of tomorrow) realize their creative potential and have the tools to use it.

A total of 21 percent of students said they had been bullied in the following ways: 13 percent made fun of, called names, or insulted; 12 percent subject of rumors; 5 percent pushed, shoved, tripped, or spat on; 4 percent threatened with harm; 5 percent purposefully excluded from activities; 2.5 percent told to do things they didn’t want to do; and 2 percent had their property purposefully destroyed. Girls reported more online harassment (16 percent) than boys (6 percent). These were the locations where students said the bullying occurred: -   42 percent in hallways or stairwells (similar for boys and girls); -   34 percent in classrooms (perhaps mainly during entry, transitions, and exit); -   22 percent in cafeterias; -   19 percent outside on school grounds; -   12 percent online or by text; -   10 percent on school buses; -   9 percent in bathrooms/locker rooms.

hallways and stairwells, taken together, are nearly twice as likely to be the source of the problem as the cafeteria, playground, or buses and bathrooms. Supervision and vigilance in those fluid spaces between classes is likely to benefit vulnerable students disproportionately.”

dance, gesture, and other forms of movement can improve motivation, engagement, and learning.

students in classrooms that integrated movement were “significantly more excited by, engaged in, and focused on the lessons” than they were with conventional teaching methods.

Dancing to memorize information

Moving among stations

Applying movement to assessments

Forming lines, rows, or other groupings – Each student gets a card with a punctuation mark or a word and students silently arrange themselves to form a complete sentence.

Representing terms or ideas with actions – After reading a book about emotions, students stand and act out furious, satisfied, courageous, and other words.

– The teacher gives each group of students sets of fraction cards and they take turns moving to another group in search of equivalent fractions, bringing possible matches back to their group to see if they’re correct.

– To test knowledge of synonyms and antonyms, pairs of students jump straight up and down three times, then choose to land on either their right or left foot; if both land on the same foot, they must come up with synonyms for a word on the board; if they land on opposite feet, they must name antonyms.

– Doing a dance skip-counting numbers (5, 10, 15, 20…) to the “Macarena.”

Many teachers assigned tasks with complex instructions and procedures, but little higher-level thinking was required of students

How many of these do schools teach? Just three, say the authors, even in schools where students get high state test scores: application, recall, and (sometimes) analysis.

a synthesis of the skills they believe adults need for successful lives: Cognitive skills: -   Recall -   Application -   Analysis -   Evaluation -   Creative thinking Interpersonal skills: -   Communication -   Cooperation -   Empathy -   Trust building -   Service orientation -   Conflict resolution -   Negotiation -   Responsibility -   Assertiveness -   Advocacy Intrapersonal skills: -   Flexibility -   Adaptability -   Appreciation of diversity -   Valuing learning -   Cultural appreciation -   Curiosity -   Forethought -   Self-regulation -   Self-monitoring -   Self-evaluation

Most teachers presented students with complex content, but the tasks students were asked to perform were simple recall and application

interpersonal and intrapersonal skills almost never showed up.

These exceptional instructors created “a harmonious environment,” say the researchers, “demonstrating an understanding that doing so is a prerequisite to academic learning.”

It was the teacher, not the subject. This level of intellectual and affective demand cropped up in different subjects, grades, and classes with different student achievement levels. The variable was the teacher.

In a 10th-grade honors humanities class, for example, students were asked to invent questions to guide their study of Western imperialism in China (having just finished a unit on the colonization of Africa). Guided by the teacher, students brainstormed possible questions, decided which were most important, and edited questions until the questions were intellectually stimulating and open-ended.

These outliers managed to weave rigorous instruction of content across the cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal domains, putting to rest the notion that content- and skill-focused instruction precludes higher-order thinking – and vice-versa.

Teachers adapted their teaching to the moment.

to teach a deep and broad range of skills while also addressing disciplinary knowledge – requires intelligence and years of practice.”

Instruction was tied to complex assessments. Often designed by the teachers themselves, these checks for understanding stood in contrast to the test-prep oriented assessments in other classrooms.

Teachers built strong relationships with students.

First, Nehring, Charner-Laird, and Szczesiul suggest that schools need complex, high-level assessments to make all classrooms accountable for teaching the full range of adult skills. Second, “excellence requires highly skilled teachers with finely tuned radar and improvisational ability.” And third, “good teaching is about caring relationships, a parental affection that gives and receives, that honors the fundamentally human nature of our work as educators.

Thomas Guskey (University of Kentucky) stresses the importance of professional development starting with clear outcomes.

Polly details the 5E approach, in which students spend most of a lesson exploring mathematical tasks with limited support from the teacher, and some students get individual or small-group support: -   Engage – The class is given a math task or activity. -   Explore – Students have time to work on the task with their partner or a small group, with the teacher giving only instructions and circulating, sometimes posing questions to support students’ exploration. -   Explain – The class comes together to discuss the problem and how different students solved it. The teacher facilitates the discussion, perhaps choosing a main focus based on what was observed during the work time, and provides direct instruction as needed. -   Elaborate/extend – For the rest of the class, the teacher gets students working on activities, math games, and small-group activities that deepen understanding of the concept and zeros in on students who seem confused or off track. -   Evaluate – Students solve a final task or participate in a discussion of concepts, allowing the teacher to assess learning and plan for future lessons.

“Looking beyond the intended goals to the broader array of possible outcomes is an important aspect of evaluation and vital to judging effectiveness,”

What sparks robust discussions in PLCs is looking at variations in students’ responses to individual items on common assessments and writing prompts.

“The primary purpose of this collaborative data analysis,” says Guskey, “is to guide these teachers’ professional learning experiences so they can improve the quality of their instruction and help all students learn well.”

One additional cautionary note: PLCs tend to jump into “debating new ideas, techniques, innovations, programs, and instructional issues,” says Guskey. “While these are important issues, we must remember that they are means to an important end that must be determined first. Our journey always begins by deciding our destination… Ninety percent of essential questions in any evaluation are addressed in the planning process, before the journey begins.”

“When a teacher models and provides direct instruction at the start of a lesson, it rarely enables students to explore mathematical tasks or engage in productive struggle,” says Drew Polly (University of North Carolina/Charlotte) in this article in Teaching Children Mathematics.

researchers have found that if students grapple with a task before the teacher explains and models it (and receive appropriate follow-up), they’re more engaged and learn better.

What student learning outcomes do we aim to accomplish? -   What evidence will tell us if we met the goal? (ideally more than one source of data) -   What unintended consequences might occur, positive or negative?

“[T]he size of a person’s vocabulary is one of the strongest predictors of his or her reading comprehension,” say Tanya Wright (Michigan State University/East Lansing) and Gina Cervetti ((University of Michigan/Ann Arbor) in this article in Reading Research Quarterly.

Students who enter school knowing fewer words are likely to continue with relatively small vocabularies and struggle with text comprehension throughout school. Students who start with larger vocabularies, on the other hand, have broader general knowledge, need to spend less time accessing memory of words (which frees up working memory to grasp the meaning of a text), read and enjoy their reading more, and build stronger vocabularies – a reciprocal relationship that tends to widen the achievement gap.

Teaching word meanings almost always improved comprehension of texts containing the words taught. • Teaching word meanings doesn’t seem to improve comprehension of texts that don’t contain the target words.             • Instruction involving students in some active processing was more effective than dictionary and definition work at improving comprehension of texts containing the words taught. One caveat: researchers don’t know how much active processing is enough.             • Teaching one or two strategies (e.g., context clues or morphology) for solving word meanings doesn’t seem to improve generalized reading comprehension.

“This requires slowing down, checking to be sure we understand correctly, and sharing back what we hear.”

Meeting anger or frustration with genuine, compassionate interest builds trust.

Changing course based on input is a sign of integrity, not weakness.”

A key value she worked to communicated was about listening to dissent and changing course if necessary.

Fiarman found that making quick visits to classrooms every day communicated respect and made her far more knowledgeable about instruction.

it engenders trust when your boss can speak to the specifics of your work.”

for practice to be an effective tool for improvement, students need to be pushing the limits of current performance and getting continuous feedback – very difficult to orchestrate for 30 students working in their bedrooms. Second, as soon as teachers give grades for practice work, the incentive is for students to play it safe and not push into challenging or unknown territory.

Here are their ideas on making feedback less threatening and more productive:             • Separate coaching from evaluation.

“Coaching sessions should include no rubric scoring or other evaluations,”

Be thoughtful about receiving criticism. “The person getting the feedback has the power to decide whether it’s on target, fair, or helpful,” say the authors, “and to decide whether to use the feedback or dismiss it.”

When feedback rubs you the wrong way, it’s also important to dig deeper to understand what’s really going.

Be noisy about the importance of improving your school’s feedback culture – for students, for teachers, for parents, and for yourself.”

In this article in All Things PLC, consultant/author Douglas Reeves confronts these widely espoused misconceptions about grading:

if grades were effective motivators, homework completion, classroom engagement, and overall diligence would be sky-high. Not so!

“Asking such questions helps me counteract my unconscious bias,” says Fiarman. “Recognizing the pervasiveness of bias is an important first step. Acknowledging that I might make mistakes because of this bias – then actively working to counter it – builds trust.”

the only feedback that matters is that the work was finished on time and correctly.

it’s unfair and demotivating for students to have their final grade pulled down for practice work.

Myth #3: Grades drive future performance. True, there’s a correlation between good grades and college success, and between poor grades and dropping out of school, but Reeves questions whether grades cause success and failure.

While it is possible that intelligence and work ethic forge the path from kindergarten to Ivy League and Wall Street, it is also possible that zip code, tutors, and connections – all artifacts of family socioeconomic status – are the underlying causes.”

Teachers giving zeros for missed assignments and refusing to accept late work lets students off the hook – and starts a spiral of doom with their final grades.

Averaging grades through a semester punishes students for early failures versus rewarding them for using early problems to improve final performance.

“Rather than using the last two months of the semester to build momentum and finish strong,” says Reeves, “because of a punitive grading system, they are doomed to failure well before the semester is over. There is nothing left for them to do except cut class, be disruptive, or ultimately, quit school.”

“grading policies are matters of equity, with disparate impacts on students, particularly based on ethnicity and gender. Boys and minority males receive lower grades just as they are more likely to be more severely disciplined for an infraction. Girls receive higher grades for the same level of proficiency. If racial and gender disparities of this sort took place in any other area of public life, the consequences would be swift and sure.”

Instead, he suggests replacing each statement of fact – Punishment deters unwanted behavior – with a testable hypothesis – If I penalize students for late, incomplete, and absent homework, then student achievement will improve – and conducting real-time experiments within the school.

He’s found that non-evaluative comments are “easy to receive, easy to give, and easy to act on.”

Teaching sentence stems can be helpful: I’m not sure I understand the opening of this piece… I’m not sure why you did this; can you explain it more?

Be specific.

Prior to peer feedback, the teacher should introduce a rubric and lead the class in a group critique of an exemplar paper, focusing on suggestions that will make a difference.

The teacher might also display samples of feedback statements and have students break into groups and rank them from helpful to unhelpful, taking note of sentence starters and phrases they can use in their own feedback conversations.

Be timely. One of the greatest advantages of well-orchestrated peer feedback is that students can get comments on their work immediately, rather than waiting days, perhaps weeks, for the teacher to wade through piles of papers.

“Unfortunately,” Eden concludes, “by second-guessing teachers’ judgments about how to maintain order, policymakers and district administrators are likely harming the education of many millions of well-behaved students in an effort to help the misbehaving few.”

“[T]hey are encouraged more than ever to present themselves as ‘sexy’ – not about being attractive or beautiful, but a very narrow, commercialized idea of sexy. What’s particularly complicated is they’re sold that idea [of sexiness] as being a source of personal power. There is a complete disconnect between that image of sexiness and an understanding of their bodies, their own wants, needs, desires, and limits, what those might be, having those respected.”

young women “are almost conditioned, starting in middle school, to have their bodies publicly commented on by young men, [and] they don’t think they have any power to really stop it.” In schools, she says, the “everyday chipping away of girls’ self-worth by reducing them to their bodies is completely ignored.”

We tend to silo conversations about sex as if it is not about the same values of compassion, kindness, respect, mutuality, and caring that we want our children to embody in every other aspect of their lives.”

The Internet – “Unfortunately,” says Orenstein, “the first thing kids Google is porn. The average age that kids today are exposed to porn, either intentionally or not, is 11. We have to ask what it means that kids are learning about sex from that realm before they’ve even had their first kiss and how that’s shaping them, their attitudes toward sexuality, and their expectations of sex.” Parents and schools need to explicitly teach kids to apply a critical lens to what they’re seeing, and shape values that will help them safely and wisely navigate this very challenging era.

“If you want to be a lifelong employee anywhere today, you have to be a lifelong learner.” He quotes education-to-work expert Heather McGowan: “Stop asking a young person WHAT you want to be when you grow up. It freezes their identity into a job that may not be there. Ask them HOW you want to be when you grow up. Having an agile learning mind-set will be the new skill set of the 21st century.”

Visual attention provides an index of what people are thinking about.

Edmodo as an all encompassing classroom management/teaching and learning/collaboration system.

My favorite feature of Edmodo and a big difference between itself and blogging. I’ve written a few posts on how I’ve used groups to organize my lessons with different small groups.

It’s simply a feature blogging doesn’t offer

convenience and ease of creating groups for different subjects or smaller groups within that group so that specific groups of children can collaborate and discuss.It takes no time to set the groups up and they can be altered at any time.

the simplicity of the Edmodo discussion wins me over compared to blogging. Simply add a note explaining the topic of the discussion, which can include images, videos, embedded links to other web tools, links to other sites, click Add and the discussion begins. All it takes is to hit the Reply button and the discussion is in full swing. The one feature I would like Edmodo to add is the ability to reply to a specific comment like you can in blogs. It can be a bit cumbersome having to write a reply to someone who wrote something 10 comments back.

sharing files is very easy with Edmodo

the polls and quizzes on Edmodo can be created much more quickly, albeit only by the teacher

Extrinsic motivation through Badges - Not everyone’s cup of tea, but if you like to use stickers or awards, Edmodo has its own reward system called badges. You can create your own (but it’s a lot easier to just grab badges already created by other Edmodo teachers – I’ve collected 190 of them from my connections) and to encourage or acknowledge student effort or work, you can simply select their name in your class list, select a badge and award it to the students

a good way to collate a whole bunch of comments for your student reports without doing any more work than giving that badge toa student.

The challenge, say the authors, is designing classroom observations that provide valid data on what’s happening day to day in classrooms, make meaningful distinctions among teachers, provide teachers with useful feedback, and support helpful, high-quality professional development.

I would suggest two more questions: First, are classroom visits announced or unannounced? If researchers don’t gather data on this, they are missing an important variable in the reliability of teacher assessment – teachers are likely to put on an especially good lesson when they know they’re being observed. Second, are teacher-evaluation rubrics used to score individual classroom visits, which is conceptually very difficult, or as end-of-year summations of multiple classroom visits with feedback conversations through the year?

Tomlinson and other proponents suggest that teachers differentiate by content (what is taught), process (how it’s taught), and product (how students are asked to demonstrate their learning).

students learn better, they said, when the work is at the right level of difficulty, personally relevant, and appropriately engaging.

trying to assess a teacher’s work asking, Is it differentiated? runs the risk of missing the forest for the trees. Better, says Marshall, to ask two broader questions (tip of the hat to Rick DuFour): -   What are students supposed to be learning? -   Are all students mastering it?

Good lesson plans build in multiple entry points, using the principles of Universal Design for Learning to make learning accessible to as many students as possible, and have clear goals; thoughtful task analysis; chunked learning; teaching methods appropriate to the content; links to students’ interests and experiences; checks for understanding; and accommodations for students with special needs.

a major factor in student success is a set of in-the-moment moves that effective teachers have always used, among them effective classroom management; knowing students well; being culturally sensitive; making the subject matter exciting; making it relevant; making it clear; taking advantage of visuals and props; involving students and getting them involved with each other; having a sense of humor; and nimbly using teachable moments.” But equally important is checking for understanding – dry-erase boards, clickers, probing questions, looking over students’ shoulders – and using students’ responses to continuously fine-tune teaching.

Timely follow-up with these students is crucial – pullout, small-group after-school help, tutoring, Saturday school, and other venues to help them catch up.

Among the most important life skills that students should take away from their K-12 years,” says Marshall, “is the ability to self-assess, know their strengths and weaknesses, deal with difficulty and failure, and build a growth mindset. Student self-efficacy and independence should be prime considerations in planning, lesson execution, and follow-up so that students move through the grades becoming increasingly motivated, confident, and autonomous learners prepared to succeed in the wider world.”

cold-calling actually increases students’ voluntary participation. “Cold-calling encourages students to prepare more and to participate more frequently,” said one researcher. “The more they prepare, and the more frequently they participate, the more comfortable they become when participating.”

If we don’t encourage students to come out of their shells for fear of putting them on the spot, we may be doing them a disservice… You’re curious about their views and their understanding of the issues being discussed. What they think is important – both to their own learning and to that of their peers.”

Drawing on two decades of data from the National Center for Educational Statistics, the authors found that between 1998 and 2010, the reading readiness gap closed by 16 percent and the math gap by 10 percent. The black-white and the Hispanic-white gaps also narrowed by about 15 percent.

the gaps closed because of rapid progress by low-income children, not declines in the readiness of high-income children, and the gains persisted at least through fourth grade.

What brought about the early reading and math gains? The authors believe several factors contributed: • The availability of high-quality, publicly funded preschool programs – the percent of U.S. 4-year-olds enrolled in state-funded preschools has increased from 14 to 29 percent from 2000. • The fact that more families are investing in books and other reading matter for children, as well as Internet access and computer games focused on reading and math skills. • More parents are spending quality time with children, taking them to local libraries, and engaging in learning activities at home.

Then Project Aristotle began looking at group norms – the culture of unwritten rules that guide people when they collaborate – and hit pay dirt. It turned out that two group norms were shared by virtually all of Google’s most effective teams: -   Equal air time – In teams that got the best results, members participated roughly the same amount during meetings. “As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,” said Google researcher Anita Woolley. “But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.” -   Interpersonal sensitivity – Effective team members had the ability to intuit how colleagues felt by their tone of voice, facial expressions, and other nonverbal cues. The members of less-effective teams were less tuned in to their teammates’ feelings.

The behaviors that create psychological safety – conversational turn-taking and empathy – are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond. And those human bonds matter as much at work as anywhere else. In fact, they sometimes matter more.”

In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.”

He believes there are two “ubiquitous features of conventional school environments” that trigger and reinforce the psychological factors noted above, augment the disadvantages with which minority students enter school, and feed the peer pressures to disengage from schooling – all of which creates a self-reinforcing downward spiral of achievement. The two features are: -   Students being given work that is too difficult for their current academic level; -   Students getting low grades on their work rather than frequent, individualized, objective feedback.

“The hypothesis,” say Yeh, “is that the conventional school system is inadvertently structured in a way that fosters disengagement, thereby reducing effort, which depresses achievement and grades, causing demoralization, which further reduces engagement and achievement.” The process kicks in around third grade, when struggling students begin to view themselves as intellectually inferior because their grades are lower than their classmates’, contributing to decreased self-efficacy and increasing passivity; it accelerates in middle school, at which point low grades strongly correlate with eventually dropping out.

What is to be done? Yeh’s theory is that by flipping the two pernicious factors, schools can turn the downward spiral into a virtuous upward cycle of achievement. That involves: -   Adjusting task difficulty for low-performing students to an appropriate level of challenge so that if they apply effective effort, they will be successful. -   Rapid performance feedback with respect to a standard, not other students.

He cites positive research on two programs using this approach – Reading Assessment and Math Assessment – and reports on a systematic study comparing different interventions aimed at closing the achievement gap – charter schools, voucher programs, an additional year of school, various high-quality pre-school programs, full-day kindergarten, class size reduction, value-added assessment, summer school, teacher salary incentives, teacher experience, teacher PD, longer school day, computer instruction, tutoring, and school reform. Rapid assessment is dramatically more successful at raising student achievement than any of the others.

by far the most powerful and cost-effective intervention is to adjust task difficulty and provide students with prompt, objective feedback on their efforts.

“When students engage in project-based learning over the course of their time in school,” says John Larmer (Buck Institute for Education) in this article in Educational Leadership, “there’s an accumulating effect. They feel empowered. They see that they can make a difference.” In addition, they’re more likely to acquire the skills, knowledge, and dispositions needed for college and career success.

the key elements of project-based learning, carefully planned and skillfully managed by the teacher:

A challenging problem or question

Sustained inquiry

Student voice and choice

Authenticity

Reflection

Critique and revision

Public product

four ways that project-based learning can go off the rails and not fulfill its potential: -   Mistake #1: Using materials that aren’t truly project-based; beware of PBL-lite! -   Mistake #2: Providing inadequate training and support for teachers; one-shot workshops are not enough. -   Mistake #3: Over-using projects in the curriculum; basic skills can still be taught in a more conventional format. -   Mistake #4: Implementing project-based learning on an ad hoc basis; to get the long-term effect, students need to engage in high-quality projects on a regular basis through their school years.

AltSchools encourage students to dive into topics they’re passionate about, with teachers tracking everything they do using classroom video cameras and elaborate K-8 databases. The schools make a point of shaping diverse student bodies by giving scholarships to students whose parents can’t afford the $30,000-a-year tuition.

We are raising a generation that will have the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips, for every minute of their life, so clearly education needs to change to accommodate that.”

“Basically, what we have told teachers is we have hired you for your creative teacher brains, and anytime you are doing something that doesn’t require your creative teacher brain that a computer could be doing as well as or better than you, then a computer should do it.”

To a computer measuring keystrokes, a student zoning out because he’s bored is indistinguishable from one who is moved by her book to imagine a world of her own.”

“People are very focused on the algorithm. But equally important is the quality of the materials” – the clarity of the math questions and the worthiness of the readings being presented on students’ computer screens. Willingham also notes that teachers in high-tech classrooms often have to prepare two lesson plans – one that uses the technology and one for when the technology breaks down.

Hire capable, well-matched teachers. Detailed advertisements and postings are important to giving candidates a clear idea of each position, says Clement. She also recommends longer interviews with more candidates, enlisting experienced teachers to take part in interviews, and gathering information on candidates from multiple sources.

Provide continuous professional development. This should include induction that eases new teachers into the demands of the full job – orientation before classes begin, well-matched mentors through the first five years, and ongoing PD specific to rookies’ needs.

Use colleagues to provide feedback. Traditional “gotcha” teacher evaluation has rarely been helpful in supporting new teachers, says Clement. Trained mentors can provide non-evaluative feedback that really makes a difference, perhaps with a firewall between their observations and the formal evaluation process. Of course it’s important that incoming teachers know the district’s criteria for effective teaching and are familiar with how administrators will assess their work.

Understand millennials. “This generation of teachers wants to network and have input,” says Clement. Most have a strong preference for electronic interaction, and administrators and colleagues should meet young teachers where they are tech-wise and provide strong online resources.

• Provide leadership opportunities. “While many new teachers are just surviving, others actively seek an avenue to truly make a difference,” says Clement. To find fulfillment in teaching and stay in the profession, they need to get involved in meaningful roles outside their classrooms. Some possibilities: speaking at induction ceremonies and serving on a welcome committee for the newest hires; leading book study groups; taking part in social service organizations on campus; and serving on curriculum committees

students who read about scientists’ struggles, whether intellectual or personal, got better grades in science after reading the texts. The positive effect was most pronounced among students whose science grades were low before the experiment.

Another finding: both before and after reading the texts, students who had a “growth” mindset (effort, not innate talent, determines success) tended to do better in science classes than students with a “fixed” mindset.

and she was trained to highlight strengths

Showing empathy was important

The trainer stressed the importance of avoiding teen patois and not making typos, which undermine authoritativeness.

Having all three factors present in a school can compensate for their absence in the family, community, or peer group. And a school with these factors can be resilient as an organization in the face of challenges and traumatic events it may face.

But in practical terms, text messaging affords a level of privacy that the human voice makes impossible. If you’re hiding from an abusive relative or you just don’t want your classmates to know how overwhelmed you feel about applying to college, a text message, even one sent in public, is safer than a phone call.

What’s more, tears go undetected by the person you’ve reached out to, and you don’t have to hear yourself say aloud your most shameful secrets.”

All people have the capacity for resilience, she says, and there are three factors that tap and nurture that potential: (a) caring relationships, (b) high expectations, and (c) meaningful opportunities for participation and contribution.

The advantage of using texting for a crisis hotline is that teens who are willfully uncommunicative when speaking are often forthcoming to the point of garrulous when texting, quite willing to disclose sensitive information.

The three factors help develop children’s social competence, problem-solving ability, sense of self and internal locus of control, and sense of purpose and optimism about the future – all of which are key to dealing successfully with adversity.

This is all about providing a sense of connectedness and belonging, “being there,” showing compassion and trust.

Teachers make appropriate expectations clear and recognize progress as well as performance. They also encourage mindfulness and self-awareness of moods, thinking, and actions. Principals orchestrate a curriculum that is challenging, comprehensive, thematic, experiential, and inclusive of multiple perspectives. They also provide training in resilience and youth development, and work to change deeply held adult beliefs about students’ capacities.

Teachers hold daily class meetings and empower students to create classroom norms and agreements. Principals establish peer-helping/tutoring and cross-age mentoring/tutoring programs and set up peer support networks to help new students and families acclimate to the school environment.

Resilience is a process, not a trait. It’s a struggle to define oneself as healthy amidst serious challenges.

Several personal strengths are associated with resilience – being strong cognitively, socially, emotionally, morally, and spiritually.

In classrooms, open channels of communication are essential. Nothing should inhibit, embarrass, or shame students from asking questions during a lesson.

a person who displays bad judgment is not ‘forever’ a bad person.”

To help others, educators need to take care of themselves. An analogy: on an airplane, people need to have their own oxygen masks in place before they can help others.

“The admissions process can counteract a narrow focus on personal success and promote in young people a greater appreciation of others and the common good.

ome have pointed out that the report applies mostly to a small percent of students, and what colleges say they value may be a challenge to game the system.

Julie Coiro (University of Rhode Island) takes note of a large international study by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), which found that computers were having no significant impact on students’ proficiency in reading, math, and science.

In many countries, the study found, frequent use of computers actually made students’ performance worse. “Although these findings may relate to differences in professional development or implementation,” says Coiro, “it was clear that drill-and-practice software had a negative effect on student performance.”

Technology is not critical for learning to be personal; all that’s needed is space and time to actively reflect, collaborate, and engage with personally meaningful ideas.

“What students can learn,” says Stygles, “is how to manage their time, select books reasonably, and justify their reading choices. When students understand their capacity – what they can do successfully – they not only protect themselves from shameful failure, but also become stronger readers through repeated experiences of success and pleasure.”

when blended learning is implemented in a balanced way, “teachers and students use a range of human and digital resources to improve their ability to think, problem solve, collaborate, and communicate. A delicate balance of talk and technology use keeps us all grounded in conversations with other people about what really matters.” Coiro has four suggestions for striking this balance:             • Build a culture of personal inquiry. Students have regular opportunities to pursue topics relevant to them, using a range of texts, tools, and people (offline and online) to get emotionally engaged.             • Expect learners to talk. Students engage in literacy experiences involving face-to-face and online collaboration, conversations, arguments, negotiations, and presentations.             • Encourage digital creation. Students create original products that share new knowledge and connect insights from school, home, and the community.             • Make space for students to participate and matter. “Through participation, individuals assert their autonomy and ownership of learning,” says Coiro. “In turn, their inquiry becomes more personal and engaging.”

Once students are empowered to direct their own learning pathways, technology can open the door to a range of texts, tools, and people to explore and connect ideas

“Unlike participation in sports,” says Stygles, “the choice to abandon reading to pursue other talents is not an option. Kids really have no escape from the struggles they face during the learning-to-read process, especially in light of frequent assessment or graduation through levels.”

“Measurement must be replaced by early and frequent positive transactions between reading, teacher, and texts,”

We should share with students what intimidates us about reading, how we find time, and how we focus… If we show our readers realities of reading, maturing students will see reading as less burdensome.”

“Shamed readers do not believe they improve or can improve,” says Stygles

“A good exit ticket can tell whether students have a superficial or in-depth understanding of the material,” they write. “Teachers can then use this data for adapting instruction to meet students’ needs the very next day… Exit tickets allow teachers to see where the gaps in knowledge are, what they need to fix, what students have mastered, and what can be enriched in the classroom…

The key to differentiation is that you have high expectations for all students and a clear objective.

If you know what you want students to master, differentiation allows you to use different strategies to help all students get there.”

Each of these tools allows students to contribute individually to shared creations involving inquiry, peer feedback, and collaborative composition.

Google Docs

Padlet

Coggle

VoiceThread

Beaubien and her colleagues at the Stanford Project for Education Research That Scales (PERTS – https://www.perts.net) are offering online growth mindset training modules for teachers and encouraging grassroots efforts to spread effective practices.

Limit initiatives to those that support the big goal. “As we try to change and grow our practice, whether self-driven or motivated by policy or district-level change,” she says, “we will encounter more ideas than we can possibly implement in a year or even our whole career. It pays to focus on a smaller set of objectives, and for a while, selectively choose initiatives that fit those goals.”

Collaboration is key.

Within her school, she co-taught, observed colleagues, discussed goals (big and small), monitored students’ progress, and (with some trepidation) invited other teachers to observe her teaching and give feedback.

she visited other Connected Math schools and watched lesson videos at http://www.connectedmath.msu.edu and http://www.teachingchannel.org.

“The brains of adolescents are notoriously more receptive to short-term rewards and peer approval,” says Amanda Ripley in this New York Times article, “which can lead to risky behavior.” But young people are also very attuned to autonomy and social justice. “There are two adolescent imperatives,” says Rob Riordan of High Tech High in California: “To resist authority and to contribute to community.” Might it be possible to take advantage of these characteristics to bend teenage rebelliousness toward wholesome ends?

“What’s really exciting about this study and other work like it is that if you can appeal to kids’ sense of wanting to not be duped, you empower them to take a stand,” says Ronald Dahl (University of California/Berkeley). “If they are motivated, you can change their behavior profoundly.”

A big unanswered question is whether the positive behavioral shifts in the experiments will last more than a few hours; after all, almost no obesity prevention programs for adolescents result in long-term weight loss and there is a powerful consumer culture pushing young people in the other direction.

What inspires you? Do you have any regrets from the first two years of high school? How have you shown leadership? What are your college plans? What career do you want to pursue? Where do you think you will be in five years? What’s your favorite class? At the end of the ritual, the audience says whether each student is ready to move on. Not every student gets the nod.

Rounds are brief observations of a sampling of classrooms within a school by groups of teachers, administrators, or both. Ideally, rounds should foster: -   A common language about and understanding of high-quality teaching; -   A collaborative learning culture versus a culture of compliance; -   A more coherent approach to improving instruction.

The purpose needs to be clear, observations need to be carried out in a climate of trust, and everyone involved needs to understand how the observations connect to other improvement efforts.”

In short, social networks are themselves a resource that administrators can use to support the development of social capital.

In this New York Times article, Gretchen Reynolds has advice for teachers who tell fidgeting students to just sit still: let them tap their toes and jiggle their legs. Why? Because fidgeting is good for their health.

he has some advice for those who organize retreats:             • A clear and legitimate rationale.

“Retreats go poorly,” says Kramer, “when the reason for the retreat does not match the organization’s true needs.”

A better approach would have been to work with key stakeholders to develop the agenda, get buy-in, and engage everyone in an open and task-oriented fashion.

No hidden agendas – If trust is an issue in an organization, it’s essential that the conveners are honest about how a retreat will be handled and everything is above board.

High-quality facilitation – An effective leader keeps the trains running on time and is efficient, practical, and easy to work with.

They work best when every participant has a vested interest in what is being discussed and understands how the outcomes of the session will affect them and their work.”

Birmingham Covington’s unique bee project, like much of the coursework prioritized at the school, was driven by student interest.

“Science literacy is teaching our kids to be curious about the world around them, with the problems they identify,”

“Kids need to learn teamwork-based skills because every other class in any other subject that they have—third through eighth grade—requires them to work in different sized groups accomplishing different tasks,” Heckman explains.

The school’s voluntary Teacher Labs—facilitated by an instructional coach and organized around a clear, written protocol—enable teachers to reflect on their craft with support from their peers. Through the labs, small groups of teachers observe each other’s classes and then offer constructive feedback around a stated objective.

They put these skills to use in Thinkering Studio, an elective class where they design their own independent learning projects, and Engage, a class focused on design thinking—a system of solving problems that follows the steps of inquiry, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

In Engage, teachers Roy McCloud and Mathew Brown guide students to work on various self-directed, team-oriented projects like designing a new sport for third graders or building a roller coaster. Their support and feedback direct students toward the right resources while encouraging them to dig deeper: Did students ask the right questions? Did they get the right information? Did they go to other groups for feedback?

nstead, teachers take on the role of a facilitator of learning.  They are able to work with students in small groups and have more one-on-one interactions.

Flipped Learning

We resort to lecture and didactic instruction sometimes out of necessity (I believe that there is still a time and place for the teacher to be the expert), but mostly out of insecurity. It just *feels* good to instruct and weave a compelling story for students. It *feels* like you’re doing work. It also *looks* like you’re doing work, which keeps the parents and admins happy.

What can we do? We can seek to decrease, wherever possible, the social complexity by slowing down, by working in the smallest groups possible, by building real community through meaningful work, by building expectations with students—keeping them simple and concrete—and then using those expectations to provide much-needed boundaries.

Administrators must seek to do the same: build appropriate, clear, simple, concrete expectations with teachers around expectations and routines for students and for one another and then present a unified front with the professionals in their classrooms.

We didn’t get here in a few months, and it’s going to take more time than that to get beyond it. We all must commit to actions and values that demonstrate a culture of support and above all flexibility. We’ve suffered a collective trauma—we’re still suffering it—and expecting business as usual or even more than that isn’t going to get us anything but anger, frustration, and hostility from those we seek to serve.

By age 2, children experience some moral emotions — feelings triggered by right and wrong. To reinforce caring as the right behavior, research indicates, praise is more effective than rewards.

A couple of weeks later, when faced with more opportunities to give and share, the children were much more generous after their character had been praised than after their actions had been.

When our actions become a reflection of our character, we lean more heavily toward the moral and generous choices.

Tying generosity to character appears to matter most around age 8, when children may be starting to crystallize notions of identity.

When children cause harm, they typically feel one of two moral emotions: shame or guilt. Despite the common belief that these emotions are interchangeable, research led by the psychologist June Price Tangney reveals that they have very different causes and consequences.

The ashamed toddlers were avoiders; the guilty toddlers were amenders.

shame emerges when parents express anger, withdraw their love, or try to assert their power through threats of punishment: Children may begin to believe that they are bad people. Fearing this effect, some parents fail to exercise discipline at all, which can hinder the development of strong moral standards

parents raise caring children by expressing disappointment and explaining why the behavior was wrong, how it affected others, and how they can rectify the situation. This enables children to develop standards for judging their actions, feelings of empathy and responsibility for others, and a sense of moral identity, which are conducive to becoming a helpful person.

You’re a good person, even if you did a bad thing, and I know you can do better.”

If you don’t model generosity, preaching it may not help in the short run, and in the long run, preaching is less effective than giving while saying nothing at all

when it comes to producing moral children, we need to remember that action also shapes character.