Group items tagged

In Age of Distraction: Why It's Crucial for Students to Learn to Focus (1), Katrina Schwartz refers to studies showing that the ability to focus on a task has been linked to future success. She quotes psychologist and author Daniel Goleman as saying, "This ability [to focus] is more important than IQ or the socio economic status of the family you grew up in for determining career success, financial success and health."

In a similar article, With Tech Tools, How Should Teachers Tackle Multitasking in Class? (2), author Holly Korbey explores research around student study habits and talks to veteran teachers about their experiences with students using technology in the classroom.

Instead, we should be deliberately teaching students how to manage their attention with their devices.

“It’s not just effort, but strategy. Students need to know that if they’re stuck, they don’t need just effort. You don’t want them redoubling their efforts with the same ineffective strategies. You want them to know when to ask for help and when to use resources that are available.”

the key to schools succeeding with all students is prioritizing – isolating and focusing on “only the most vital, game-changing actions that ensure significant improvement in teaching and learning” and then sustaining a disciplined, laser-like focus for a significant amount of time.

Teachers should have clear, specific direction on which skills and concepts to teach – the what and when – with discretion on the how to and some room each week for teachable moments and personal passions.

Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern for Others and the Common Good through College Admissions marks the first time in history that a broad coalition of college admissions offices have joined forces to collectively encourage high school students to focus on meaningful ethical and intellectual engagement. The report includes concrete recommendations to reshape the college admissions process and promote greater ethical engagement among aspiring students, reduce excessive achievement pressure, and level the playing field for economically disadvantaged students. It is the first step in a two-year campaign that seeks to substantially reshape the existing college admissions process.

“The real message is because attention is under siege more than it has ever been in human history, we have more distractions than ever before, we have to be more focused on cultivating the skills of attention,”

If young students don’t build up the neural circuitry that focused attention requires, they could have problems controlling their emotions and being empathetic.

“The circuitry for paying attention is identical for the circuits for managing distressing emotion,”

Mornings are for “Integrated Learning Time”; no rigid boundaries of subject, time, or space.  The pod teachers decide when and how the students will move, and the teams focus relentlessly on how students will learn content through big, cross-disciplinary themes.  The afternoons are split between “Deep Dives”, physical activity-based “Minds in Motion”, “Exploration” opportunities for students to follow their passions,  and some dedicated time for mathematics in the upper grade levels.  Within each of these broad areas, the teachers are expected to amplify the process of inquiry and to embed the skills of design thinking.

How might we further dissolve rigidity by allowing students to re-arrange classroom furniture on a very frequent (more than daily) basis to meet the learning objectives of the moment? How often can we get students up to the writing walls to collaborate on work rather than taking individual notes or keying into their individual devices? How might we constantly defuse the “teacher-centrism” of the room?  If the teacher is not using a fixed projector or other device that requires a “front of the room”, why set the podium there, or stand there? How might we empower students to ask the questions that guide discussion? How might we allow students to find the best ways to interact within learning teams, rather than giving them a strict methodology to follow?  When have we given them enough instruction on how to learn, and when is it best for them to find this out for themselves and with their peers?

It’s never too early to learn smart strategies to focus in on priorities and tune out what’s not immediately necessary.

Neuroscience has shown that multitasking — the process of doing more than one thing at the same time — doesn’t exist.

Multitasking is also stressful for the body. When people try to do several things at once, like drive and text, the brain uses up oxygenated glucose at a much faster rate and releases the stress hormone cortisol.

“While people usually gain power through traits and actions that advance the interests of others, such as empathy, collaboration, openness, fairness, and sharing, when they start to feel powerful or enjoy a position of privilege, those qualities begin to fade.”

Behaviors like these undermine leaders’ effectiveness by depressing the performance of those around them, and are ultimately self-defeating.

power puts us in something like a manic state, making us feel expansive, energized, omnipotent, hungry for rewards, and immune to risk – which opens us up to rash, rude, and unethical actions.” But it turns out that simply being aware of those feelings – “Hey, I’m feeling as if I should rule the world right now” – and monitoring impulses to behave inappropriately helps keep those behaviors in check.

ProfHacker has written quite a bit about the app and their post “GoogleDocs and Collaboration in the Classroom” is chock-full of links to various tips and useful ideas. Getting Smart’s “6 Powerful Google Docs Features to Support the Collaborative Writing Process” provides an excellent step-by-step guide to using Google Docs especially for collaborative writing. And for a basic overview of Google Docs’ features and potential uses, you can browse through this slideshow:

I have asked my Basic English Skills students to keep a daily journal (which can be on anything they wish to write about and functions to help them build their writing muscles) in Google Docs, which they’ve only shared with me. Besides alleviating any anxiety students might have felt about making their journals public, Google Docs allows me to easily monitor new entries (whenever a Doc is edited, the title turns bold) and to verify when students are completing their entries (by using the revision history feature).

I decided to have the students write in teams of three, with one team member serving as lead editor each week. The lead editor is in charge of each week’s blog post, which includes coming up with a focus question and locating 2-3 sources to help them answer their question, which they share with their team before the week’s first class meeting (I have had the teams indicate each week’s lead editor in a spreadsheet in Google Docs so that I am aware of which students are in charge each week). But it gets really interesting when the teams come together in the week’s first class meeting. The lead editor creates a Google Doc, which they share with their team and me, and type in their focus question and a brief summary of how they plan to answer it. What follows is a 30-40 minute session in which the team discusses the question, the lead editor’s sources, and their plan for answering the question completely in writing in the Google Doc, observing a strict rule of silence (I adapted this activity from Lawrence Weinstein’s “Silent Dialogue” activity in Writing Doesn’t Have to Be Lonely).

The Innovations class is deliberately open-ended, which means students have to propose their own project ideas and the standards they plan to meet.

"The mentor can't be their dad or their dad's buddy," Wettrick says. "It has to be an expert in an arena, and it has to be somebody who makes a commitment to help them."

Students benefit from honest critique along with positive attention for their projects, Wettrick says. "They don't need to hear, 'Good job!' They're better off when an expert tells them, 'That's not bad, but have you considered this, or you might want to look at that.'

We live in a culture that does not always encourage or support expressions of loss and, frankly, expects people "to get over" grief fairly quickly

For example, in language arts, students can be told that they will be writing about someone they remember and they can focus on what they miss about that person or how they remember that person in their lives now

In the visual and performing arts, a similar assignment to make the focus of students' products someone they miss or remember.

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.

more than 35 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.

our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on “process” (consisting of personal effort and effective strategies) rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.

Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are no more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people's beliefs about why they had failed.