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Strengthening Student Engagement:A Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching - 0 views

www.ascd.org/...rally-Responsive-Teaching.aspx culturally responsive cultural competency responsive classroom responsive
shared by Jill Bergeron on 11 May 16 - Cached
  • To be effective in multicultural classrooms, teachers must relate teaching content to the cultural backgrounds of their students.
  • Engagement is the visible outcome of motivation, the natural capacity to direct energy in the pursuit of a goal. Our emotions influence our motivation. In turn, our emotions are socialized through culture—the deeply learned confluence of language, beliefs, values, and behaviors that pervades every aspect of our lives.
  • What may elicit that frustration, joy, or determination may differ across cultures, because cultures differ in their definitions of novelty, hazard, opportunity, and gratification, and in their definitions of appropriate responses. Thus, the response a student has to a learning activity reflects his or her culture.
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  • motivationally effective teaching is culturally responsive teaching.
  • Because the importance of grades and grade point averages increases as a student advances in school, it is legitimate to question whether extrinsic motivation systems are effective for significant numbers of students across cultures. We can only conclude that, as long as the educational system continues to relate motivation to learn with external rewards and punishments, culturally different students will, in large part, be excluded from engagement and success in school.
  • It is part of human nature to be curious, to be active, to initiate thought and behavior, to make meaning from experience, and to be effective at what we value. These primary sources of motivation reside in all of us, across all cultures. When students can see that what they are learning makes sense and is important, their intrinsic motivation emerges.
  • We can begin to replace the carrot and stick metaphor with the words “understand” and “elicit”; to change the concept of motivation from reward and punishment to communication and respect. We can influence the motivation of students by coming to know their perspective, by drawing forth who they naturally and culturally are, and by seeing them as unique and active. Sharing our resources with theirs, working together, we can create greater energy for learning.
  • A growing number of educational models, including constructivism and multiple intelligences theory, are based on intrinsic motivation. They see student perspective as central to teaching.
  • Unfortunately, educators must often apply these theories within educational systems dominated by extrinsic reinforcement, where grades and class rank are emphasized. And, when extrinsic rewards continue to be the primary motivators, intrinsic motivation is dampened. Those students whose socialization accommodates the extrinsic approach surge ahead, while those students—often the culturally different—whose socialization does not, fall behind. A holistic, culturally responsive pedagogy based on intrinsic motivation is needed to correct this imbalance.
  • The framework names four motivational conditions that the teacher and students continuously create or enhance. They are: Establishing inclusion—creating a learning atmosphere in which students and teachers feel respected by and connected to one another. Developing attitude—creating a favorable disposition toward the learning experience through personal relevance and choice. Enhancing meaning—creating challenging, thoughtful learning experiences that include student perspectives and values. Engendering competence—creating an understanding that students are effective in learning something they value. These conditions are essential to developing intrinsic motivation. They are sensitive to cultural differences. They work in concert as they influence students and teachers, and they happen in a moment as well as over a period of time.
  • Figure 1. Four Conditions Necessary for Culturally Responsive Teaching
  • 1. Establish Inclusion Norms: Emphasize the human purpose of what is being learned and its relationship to the students' experience. Share the ownership of knowing with all students. Collaborate and cooperate. The class assumes a hopeful view of people and their capacity to change. Treat all students equitably. Invite them to point out behaviors or practices that discriminate. Procedures: Collaborative learning approaches; cooperative learning; writing groups; peer teaching; multi-dimensional sharing; focus groups; and reframing. Structures: Ground rules, learning communities; and cooperative base groups. 2. Develop Positive Attitude Norms: Relate teaching and learning activities to students' experience or previous knowledge. Encourage students to make choices in content and assessment methods based on their experiences, values, needs, and strengths. Procedures: Clear learning goals; problem solving goals; fair and clear criteria of evaluation; relevant learning models; learning contracts; approaches based on multiple intelligences theory, pedagogical flexibility based on style, and experiential learning. Structure: Culturally responsive teacher/student/parent conferences.
  • 3. Enhance Meaning Norms: Provide challenging learning experiences involving higher order thinking and critical inquiry. Address relevant, real-world issues in an action-oriented manner. Encourage discussion of relevant experiences. Incorporate student dialect into classroom dialogue. Procedures: Critical questioning; guided reciprocal peer questioning; posing problems; decision making; investigation of definitions; historical investigations; experimental inquiry; invention; art; simulations; and case study methods. Structures: Projects and the problem-posing model. 4. Engender Competence Norms: Connect the assessment process to the students' world, frames of reference, and values. Include multiple ways to represent knowledge and skills and allow for attainment of outcomes at different points in time. Encourage self-assessment. Procedures: Feedback; contextualized assessment; authentic assessment tasks; portfolios and process-folios; tests and testing formats critiqued for bias; and self-assessment. Structures: Narrative evaluations; credit/no credit systems; and contracts for grades. Based on Wlodkowski, R. J., and M. B. Ginsberg. (1995). Diversity and Motivation: Culturally Responsive Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
  • Jill Bergeron on 11 May 16
     
    This article offers up four conditions teachers can create in order to foster a culturally responsive classroom.
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Words Their Way: Word Study in Action: Getting to Know Words Their Way - 0 views

mytrainingconnection.com/...index.html Words Their Way
shared by Gayle Cole on 26 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • Gayle Cole on 26 Jul 16
     
    Good basic introduction to Words Their Way
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Student-Centered Learning: March 2016 | Matt Renwick - 0 views

mattrenwick.com/...what-im-reading-march-2016 student-centered learning
shared by Jill Bergeron on 25 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Kraft and his team found four attributes identified in schools that experienced consistently high achievement: School safety and order Leadership and professional development High academic expectations Teacher relationships and collaboration
  • Specific professional learning offerings for teachers include one-to-one instructional coaching and school leadership opportunities. Teacher retention and higher test scores have been the result of these efforts.
  • Educators can start reimagining instruction by asking ourselves what learning we experienced in our school careers that truly mattered in our lives. This reflection can lead to finding topics and themes from our current curriculum and assessing how well they fit within this mindset of lifeworthy learning. Four tenets of big understandings – opportunity, insight, action, and ethics – can serve as gatekeepers in this process.
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  • Perkins closes this piece of identifying three national agendas (achievement, information, expertise) that may have had too much importance placed upon them.
  • Play-based learning should allow for the students to explore their passions and interests without an outcome necessarily in mind. “Play is not something you do to a child. If you have an agenda, if you are requiring them to do it, if you have to make it ‘fun’ to get them to comply, if they are not free to stop at any time, then it is not play.”
  • Play is self-chosen, enjoyable, inherently valuable, and unstructured.
  • Jill Bergeron on 25 Apr 16
     
    This is my title I created for this post. Mr. Renwick sums up several books and posts related to the idea of creating conditions for student-centered learning.
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Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » Stop Copying Others: T... - 0 views

zhaolearning.com/...hers-timss-lessons-for-america globalization assessment
shared by Scott Nancarrow on 19 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • In terms of test scores, the U.S. has certainly improved, but so have other countries. So the gap between U.S. students and East Asian students remain as large as 20 years ago
  • As test scores went up, students’ confidence and attitude toward math came down.
  • But the U.S. still has more students reporting confidence in math and valuing math than East Asian students.
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  • It seems clear that after tremendous efforts to catch up to the high performing education systems in test scores, the U.S. has not succeeded. Two questions arise. First, can the U.S. ever catch up? Second, is it really necessary to catch up? My answer to both questions are no.
  • . If it is true that whatever policies and practices that resulted in higher test scores also make students less confident and less interested in math, are these policies and practices really educationally sound? Don’t we want more people have confidence in math and value math?
  • Test scores simply do not reflect what our children need to live in the future, let alone what they need to defend and improve a democratic society. Test scores are simply the indicator of one’s ability in taking the test. We should never read too much into it and attempt to draw conclusions that fuels actions that could affect the future of millions of children and the future of our society.
  • education is both deeply rooted in and an integral part of culture, hence they mutually enhance and perpetuate
  • Different cultures impose different values and expectations on education. Different cultures also support and suppress different educational practices. Unless one is ready and able to redefine one’s culture and society, copying isolated educational policies rarely works.
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Managing Email Effectively - Time Management Training From Mind Tools - 0 views

www.mindtools.com/...managing-email.htm email time management
shared by Jill Bergeron on 08 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • check email only at set points during the day.
  • reserve time to read and respond to email after a long period of focused work, or at the time of day when your energy and creativity are at their lowest (this means that you can do higher value work at other times).
  • if the email will take less than two minutes to read and reply to, then take care of it right now, even if it's not a high priority.
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  • For emails that will take longer than two minutes to read or respond to, schedule time on your calendar, or add this as an action on your To-Do List , to do later. Most email programs allow you to highlight, flag, or star messages that need a response, so utilize this handy feature whenever you can.
  • Gmail, allow you to establish "Rules" that sort email into a particular folder as soon as it comes in.
  • If you regularly receive email such as newsletters, blogs and article feeds, you could re-route these to another email address, or use rules, so that they're instantly delivered to a particular folder.
  • For instance, if certain team members regularly send you long, drawn-out emails, let them know. Tell them gently but firmly that because of the demand on your time, you'd appreciate emails no longer than a paragraph or two. Anything longer than that should warrant a phone call. Alternatively, they could drop by your office for a discussion.
  • Jill Bergeron on 08 Feb 17
     
    Tips for managing the barrage of email.
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Teaching Empathy: Turning a Lesson Plan into a Life Skill | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...son-plan-life-skill-joe-hirsch empathy edutopia SEL social emotional learning
shared by Jill Bergeron on 12 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • academic rigor, with its unflinching emphasis on measurable success, seems strangely at odds with emotional intelligence, a soufflé of moods and feelings.
  • Designed around cooperative learning, your lesson plan can actively foster class-wide feelings of cohesiveness, collaboration and interdependence -- without sacrificing instructional time or learning goals.
  • In cooperative learning, students work together, think together and plan together using a variety of group structures designed along an instructional path.
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  • Cooperative learning creates what Daniel Goleman calls "cognitive empathy," a mind-to-mind sense of how another person's thinking works.
  • The better we understand others, the better we know them -- pointing toward (among other virtues) greater trust, appreciation and generosity.
  • Dispatching students into "groups" with the hopes they'll become more empathetic carries the same potential for success as trying to hit a dartboard while blindfolded
  • o harness the power of cooperative learning as a tool for building empathy, teachers need a specific strategy, a best practice that works
  • Created in 1971 by psychologist Elliot Aronson (1) to defuse his volatile fifth grade classroom, the jigsaw method (2) has a long track record of successfully reducing classroom conflict and increasing positive educational outcomes. As an empathy builder, it also opens doors of opportunity.
    • Jill Bergeron
      Jill Bergeron on 12 Feb 14
       
      How jigsaw groups work
  • The fluid movement, flexible groupings and redistribution of responsibility force kids to be more actively engaged in what and how they learn.
  • jigsaw learning flows freely between group members. Familiar roles change, too.
  • Teachers re-outfit themselves as sideline reporters, monitoring, questioning and analyzing the action, while the quickest and slowest students suddenly discover themselves in supporting and leading roles they never quite imagined.
  • Creating points of contact between students who would otherwise not interact delivers a humbling but elevating awareness of the "other."
  • the hard currency is active listening, or the art of thinking about what the other person is saying.
  • And because each student has a purpose (a teaching role) and something valuable (new and necessary information), every learner is regarded as an asset, not a liability
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Psychologist Offers Insight on Bullying and How to Prevent It - 0 views

www.apa.org/...prevent-bullying.aspx bullying
shared by Gayle Cole on 08 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • October is National Bullying Prevention Month, an annual campaign launched in 2006 by the Parent Advocacy Coalition for Educational Rights to raise awareness of and prevent bullying. Bullying is aggressive, repeated and intentional behavior designed to show an imbalance of power.
  • In elementary school, children who bully others often have difficulty regulating their emotions and do so in reaction to peer rejection or peer exclusion.
  • To prevent youth bullying, prevention efforts must teach children and adolescents individual emotion regulation skills, how to foster peer acceptance and ways to counter any detrimental effects of exposure to violence in their homes and communities. We must recognize that schools play a critical role in reducing these behaviors.
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  • Research published in the September issue of APA’s School Psychology Quarterly found that bullying and peer victimization can be reduced through programs and approaches that focus on improving school climate.  
  • “A student is being bullied or victimized when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more students.” More recent definitions emphasize observable or non-observable aggressive behaviors, the repetitive nature of these behaviors, and the imbalance of power between the individual or group perpetrator and the victim.
  • An imbalance of power exists when the perpetrator or group of perpetrators has more physical, social or intellectual power than the victim.
  • Educators and scholars should also comply with clear and accepted distinctions of “bullying,” “aggression” and “harassment.”
  • Only when we create safe spaces for youth who engage in these behaviors to learn more prosocial ways of managing conflicts among peers and at the same time create school environments that are not tolerant of mean and cruel behavior will we witness reductions in bullying. This problem is bigger than an individual child or adolescent who engages in bullying.
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(Re)Defining Student Engagement | Reading By Example - 0 views

readingbyexample.com/...redefining-student-engagement leadership learning engagement collaboration evaluation
shared by Jill Bergeron on 28 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • I call on all school leaders, myself included, to put aside our biases and misconceptions regarding student engagement, as we engage in our own learning experiences during our frequent visits to classrooms.
  •  Let our student actions and dispositions guide our professional assessments.
  • We in education talk so much about engagement in concert with terms like “collaboration”, “technology”, and “passion”. Is this where the best learning takes place? Sometimes, maybe even often, but certainly not always.
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  • Engagement (student involvement in instruction) can be described in a variety of ways. I think too often engagement is exclusively predefined by educators as “hands on”, “students doing more talking than the teacher”, or “active”. These descriptors may all be key indicators of engagement. But the definition should not stop there.
  • Jill Bergeron on 28 Sep 15
     
    This blogger observes teachers and asks evaluators to try to put aside their biases as they think about teaching and student engagement.
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50 End-of-School-Year, Self-Probing Questions for Educators - Getting Smart by John Har... - 1 views

gettingsmart.com/...lf-probing-questions-educators new teacher end of year
shared by Jill Bergeron on 27 May 14 - No Cached
  • Did I refer to the class as our class or my class?
  • 8. If our class were a company, would it be out-of-business now?
  • 9. Did students create and experience a great class or simply take a class and get credit?
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  • 15. Did I take advantage of spontaneous learning opportunities when students’ interests had obviously shifted, or did I maintain an inflexible mindset and vow to never deviate from an archaic lesson plan?
  • 17. Was our class set up to promote creativity and collaboration or memorization and silence?
  • 19. Were 21st Century skills embedded within daily assignments?
  • 22. Did I gain professional wisdom by speaking to my collegial mentor?
  • 25. Did I avoid professional negativity by declining to gossip at work?
  • 24. Was the technology in my classroom used in an authentic manner? (Shannon Reed)
  • 26. Did I manage my stress level by enjoying time with my family and friends, by exercising several times a week, by zoning out while engaged in a hobby, and by simply chilling out every once in a while?
  • 28. Did I laugh often with students and colleagues?
  • 31. Did I allow students to co-write their own project-based, learning contracts?
  • 34. How many colleagues did I observe in-action in their classrooms this past school year?
  • did I remember the names of all co-workers?
  • 39. How balanced were the assignments this year in terms of requiring creativity, practical thinking, and analysis? (Adam Johnson)
  • 40. Did I participate in a professional learning community outside of my school via Twitter?
  • 46. Did I consistently blog as a form of professional self-reflection?
  • 47. Am I a stronger teacher today than when I first stepped into the classroom at the beginning of the school year?
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Closing Out vs. Fading Out: 5 Steps for Ending the Year Strong | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...ut-vs-fading-out-petra-claflin end of year new teacher
shared by Jill Bergeron on 27 May 14 - No Cached
  • If you're a teacher and not an instructional leader, you can initiate this important conversation, too.
  • make sure you acknowledge his or her specific strengths so that he or she can build on them
  • now is the time to give them complete ownership over their development so that it's meaningful for them and they're inspired to do it.
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  • he or she should be the one leading the ideas for these next steps based on whatever meaningful focus areas you've identified together
  • a concrete plan to focus on as they think about next school year.
  • clearing the path is about thinking through the details of the teachers' next steps and removing barriers so that they can visualize these steps happening and articulate how they'll happen.
  • it's too easy for the summer weeks to fly by until, all of a sudden, it's the first day back at school, and the teacher hasn't accomplished any of the summer plans that he or she intended to
  • Find out from the teachers you support what they appreciated about your support, what they wanted more of, and what they'd want to change.
  • it helps them identify what they need from a coach or evaluator, and it helps you get insight into how to better support your teachers next year.
  • closing the year strong with positive, actionable takeaways will ensure that teachers walk away feeling empowered, inspired, and ready to come back even stronger next year!
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Making School About Connection | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...-about-connection-joshua-block SEL edutopia
shared by Jill Bergeron on 17 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • No one looking back on his or her school experience remembers a particularly poignant test. Instead, people remember the teacher who reached out to them at a vulnerable moment, the unit that changed the way they understand an issue, or the project that seemed impossible at first but then became something far beyond everyone's expectations.
  • Warm, genuine greetings and attempts to connect can have a large impact.
  • Classrooms based on a foundation of respect encourage people to be kind and the best versions of themselves.
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  • What can be done to bring more students into the mainstream and alleviate feelings of marginalization?
  • If the first message that students get about their work is what is wrong or how it is deficient, they are less likely to invest themselves in revision, and less likely to work hard in the future.
  • If students hear what is interesting, special, or unique about their work, they will more likely be open to suggestions for improvement.
  • Create rituals that help everyone laugh and be willing to pause the action to appreciate each other. Congratulate a class when they complete a large project.
  • Jill Bergeron on 17 Nov 14
     
    The relationships that teachers build with students are far more important than the content and the tests that they deliver.
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Tips for Parent-Teacher Conferencing | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...-conference-tips-elena-aguilar conferences parent-teacher
shared by Jill Bergeron on 21 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Whatever support you ask from a parent needs to be something that is within her sphere of influence.
  • Always convey a growth mindset. All behaviors can change given the right conditions. If you want to see changes and have concerns about a student, be prepared to offer specific, actionable solutions
  • If this is the first time you're sitting down with parents, it's a great opportunity to hear their perspective on their child's school experience so far, on what their child likes to do outside of school, on the questions and concerns they have about their child, and so on.
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  • Don't underestimate the power of the positive, and lead with it.
  • Be specific in the positive data you share -- tell an anecdote or show a piece of work.
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Teachers: Math in Videogames ~ Activities : Get The Math - 0 views

www.thirteen.org/...90 math video games
shared by Jill Bergeron on 31 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • She uses functions to control objects by assigning a number, or input, to a variable that results in a specific output or movement, producing the action that you see in a videogame. She also uses algebraic reasoning, coordinate graphing, linear equations and rate of change or slope to create her games.)
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The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 0 views

www.marshallmemo.com/issue.php reading literacy shame exit ticket differentiation edutopia
shared by Jill Bergeron on 02 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • “The act of writing, even if the product consists of only a hundred and forty characters composed with one’s thumbs, forces a kind of real-time distillation of emotional chaos.” Researchers have confirmed the efficacy of writing as a therapeutic intervention.
  • She was trained to avoid jumping into problem-solving mode, instead using validation
  • Probes were important to get more information
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  • 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
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Empathy is a Design Mindset - part 1 | Social Emotional Learning and the Common Core - 0 views

loreamartinez.com/...thy-is-a-design-mindset-part-1 design thinking empathy mindset SEL
shared by Jill Bergeron on 08 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • At the most basic level, design thinking is thought of as a 5-step process. The first step is to empathize, which is getting into other people’s shoes… literally! Interviewing people, observing them or immersing yourself in what they do. The second step is to define, which is when designers identify implicit needs that users have, or reframe a problem in a new way. The third step is to ideate, which is when designers brainstorm novel solutions to the problems or opportunities they have identified. The fourth step is to prototype, that is making ideas tangible, often with few resources. The last step is to test, which is inviting users to experience your solution and having them help you make it better.
  • one principle is having an empathetic mindset, which means that you are always looking for multiple and diverse points of view before you make decisions about a problem. Another principle is to have a bias towards action, which is having an idea and doing something about it. Another principle is identifying and challenging assumptions, which is being aware that there are norms accepted as “truth” and challenging them.
  • Using a process like design thinking helps designers to get into the lives and experiences of others. It helps them be less focused on their own emotions and more focused on what is actually needed.
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  • There are three meaningful ways to develop empathy for others. One way is through interviewing, where you have conversations with your end users.
  • Another way to develop empathy is through observation;
  • A third way to develop empathy is by immersing yourself in other people’s’ experiences.
  • The scientific method, the writing process and design thinking all require that you are intentional about what you do and why you do it.
  • Design thinking creates this cycle of learning, where by immersing yourself into other people’s experiences, you learn to uncover more about yourself.
  • Observing, interviewing and immersing are only the first steps in the empathy work. The rest of the work includes interpreting what you see, hear, and experience, and making some leaps about what it all means.
  • One example is a strategy called “why laddering”, where you ask the question “why” several times in a row.
  • Once designers get to this important emotional information, they can start designing solutions to replicate these emotions.
  • Designing for others is an act of kindness and fidelity;
  • Jill Bergeron on 08 Mar 16
     
    This interview offers several methods for helping students and teachers build empathy. Strategies include interviews, observations and immersing oneself in the experience of another.
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The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 0 views

marshallmemo.com/issue.php 21st century skills critical thinking problem solving PLC program evaluation pd professional development reading literacy vocabulary bullying bullying prevention art arts education creativity character education movement
shared by Jill Bergeron on 18 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • students who have four years of art score 91 points higher on the SAT than students who don’t.
    • Jill Bergeron
      Jill Bergeron on 18 Apr 17
       
      This seems correlational.
  • Danny Gregory applauds the arguments made for the importance of art and music in schools: they improve motor, spatial, and language skills; they enhance peer collaboration; they strengthen ties to the community; they keep at-risk students in school and improve their chances of ultimately graduating from college; and
  • In middle school, the majority start to lose their passion for making stuff and instead learn the price of making mistakes.
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  • 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.
  • Solving problems, using tools, collaborating, expressing our ideas clearly, being entrepreneurial and resourceful – these are the skills that matter in the 21st century, post-corporate labor market. Instead of being defensive about art, instead of talking about culture and self-expression, we have to focus on the power of creativity and the skills required to develop it. A great artist is also a problem solver, a presenter, an entrepreneur, a fabricator, and more.”
  • 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.
  • “In education, getting better generally means having a more positive influence on the learning of our students and helping more students learn well,” says Guskey. “Knowing our destination provides the basis for determining the effectiveness of our efforts.”
  • 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.
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Coronavirus: Close the bars. Reopen the schools. - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...ools-economy-social-distancing covid-19 corona virus corona reopening
shared by Jill Bergeron on 06 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Reopening is a community-wide project. Whether a school can reopen safely, for example, doesn’t just depend on capacity, personal protective equipment, or individual actions. It depends on how widespread the coronavirus is in the community outside the school’s walls.
  • But if a community is flooded with infections, the chances are much higher that those infections will creep in no matter how many protective steps are embraced.
  • If you want to reopen schools this fall, then you need to get the spread of Covid-19 down, as close to zero as possible, this summer. And that means opting not to reopen — possibly at all and definitely not at full capacity — restaurants, bars, nightclubs, or other places that will lead to significantly more coronavirus spread but have less value to society than schools.
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  • The goal is to keep the basic reproduction number in a community below 1. That would mean that every person who gets coronavirus transmits it to, on average, fewer than one other person. Over time, that would lead to coronavirus cases falling closer and closer to zero. This number is typically calculated as the R0 or Rt, depending on the methods used. (Some websites, like Rt.live, calculate this figure for all states, and it’s at 1 or more in most states.)
  • schools likely carry some risk of Covid-19 transmission, as an indoor environment in which students, teachers, and other school staff interact for hours. But schools are also really important for day-to-day life — not just for kids’ education, but also for food, shelter, and child care while parents are at work. Knowing that, a community may decide to fit schools into its reopening budget. The trade-off would be that other places, such as restaurants, bars, or gyms, more likely have to remain closed.
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How School Leaders Can Support Teachers and Students This Year | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...students-can-only-take-so-much leaders stress pandemic SEL
shared by Jill Bergeron on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • One of the things we know about brains that have been pushed too far is that they can’t learn. They just can’t. They need an opportunity to calm, to feel safe, to find their way out of the lizard-brain response that is fight-flight-flock-freeze-appease.
  • High social complexity + low form predictability = stress reactive behaviors.
  • High social complexity (lack of clarity around the social expectations, cultural norms, and how to navigate the expected social realities of a situation) + low form predictability (confusion about what is going to happen moment to moment, day to day, week to week) = stress reactive behaviors (fight-flight-flock-freeze-appease or signs that the amygdala, the lizard brain, has taken control and the prefrontal cortex—the part that learns and plans and creates—isn’t fully engaged).
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  • 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.
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