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lesmcbeth

Resources | Leadership+Design - 0 views

leadershipanddesign.wordpress.com/resources

DesignThinking

shared by lesmcbeth on 01 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Ewan McIntosh at TEDxLondon. In this talk, hybrid teacher/investor Ewan McIntosh shows how really using the design thinking model requires a shift in teacher behavior to “get out of the way” and allow students to find solutions to relevant challenges.
  • esign Thinking for Independent School Educators.” This webinar by Leading is Learning co-founder Greg Bamford provides a 100-level introduction to design thinking and why is matters in the independent school environment. Design Thinking in Education. This partnership between IDEO and Riverdale Country Day School (NY) focuses on how design thinking is used in schools, often to help schools solve problems about where they should go, what they should do. It includes case studies and nice short videos about educators using design thinking here. The Stanford d. school K-12 Wiki has a range of resources for K-12 educators. Stanford REDLab (Design and Education) has scholarly articles on design thinking and education, videos, and a few models of design thinking units in middle school math and high school science here. The Nueva School in northern California, a K-8 independent school, is a national leader in using Design Thinking. Information on their curriculum and iLab facility is here.
  • lesmcbeth on 01 Dec 14
     
    What does Design Thinking look like in schools?
garth nichols

A High School in Massachusetts Where the Students Are the Teachers | TIME.com - 0 views

healthland.time.com/...-the-students-are-the-teachers

shared by garth nichols on 02 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Sam Levin, an alum of Monument who is currently a sophomore at the University of Oxford in England studying biological sciences, started the program in 2010. Frustrated with his public-high-school schedule and realizing that his friends weren’t inspired to learn, Levin complained to his mother about how unhappy he and his classmates were, to which she responded: “Why don’t you just make your own school?” And so he did — albeit in small steps. In ninth grade, Levin started a school-wide garden that was solely cared for by students; some woke up early on Saturdays to work with the plants. The garden is still functioning and serves at-need families in the community. After witnessing the commitment that his classmates had to nurturing something they had created themselves, Levin was convinced that they were capable of putting more time and energy into their studies — as long as it was something they cared about. “I was seeing the exact opposite in school. Kids weren’t even doing the things they needed to do to get credit. There was something at odds with students getting up to work for no credit or money [on the garden] at 7 in the morning, but not wanting to wake up to read or do a science experiment,” says Levin. “I saw the really amazing and powerful things that happened when high school students stepped it up and were excited about something.”
  • The semester is split in half, with the first nine weeks focused on natural and social sciences. Each Monday morning, the students formulate a question with the help of their classmates. For example, “How are plants from different parts of a mountain different from each other?” or “What causes innovation?” The students spend the rest of the week researching the answer and creating a presentation to summarize their findings to share with their classmates at the end of the week for feedback and critique. The students are in charge of keeping themselves on task, creating their research plans and meeting their deadlines.
  • By taking ownership of their learning, the students at Monument are forced to think creatively and capitalize on their own talents in order to excel. The class framework is similar to what will be expected of them in college and in the workforce, when they have to make their own educated and independent decisions.
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  • Still, the project is not without its challenges, and the program continues to evolve. This year was the first time students in the program could receive general credit for the course instead of elective credit. Powell also says it’s not necessarily right for every student. “It is a challenge to think that a teenager can have that much freedom to figure out what they want to study and manage their time,” says Powell. “People are more on board now that they have observed the program, but there are still some skeptics with legitimate reasons, and we are always addressing challenges.”
  • His hope is that the Independent Project will continue to challenge current theories about education, and help teachers and policymakers think more creatively about the best way to help young people learn. Ultimately, that understanding should lead to systemic changes that open up more opportunities for children to get the education that will benefit them the most. “It is one thing to help school by school, and that is how a lot of change happens, but at the same time, the long-term goal and broader ambition is to make changes to the education system,” he says.
  • garth nichols on 02 Apr 13
     
    A different approach to learning via whole school change.
Derek Doucet

CEFR and the DELF - 0 views

www.cpfalta.ab.ca/...CEFRandDELF.htm

CEFR DELF

shared by Derek Doucet on 22 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • The CEFR
  • was developed to promote language learning, to facilitate educational and occupational mobility, and to support plurilingualism and multiculturalism.
  • The CEFR is organized into six reference levels
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  • A  Basic User B  Independent User C  Proficient User A1 Breakthrough A2 Waystage B1 Threshold B2 Vantage C1 Proficiency C2 Mastery
  • "The CEFR examines and values what an individual does know, based on their competencies. Its philosophical underpinning is that all individuals have the capacity to learn, there are many different ways to learn, that learning can continue throughout the life span.
  • Educators: learn more about the CEFR through an online professional learning workshop offered to members of the Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers. Contact mihaelavieru@caslt.org.
  • France has developed the Diplôme d'études en langue française (DELF) for levels A1 through B2 and the Diplôme approfondi de langue française (DALF) for levels C1 and C2. 
  • The DELF/DALF are offered in 154 countries to some 300,000 candidates each year.
  • A learner takes the level of assessment for which s/he feels confident (for students, the teacher normally assists in choosing the most appropriate level).  It is not required to take all of the tests, or to take them sequentially.
  • Having successfully passed one of the DALF / DELF exams, the candidate receives an official Diplôme issued by the Ministère de l'Éducation Nationale of France through the Centre International d'Études Pédagogiques (www.ciep.fr). The candidate also receives his/her marks for each portion of the exam.
  • This life-long certification is recognized internationally by employers and postsecondary institutions. For example, the B2 level is required for entrance into most universities in France. And, of course, the Diplôme and the accompanying proficiency descriptors are the perfect addition to any résumé, outlining in very practical terms what the individual is capable of doing in French.
  • In Canada, responsibility for the DELF/DALF rests with the Embassy of France. The DELF Scolaire is offered by a school district or a school in agreement with the Embassy, the DELF Junior by language schools such as the Alliance Française.
  • Each exam center receives the software and other materials required to conduct the exams. The center is responsible for logistical arrangements, assessors, registering candidates, printing the exams, marking the oral and written exams, and publishing the results.  The center establishes the fees it will charge for the exams.
  • A school or district can become an exam center through an agreement with the Embassy of France. Alternately, it can make arrangements with an existing exam center to administer the exams to interested students.
  • Derek Doucet on 22 Nov 12
     
    A website that explains the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, and the Diplôme d'Éducation de la Langue Française. 
garth nichols

An A+ student regrets his grades - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...article7359620

Grades Education Real World

shared by garth nichols on 25 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • One of the few classes that effectively taught me how to take information from the classroom to the real world was instructed by Doug Wightman at Queen’s University. The course covered concepts from how to start a start-up, build business models and prototypes, to venture deals, stock options and term sheets. But it didn’t end there. Toward the end of the course, many students had working prototypes, and a few managed to execute and launch their ideas. This course taught me something important: We can’t allow learning to become passive. We need to teach students to learn how to learn – to become independent, innovative thinkers capable of changing the world.
  • Culture is a problem, and we need to fix it – from the ground up. There’s a psychosocial dynamic of not questioning current practices of education. But we can’t let this get in the way. Embrace education with all your heart, and remember that schooling is only a small part of the puzzle. The remainder is what you’ll have to discover and solve through your own journey.
  • garth nichols on 25 Jan 13
     
    What do grades mean today for students? A student tells us!
garth nichols

Stop Penalizing Boys for Not Being Able to Sit Still at School - Jessica Lahey - The At... - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...276976

whole-child Boys_Education

shared by garth nichols on 02 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • The authors of this study conclude that teacher bias regarding behavior, rather than academic perfor
  • mance, penalizes boys as early as kindergarten. On average, boys receive lower behavioral assessment scores from teachers, and those scores affect teachers' overall perceptions of boys' intelligence and achievement.
  • The most effective lessons included more than one of these elements: Lessons that result in an end product--a booklet, a catapult, a poem, or a comic strip, for example. Lessons that are structured as competitive games. Lessons requiring motor activity. Lessons requiring boys to assume responsibility for the learning of others. Lessons that require boys to address open questions or unsolved problems. Lessons that require a combination of competition and teamwork. Lessons that focus on independent, personal discovery and realization. Lessons that introduce drama in the form of novelty or surprise.
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  • Split the class into groups of four and spread them around the room. Each team will need paper and pencils. At the front of the room, place copies of a document including all of the material that has been taught in some sort of graphical form--a spider diagram, for example. Then tell the students that one person from each group may come up to the front of the classroom and look at the document for thirty seconds. When those thirty seconds are up, they return to their group and write down what they remember in an attempt to re-create the original document in its entirety. The students rotate through the process until the group has pieced the original document back together as a team, from memory. These end products may be "graded" by other teams, and as a final exercise, each student can be required to return to his desk and re-create the document on his own.
  • Rather than penalize the boys' relatively higher energy and competitive drive, the most effective way to teach boys is to take advantage of that high energy, curiosity, and thirst for competition. While Reichert and Hawley's research was conducted in all-boys schools, these lessons can be used in all classrooms, with both boys and girls.
  • garth nichols on 02 Jul 13
     
    Great article on Boys' Education
mr_bornstein

Forget Talent: Why Practice is Key to Most Prodigies' Success | MindShift | KQED News - 1 views

ww2.kqed.org/...-key-to-most-prodigies-success

growth mindset

shared by mr_bornstein on 25 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Peak: Secrets From The New Science Of Expertise,
  • talent” is often a story we tell ourselves to justify our own failure or to protect children from the possibility of failure.
  • “
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  • a tendency to assume that some people have a talent for something and others don’t and that you can tell the difference early on. If you believe that, you encourage and support the ‘talented’ ones and discourage the rest, creating the self-fulfilling prophecy. … The best way to avoid this is to recognize the potential in all of us — and work to find ways to develop it.
  • “deliberate practice.”
  • ind a teacher who has been teaching other people to reach the level of performance that you want to attain. This basically means that teacher will be able to tell you the most effective ways to improve. A good teacher will also be able to find suitable units of improvement, so you don’t push yourself more than you can do.
  • start out, 15 or 20 minutes [a day]
  • think of something you want to attain and then get the help of teachers and parents to start you on the path of creating that
  • But you haven’t simply been waiting around for something that would allow you to instantaneously become good because that’s never happening.
  • You can improve your performance more in those one or two hours with a coach than in 5 to 10 years of regular practice with your friends.
  • you’re really trying to help the child develop this ability and become increasingly more able to monitor their own learning so they will eventually become independent
  • there is a way of helping a child get enjoyment from the mastery and the development of an ability.
  • before a public performance a child is much more motivated to practice and work on things that will translate into a better performance.
  • When that becomes important, you’ll have the motivation and willingness to do the training that will allow you to reach a high level of proficiency.
  • with certain kinds of math activities it’s hard to see how they will actually benefit you as an adult. So, I think education can be transformed into being more skills-based, where students will be able to see how, by learning certain skills, they’ll be able to do things that they couldn’t do before.
  • understand and integrate that knowledge in a way that allows you to use it.
  • I could infer and relate things that were related to me in a meaningful way.
amacrae

The Third Teacher - 1 views

DIIGO_FILE_HOME/5qz9p/5nc2

shared by amacrae on 19 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • 2Getting Started with the Physical EnvironmentOVERALL ...It is both an art and a science to design (as opposed to decorate) a learning environment that responds to our ultimate goal as educators – to develop independent and rigorous thought. Therefore, if we want to foster discovery and reflection, dialogue and the sharing of ideas, the overall physical environment should include:•A large gathering space for whole-group work and discussions, located near whiteboards, easels and/or projector screens.•A gathering space for small-group and whole-group discussions – where students can see clearly the representations of learning that are posted on boards or screens and hear classmates as they share ideas.•Flexible and reconfigurable space for small-group collaborative work and inquiry – space must allow for groupings of various sizes, such as pairs, triads and groups of four or more.•Desks and tables configured to facilitate discussion by allowing eye contact with peers and teacher, the unencumbered flow of traffic and enough space for students to write collaboratively.•Active areas for inquiry, investigation and wonder and quiet areas for thinking and exploring technology – all areas need to be accessible to students for communicating and documenting their own learning (e.g., computers, computer software, tablets, digital cameras and video recorders, document cameras, interactive white boards).•Instructional materials organized in such a way as to provide easy selection and access for all students – materials may include computer software, educational web sites and applications, found materials, graphic organizers, newspapers and other media, resource texts, etc.FOR MATHEMATICS ...Mathematically literate students demonstrate the capacity to “formulate, employ and interpret mathematics” (OECD, 2012, p. 4); they view themselves as mathematicians, knowing that mathematics can be used to understand important issues and to solve meaningful problems, not just in school but in life. By extension, the physical environment for mathematics learning should include: •Spaces where students can use manipulatives to solve problems and record their solutions.•Board and/or wall space to display student solutions for Math Congress and Bansho – student solutions should be easily visible from the group gathering space.•Space to post co-created reference charts such as glossary terms and past and current summaries of learning that specifically support the development of the big ideas currently under study.•Instructional materials organized in such a way as to provide easy selection and access for all students; may include mathematics manipulatives, calculators and other mathematical tools, mathematical texts, hand-held technology.FOR LITERACY ... Today’s literate learners experience “a constant stream of ideas and information” – they need strategies for interpretation and making sense and lots of practice in identifying meaning, bias and perspective (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2009, 2006). By extension, the physical environment for literacy learning should include: •Spaces where students can talk, listen, read and write.A place for wonder, mystery and discovery ...“We need to think about creating classroom environments that give children the opportunity for wonder, mystery and discovery; an environment that speaks to young children’s inherent curiosity and innate yearning for exploration is a classroom where children are passionate about learning and love school.” (Heard & McDonough, 2009)
  • maintain that the key to learning in today’s world is not just the physical space we provide for students but the social space as well (
  • A large gathering space
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  • mall-
Marcie Lewis

Annie Kidder: Are Parents the True Levers of Change in Education Systems? - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

parents change education

shared by Marcie Lewis on 23 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Marcie Lewis on 23 Mar 14
     
    Interesting discussion about the power of parents in change; interesting to think about parental voices in the context of independent schools
Carolyn Bilton

20th vs. 21st Century Teaching | My Island View - 1 views

tomwhitby.wordpress.com/...20th-vs-21st-century-teaching

21st Century Teaching technology student-centric

shared by Carolyn Bilton on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Collaborative learning, which has always been with us, has been turbo-boosted by technology
  • Collaboration now has no boundaries of time and space. Collaborative learning can take place anytime and anywhere
  • Technology now provides the means for student-centric lessons.
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  • get our students familiar with having a voice in personalizing their learning
  • We cannot hold them responsible for learning, if we don’t teach them the skills of learning
  • This student-centric learning strongly supports lifelong learning. It creates independent learners and thinkers. It is a learning-by-doing philosophy.
  • Technology is a driving force for much of the student-centric learning. We need our educators to be at the very least literate in this relatively new digital literacy
  • We need to prepare this generation not only to learn, but also to think critically as well. Learning and thinking are a far cry from listening, memorizing and regurgitating facts
garth nichols

Pasi Sahlberg - The Finnish Paradox - 0 views

pasisahlberg.com/the-finnish-paradox

finnish paradox cohort21

shared by garth nichols on 07 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In the global perspective, the Finnish education system seems to be a paradox. When much of the rest of the world is implementing more oversight of schools to assure teachers meet specific goals, lengthening the school day, toughening academic standards, and increasing homework, Finnish children continue to enjoy a relatively short school day, a broad curriculum, and a light homework load. In addition, Finnish children do not attend private tutoring sessions or spend any time preparing for standardized tests, as so many of their peers around the world must.
  • Perhaps the most surprising part of the Finnish educational philosophy is the central role of play in children’s lives, both in and out of school. Formal learning doesn’t start before the first grade when children are seven years old. Before that, children spend their time in play to develop a sense of independence and responsibility, and to learn about themselves and others. In the early years of elementary education, children furthermore learn to read and do math through various forms of play, music, and drama.  The old adage of “less is more” is carried out every day in Finnish schools, as I describe in “Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland” (2011).
  • Finland’s success is a result of finding its own way of change rather than doing more of the same than others. This is particularly true in enhancing educational quality and equity.  Some foreign observers claim that Finnish educational success results from the country’s smallness, cultural homogeneity, and wealth. Those thinking this way often fail to distinguish the Finnish way from the global education reform movement (or GERM) that sees competition, standardization, frequent testing, and privatization as the most effective drivers of change.
  • garth nichols on 07 Jan 14
     
    As an addendum to Dr. Yong Zhoa's article about why Finland is still really the tops of education despite recent PISA results...read about the Finnish Paradox
garth nichols

Multitasking while studying: Divided attention and technological gadgets impair learnin... - 2 views

www.slate.com/...and_technological_gadgets.html

multitasking edtech

shared by garth nichols on 05 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the Web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were wearing earbuds.
  • tudents’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork.
  • The media multitasking habit starts early. In “Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,” a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and published in 2010, almost a third of those surveyed said that when they were doing homework, “most of the time” they were also watching TV, texting, listening to music, or using some other medium. The lead author of the study was Victoria Rideout, then a vice president at Kaiser and now an independent research and policy consultant. Although the study looked at all aspects of kids’ media use, Rideout told me she was particularly troubled by its findings regarding media multitasking while doing schoolwork.
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  • During the first meeting of his courses, Rosen makes a practice of calling on a student who is busy with his phone. “I ask him, ‘What was on the slide I just showed to the class?’ The student always pulls a blank,” Rosen reports. “Young people have a wildly inflated idea of how many things they can attend to at once, and this demonstration helps drive the point home: If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in class.” Other professors have taken a more surreptitious approach, installing electronic spyware or planting human observers to record whether students are taking notes on their laptops or using them for other, unauthorized purposes.
  • garth nichols on 05 Jan 15
     
    Why digital multitasking is inhibiting our learning
lauramustardscs

Literacy Apps in the Library - 1 views

aislnews.org/?p=1796

edtech literacy apps library

shared by lauramustardscs on 17 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • lauramustardscs on 17 Nov 14
     
    From my fave blog of independent school librarians, this is a great post about combining reading online with more traditional library instruction for a truly engaged experience for your students
su11armstrong

Four ways to extend the 'fast' blended learning student | eSchool News | eSchool News | 4 - 5 views

www.eschoolnews.com/...4

blended blended learning independent pace Education

shared by su11armstrong on 13 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • su11armstrong on 13 Nov 14
     
    This article looks at three structures that support learning for the student that moves quickly through material. Although specific to blended learning there are ideas that can be transferred to other individual learning situations.
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