Group items tagged

Newly learned skills: Kohn argues that it is rare that all students need the same practice at the end of a lesson.  For some, additional practice may  be confusing, while for others, it may  be unnecessary. What the research says: Kohn scoured the research to find that there is no evidence that homework in elementary school leads to an increase in student achievement.

Time management and organizational skills: Kohn points out that rather than teaching time management to students, homework actually requires parents to do more to organize children’s time.

As a former teacher, I had always felt that homework was a critical part of children learning organizational skills and responsibility and a way to practice newly developed skills.  Moreover, the idea of getting rid of homework seemed a bit too unconventional. But when I finally did pick up “The Homework Myth,” I couldn’t put it down. One by one, my reasons for considering homework an essential part of the elementary school experience were dismantled.

In kindergarten, students dictate stories to their families on a regular basis, but with no official due dates.  Parents were encouraged to read to their children, but there were no set expectations for how much or how often. Starting in first grade, students were expected to read nightly and this included families reading to children. Most grade-level teams opted out of reading logs or other accountability structures, noting that these often devolved into a meaningless checklists lacking accountability altogether. Third graders were asked to write nightly. Students determine the content and form of their writing, which is not graded.  Third graders are also expected to practice their math facts based on both grade level expectations and personal levels of mastery.

Teachers give parents information about other elements also taught in class so they can be supportive of the related homework.  When a teacher asks students to read for 30 minutes, some students may read 10 pages, and others may read 30.  Parents can help children find a regular time to do that homework because the time needed is consistent. 

Our school may be giving less homework but we have more students engaged in more meaningful learning activities at home than ever before.

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.

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.

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

What time allotment will be given to the project? Will this project be conducted during the entire school day or during dedicated blocks of time? How many days will be devoted to the project?

Also, allow students to go in new directions, but guide them when they appear to digress from the project.

Facilitate the process and the love of learning. Teach the students how to work collaboratively. Designate fluid roles for group members. Have students choose their primary roles, but assume responsibility and interactivity for all group roles. Remind them that every part of the process belongs to each individual and needs each student's total involvement. Provide resources and guidance. Assess the process by creating team and project rubrics.

Team rubrics state the expectations of each team member: Watch the group dynamics. How well are the members participating? How engaged are they in the process? Assess the outcome. Project rubrics, on the other hand, ask these questions: What is required for project completion? What is the final product: A document? A multimedia presentation? A poster? A combination of products? What does a good report, multimedia presentation, poster, or other product look like? Make the requirements clear to the students so they can all meet with success.

Discovery Education (13) offers a great resource; a collection of assessment rubrics and graphic organizers (14) that may be helpful to you as you create your own.

When a student's assessment and the teacher's assessment don't agree, schedule a student-teacher conference to let the student explain in more detail his or her understanding of the content and justify the outcome.

devise a plan that will integrate as many subjects as possible into the project.

Just ten years ago, we would not have imagined the need for “a guide to gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the web.” Indeed, few of us knew the web existed. Even the editors of Wired ignored it in their inaugural issue.4 Ten years ago, we would have been objects of curiosity, if not derision, if we had proposed such a project.

The first advantage of digital media for historians is storage capacity—digital media can condense unparalleled amounts of data into small spaces.

The most profound effect, however, may be on tomorrow’s historians. The rapidly dropping price of data storage has led computer scientists like Michael Lesk (a cyber-enthusiast to be sure) to claim that in the future, “there will be enough disk space and tape storage in the world to store everything people write, say, perform, or photograph.” In other words, why delete anything from the current historical record if it costs so little save it? How might our history writing be different if all historical evidence were available?

a second and even more important advantage—accessibility.

Our web server at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) gets about three-quarters of a million hits a day, but on September 11, 2002 (when people looking to commemorate the attacks of the previous year descended in droves on the September 11 Digital Archive that we organized in collaboration with the American Social History Project), we handled eight million hits—a more than ten-fold increase with no additional costs

But the flexibility of digital data lies not just in the ability to encompass different media. It also resides in the ability of the same data to assume multiple guises instantaneously. Although language translation software is still primitive, we are moving toward a time when words in one tongue can be automatically translated into another—perhaps not perfectly but effectively enough.

Flexibility transforms the experience of consuming history, but digital media—because of their openness and diversity—also alters the conditions and circumstances of producing history. The computer networks that have come together in the World Wide Web are not only more open to a global audience of history readers than any other previous medium, they are also more open to history authors. A 2004 study found that almost half of the Internet users in the United States have created online content by building websites, creating blogs, and posting and sharing files.

quantitative advantages—we can do more, reach more people, store more data, give readers more varied sources; we can get more historical materials into classrooms, give students more access to formerly cloistered documents, hear from more perspectives.

amlet on the Holodeck, her book on the future of narrative in cyberspace

o consider these “expressive” qualities we need to think, for example, about the manipulability of digital media—the possibility of manipulating historical data with electronic tools as a way of finding things that were not previously evident. At the moment, the most powerful of those tools for historians is the simplest—the ability to search through vast quantities of text for particular strings of words. The word search capabilities of JSTOR, the online database of 460 scholarly periodicals, makes possible a kind of intellectual history that cannot be done as readily in print sources.

Digital media also differ from many other older media in their interactivity—a product of the web being, unlike broadcast television, a two-way medium, in which every point of consumption can also be a point of production. This interactivity enables multiple forms of historical dialogue—among professionals, between professionals and nonprofessionals, between teachers and students, among students, among people reminiscing about the past—that were possible before but which are not only simpler but potentially richer and more intensive in the digital medium. Many history websites offer opportunities for dialogue and feedback. The level of response has varied widely, but the experience so far suggests how we might transform historical practice—the web becomes a place for new forms of collaboration, new modes of debate, and new modes of collecting evidence about the past. At least potentially, digital media transform the traditional, one-way reader/writer, producer/consumer relationship. Public historians, in particular, have long sought for ways to “share authority” with their audiences; the web offers an ideal medium for that sharing and collaboration.16

inally, we note the hypertextuality, or nonlinearity, of digital media—the ease of moving through narratives or data in undirected and multiple ways.

the problems of quality and authenticity emerge

Moreover, in general, the web is more likely to be right than wrong.

Consider, for example, the famous “photograph” of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby playing rock music together in a Dallas basement. Such fake photographs have a long history; Stalin’s photo retouchers, for example, spent considerable time airbrushing Trotsky out of the historical record. But the transformation of the original Bob Jackson photo of Ruby shooting Oswald into “In-A-Gadda-Da-Oswald” did not require a skilled craftsman. George Mahlberg created it with Photoshop in forty minutes and it quickly spread across the World Wide Web, popping up in multiple contexts that erase the credit of the “original” counterfeiter.20

Is there some way to police the boundaries of historical quality and authenticity on the web? Could we stop a thousand historical flowers—amateur, professional, commercial, crackpot—from blooming on the web? Would we want to? Of course, issues of quality, authenticity, and authority pre-date the Internet. But digital media undercut an existing structure of trust and authority and we, as historians and citizens, have yet to establish a new structure of historical legitimation and authority. When you move your history online, you are entering a less structured and controlled environment than the history monograph, the scholarly journal, the history museum, or the history classroom. That can have both positive and unsettling implications.

Digital enthusiasts assume that the online environment is intrinsically more “interactive” than one-way, passive media like television. But digital technology could, in fact, foster a new couch potatoÐlike passivity. Efforts to create nuanced interactive history projects sometimes become quixotic when the producers confront the fact that computers are good at yes and no and right and wrong, whereas historians prefer words like “maybe,” “perhaps,” and “it is more complicated than that.” Thus the most common form of historical interactivity on the web is the multiple-choice test. But the high-budget version is little better. Take, for example, the History Channel’s website Modern Marvel’s Boys’ Toys, which is a combination of watching the cable channel and playing a video game. The true interactivity here comes when you click on the “shop” button. As legal scholar Lawrence Lessig has written pessimistically: “There are two futures in front of us, the one we are taking and the one we could have. The one we are taking is easy to describe. Take the Net, mix it with the fanciest TV, add a simple way to buy things, and that’s pretty much it.” At the same time, some wonder whether we really want to foster “interactivity” at all, arguing that it fails to provide the critical experience of understanding, of getting inside the thoughts and experiences of others. The literary critic Harold Bloom, for example, argues that whereas linear fiction allows us to experience more by granting us access to the lives and thoughts of those different from ourselves, interactivity only permits us to experience more of ourselves.25

Another concern stems more from the production than the consumption side. Will amateur and academic historians be able to compete with well-funded commercial operators—like the History Channel—for attention on the Net?

a PLC is typically: Face to face High accountability Comprised of colleagues from a face-to-face or daily environment Comprised of peers with similar professional responsibilities

Torrey Trust defines the PLN (PDF) as "a system of interpersonal connections and resources that support informal learning.

according to multiple, peer reviewed studies, simply being in an open network instead of a closed one is the best predictor of career success . . . the further . . . you go towards a closed network, the more you repeatedly hear the same ideas, which reaffirm what you already believe. The further you go towards an open network, the more you're exposed to new ideas

PLNs are typically: Online and open More informal Open to a free flow of ideas Often welcoming to newcomers

PLNs' weaknesses are: Teachers get excited about an idea but meet resistance in their local school. Teachers have no way to share and discuss ideas with their local school. Some educators use their PLN inconsistently and have no accountability to keep learning. PLNs can be overwhelming because it seems like too much, or users can't focus. Authentic conversations can become dominated by a few loud voices. Some hashtag founders exhibit territorial behavior that limits conversation. Trolls and spammers can derail hashtag conversations.

"Blend" your school's PLC by creating an online space for it. Make this a simple place to share resources and ideas gleaned from participants' PLNs. Many teachers don't collaborate online because it's just one more thing to do. Make it simple to share. Give the less social-media-savvy educators simple options such as an email subscription to a few blogs.

Encourage educators to share ideas. Set specific goals. You can't be everywhere and do everything. Focus can achieve incredible results if you're all searching your PLNs for new ideas to tackle a troubling issue in your PLC

5. Link the online and face-to-face worlds. Administrators and others should mention the online spaces in staff meetings. Likewise, an online reflection of something said at the PLC helps show continuity. Educators should see both the online and face-to-face spaces as substantial parts of their PLC.

Rather than trying to do everything at the same time, the most productive people prioritize and block off their schedules to focus on one task at a time.

the basic principle of focusing in on one task at a time holds true for anyone.

“When they’re doing something, they’re really doing it,” Levitin said. “They get more done because their brain isn’t half somewhere else.”

“People who take regular breaks — and naps even — end up being more productive and more creative in their work,” Levitin said.

The brain has a natural way of giving itself a break — it’s called daydreaming. “It allows you to refresh and release all those neural circuits that get all bound up when you’re focused,”

“You need to give your brain time to consolidate all the information that’s come in, to toss it and turn it.”

“Children shouldn’t be overly scheduled,” Levitin said. “They should have blocks of time to promote spontaneity and creativity.”

Daydreaming and playing are crucial to develop the kind of creativity many say should be a focal point of a modern education system.

The world has changed much more quickly than the genome can keep up with, which means schools have a responsibility to help kids develop the skills to sift through the overwhelming stimuli.

It can be hard to focus on one thing when there’s a long, nagging list of things that need to get done in a day, both personal and professional. Levitin recommends writing all those things down on notecards, externalizing the memories into digestible bits that can be shuffled as priorities change. “My brain knows I’ve written it down and it stops nagging me,” Levitin said of his method.

he hyperactive child might be able to help develop a more creative set of ideas, while the more focused child knows how to take that idea

to fruition.

There is moderately strong evidence for an association between screentime and depressive symptoms. This association is for overall screentime but there is very limited evidence from only one review for an association with social media screentime. There is moderate evidence for a dose-response effect, with weak evidence for a threshold of ≥2 hours daily screentime for the association with depressive symptoms.There is moderate evidence for an association of screentime with lower HRQOL, with weak evidence for a threshold of ≥2 hours daily screentime.

There is weak evidence that screentime is associated with poor sleep outcomes including delay in sleep onset, reduced total sleep time and daytime tiredness.

There was moderately strong evidence for an association between screentime and depressive symptoms, although evidence for social media screentime and depression was weak.

Evidence that screentime was associated with poorer quality of life was moderate,

We found no convincing evidence of health benefits from screentime. Yet some argue strongly that digital media have potential significant health, social and cognitive benefits and that harms are overstated.

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.

Educators should strive to create supportive atmospheres and equip their students with tools to independently express their areas of EF need. Educators can use what we call the “Four Tiers of Support” to set up this system in the classroom and beyond. They include: Teaching common EF language Identifying strengths and areas of need Setting up a classroom to support all students Teaching self-advocacy skills

Avoidance is at the core of anxiety.

There are several ways to do this. We can work directly with the child. We can work with the child and parents together. Or we can work with parents alone. All these instances emphasize teaching the child non-avoidance behaviors.