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mbarek Akaddar

EnglishTestStore - Test English Online and Download Free Tests - 12 views

  •  
    All Skills, All Levels: Grammar, Listening, Reading, Vocabulary, TOEFL, TOEIC, GRE, GMAT, SAT, English For Grades 6-12. Download all more than 4,500 quizzes and 60,000 questions
REZA CHOWDHURY

Project Zero: Cultures of Thinking - 0 views

  • Cultures of Thinking” (CoT) as places where a group’s collective as well as individual thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted as part of the regular, day-to-day experience of all group members.
  • Ron Ritchhart (2002)
  • CoT project focuses
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  • eight cultural forces
  • in every school, classroom, and group learning situation.
  • language, time, environment, opportunities, routines, modeling, interactions, and expectations.
  • scaffolds
  • make their own thinking visible,
  • this work doesn’t happen by teachers merely implementing a defined set of practices; it must be supported by a rich professional culture.
  • a core premise of the CoT project is
  • that for classrooms to be cultures of thinking for students
  • schools must be cultures of thinking for teachers.
  • In 2005, we began our work at Bialik College by forming two focus groups of eight teachers with whom we worked intensively. These groups were all heterogeneous, including K-12 teachers of various subjects, representing a departure from traditional forms of professional development that target specific subject areas or levels. 
  • diverse range of teachers
  • Team teaching efforts
  • developmental perspective on students’ thinking
  • In 2011, we published Making Thinking Visible,
  • which captures much of the great work being done by teachers in the project.
  • the CoT project’s research agenda
  • sought to better understand changes in teachers’ and students’ attitudes and practices as thinking becomes more visible in the school and classroom environments.
  • measures of school and classroom thoughtfulness to capture these changes.
  • at how students’ conceptual understanding of the domain of thinking developed
  • case studies of teachers
  • Our research to date has shown that students recognize CoT classrooms as being more focused on thinking, learning, and understanding, and more likely to be collaborative in nature than those of teachers not in the project
  • Teachers in the project notice that as they work with CoT ideas, their classrooms shift in noticeable ways. Specifically, they find that they give thinking more time, discussion increases, and their questioning of students shifts toward asking students to elaborate on their thinking rather than testing them on their recall of facts and procedures.
  • Our research on students’ conceptual development found that
  • over the course of a single school year, the average CoT classroom students’ growth and maturity, with respect to understanding thinking processes that they themselves use and control, increased by twice the normal rate one might expect by virtue of maturity alone (Ritchhart, Turner, Hadar, 2009).
  • Recent data on students’ language arts performance has shown superior performance by students coming from strong CoT classrooms/schools on standardized tests such as the MAEP Writing Assessment (Michigan), MCAS ELA (Massachusetts), VCE English (Victoria, Australia), and IB English exams.
  • The new book, Creating Cultures of Thinking,
  • The book draws on case studies from teachers around the world to demonstrate the power and importance of each cultural force in shaping classroom culture.
  • hese include frameworks and tools for professional learning communities, videos, and frameworks for understanding classroom questioning.
  • Though the formal research phase of the project ended in 2009, the project continues through 2013 in a support phase to develop internal leadership and outreach around these ideas.
  • he research ideas are also being taken up by many new sites, including Oakland County Michigan and Santa Fe, New Mexico. 
  • Funding: Bialik College (Melbourne, Australia) under the patronage of Abe and Vera Dorevitch 
  • Project Staff: Ron Ritchhart Mark Church (consultant)
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    Project Zero: Cultures of Thinking
Carl Davis

The Associated Press: Math and English classes could be standardized - 0 views

  • ould lead to students across the country using the same math and English textbooks and taking the same tests
  • Council of Chief State School Officers
  • new national tests
Barbara Lindsey

My School, Meet MySpace: Social Networking at School | Edutopia - 1 views

  • Months before the newly hired teachers at Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy (SLA) started their jobs, they began the consuming work of creating the high school of their dreams -- without meeting face to face. They articulated a vision, planned curriculum, designed assessment rubrics, debated discipline policies, and even hammered out daily schedules using the sort of networking tools -- messaging, file swapping, idea sharing, and blogging -- kids love on sites such as MySpace.
  • hen, weeks before the first day of school, the incoming students jumped onboard -- or, more precisely, onto the Science Leadership Academy Web site -- to meet, talk with their teachers, and share their hopes for their education. So began a conversation that still perks along 24/7 in SLA classrooms and cyberspace. It's a bold experiment to redefine learning spaces, the roles and relationships of teachers and students, and the mission of the modern high school.
  • When I hear people say it's our job to create the twenty-first-century workforce, it scares the hell out of me," says Chris Lehmann, SLA's founding principal. "Our job is to create twenty-first-century citizens. We need workers, yes, but we also need scholars, activists, parents -- compassionate, engaged people. We're not reinventing schools to create a new version of a trade school. We're reinventing schools to help kids be adaptable in a world that is changing at a blinding rate."
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  • It's the spirit of science rather than hardcore curriculum that permeates SLA. "In science education, inquiry-based learning is the foothold," Lehmann says. "We asked, 'What does it mean to build a school where everything is based on the core values of science: inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection?'"
  • It means the first-year curriculum is built around essential questions: Who am I? What influences my identity? How do I interact with my world? In addition to science, math, and engineering, core courses include African American history, Spanish, English, and a basic how-to class in technology that also covers Internet safety and the ethical use of information and software. Classes focus less on facts to be memorized and more on skills and knowledge for students to master independently and incorporate into their lives. Students rarely take tests; they write reflections and do "culminating" projects. Learning doesn't merely cross disciplines -- it shatters outdated departmental divisions. Recently, for instance, kids studied atomic weights in biochemistry (itself a homegrown interdisciplinary course), did mole calculations in algebra, and created Dalton models (diagrams that illustrate molecular structures) in art.
  • This is Dewey for the digital age, old-fashioned progressive education with a technological twist.
  • computers and networking are central to learning at, and shaping the culture of, SLA. "
  • he zest to experiment -- and the determination to use technology to run a school not better, but altogether differently -- began with Lehmann and the teachers last spring when they planned SLA online. Their use of Moodle, an open source course-management system, proved so easy and inspired such productive collaboration that Lehmann adopted it as the school's platform. It's rare to see a dog-eared textbook or pad of paper at SLA; everybody works on iBooks. Students do research on the Internet, post assignments on class Moodle sites, and share information through forums, chat, bookmarks, and new software they seem to discover every day.
  • Teachers continue to use Moodle to plan, dream, and learn, to log attendance and student performance, and to talk about everything -- from the student who shows up each morning without a winter coat to cool new software for tagging research sources. There's also a schoolwide forum called SLA Talk, a combination bulletin board, assembly, PA system, and rap session.
  • Web technology, of course, can do more than get people talking with those they see every day; people can communicate with anyone anywhere. Students at SLA are learning how to use social-networking tools to forge intellectual connections.
  • In October, Lehmann noticed that students were sorting themselves by race in the lunchroom and some clubs. He felt disturbed and started a passionate thread on self-segregation.
  • "Having the conversation changed the way kids looked at themselves," he says.
  • "What I like best about this school is the sense of community," says student Hannah Feldman. "You're not just here to learn, even though you do learn a lot. It's more like a second home."
  • As part of the study of memoirs, for example, Alexa Dunn's English class read Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas's account of growing up Iranian in the United States -- yes, the students do read books -- and talked with the author in California via Skype. The students also wrote their own memoirs and uploaded them to SLA's network for the teacher and class to read and edit. Then, digital arts teacher Marcie Hull showed the students GarageBand, which they used to turn their memoirs into podcasts. These they posted on the education social-networking site EduSpaces (formerly Elgg); they also posted blogs about the memoirs.
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