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"The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have the po - tential to ensure that every child in the United States is prepared for college and careers. It is a worthy goal and one that we must work together to achieve. However, infor - mation, policies, and products aimed at helping educators to implement the ELA Common Core State Standards are be - ing produced rapidly, sometimes with conf licting messages about literacy practices. This can be a confusing situation for school leaders and classroom teachers as they seek to under - stand the Standards and the best practices for literacy instruc - tion and assessment. It is state and local leaders and teachers themselves who, ultimately, must make the Standards into an effective instructional reality-what happens day to day in classrooms determines student ELA learning."

"Students have more information at their fingertips than ever before, yet the challenge remains for them to find, evaluate, and apply the information they discover in the classroom and beyond. Applying critical thinking skills through web research can help students: * Improve search skills. * Evaluate the information they find. * Incorporate them in their work. Explore the ready-to-use curriculum below, including detailed lesson plans, student worksheets, and class demonstrations on: * Mechanics of searching * Validity and reliability * Plagiarism * Citing web sources * Civil discourse"

control turning around failing schools? Hardly. Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein continue to run the New York City schools. Boston and Chicago mayors will still have their appointees overseeing schools. Business and civic leaders' faith that mayoral control is the key to "real" reform may be tarnished somewhat by D.C., Detroit, and Baltimore but it continues to entrance venture fund entrepreneurs and policy wonks inside the Beltway. Other mayors will learn from Fenty's loss that voters can turn on you if you fail to heed your community and give your

When I started using social media in the classroom, I looked for and began to learn from more experienced educators. First, I read and then tried to comment usefully on their blog posts and tweets. When I began to understand who knew what in the world of social media in education, I narrowed my focus to the most knowledgeable and adventurous among them. I paid attention to the people the savviest social media educators paid attention to. I added and subtracted voices from my attention network, listened and followed, then commented and opened conversations. When I found something I thought would interest the friends and strangers I was learning from, I passed along my own learning through my blogs and Twitterstream. I asked questions, asked for help, and eventually started providing answers and assistance to those who seemed to know less than I. The teachers I had been learning from had a name for what I was doing -- "growing a personal learning network." So I started looking for and learning from people who talked about HOW to grow a "PLN" as the enthusiasts called them. Learning innovator Will Richardson led me to Shelly Terrell, who genuinely lives out her "collaborate for change" maxim.

Personal Learning Networks can be important in helping you find authorities in a field. A collection of professionals, a network of enthusiasts on a subject, can provide checks on opinion and fact.

Imagine a classroom library showcasing books by Gail Gibbons and Eric Carle, selections from the Curious George series, nonfiction trade books about animals, and science magazines. Although the books appear to be disconnected, they are part of a unit of study called Fact or Fiction in which students investigate how authors use factual information about animals in fictional stories. By carefully selecting these texts within the context of a meaningful unit of study, the teacher has taken the first step in helping students be successful with complex informational text.

"Boost Your Teaching - With Critical Thinking Part of the series: Boost Your Teaching More to view/download/share: links Part of the series Boost Your Teaching Roy van den Brink-Budgen, a former chief examiner for critical thinking, explains some of the concepts involved in helping your pupils developing critical thinking skills. Learning how to analyse, evaluate and produce arguments can help pupils become enquiring thinkers, and skills can be developed across subjects and key stages. Whatever the subject, critical thinking encourages students to take claims and ask questions about them, whether they are made in conversations, in the classroom, or in the media."

Great video illustrating some important skills.

Science News Share Blog Cite Print Email Bookmark Is Technology Producing A Decline In Critical Thinking And Analysis? ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2009) - As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved, according to research by Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles. See also: Mind & Brain Intelligence Educational Psychology Computers & Math Video Games Computer Graphics Science & Society Popular Culture Educational Policy Reference Computing power everywhere Webcast Computer-generated imagery Aptitude Learners have changed as a result of their exposure to technology, says Greenfield, who analyzed more than 50 studies on learning and technology, including research on multi-tasking and the use of computers, the Internet and video games. Her research was published this month in the journal Science. Reading for pleasure, which has declined among young people in recent decades, enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not, Greenfield said. How much should schools use new media, versus older techniques such as reading and classroom discussion? "No one medium is good for everything," Greenfield said. "If we want to develop a variety of skills, we need a balanced media diet. Each medium has costs and benefits in terms of what skills each develops." S

"Encouraging Critical Thinking Online Encouraging Critical Thinking Online is a set of free teaching resources designed to develop students' analytic abilities, using the Web as source material. Two units are currently available, each consisting of a series of exercises for classroom or seminar use. Students are invited to explore the Web and find a number of sites which address the selected topic, and then, in a teacher-led group discussion, to share and discuss their findings. The exercises are designed so that they may be used either consecutively to form a short course, or individually. The resources encourage students to think carefully and critically about the information sources they use. The subject matter of the exercises is of relevance to a range of humanities disciplines (most especially, though by no means limited to, philosophy and religious studies), while the research skills gained will be valuable to all students."

Visible Thinking includes a number of ways of making students' thinking visible to themselves, to their peers, and to the teacher, so they get more engaged by it and come to manage it better for learning and other purposes. When thinking is visible in classrooms, students are in a position to be more metacognitive, to think about their thinking. When thinking is visible, it becomes clear that school is not about memorizing content but exploring ideas. Teachers benefit when they can see students' thinking because misconceptions, prior knowledge, reasoning ability, and degrees of understanding are more likely to be uncovered. Teachers can then address these challenges and extend students' thinking by starting from where they are.

""Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection" by Neil Postman (Delivered at the National Convention for the Teachers of English [NCTE], November 28, 1969, Washington, D.C.)"

We hear this everywhere - students should be doing "real-world" math and they should be applying what they learn in math to "real-world situations."

"But it is heavy lifting for teachers, administrators, parents, and students to dump high school structures that inhibit reasoning and sustain those changes over time. In the face of actual or threatened budget cuts, there is even less determination to touch those taken-for-granted organizational routines. Yet the lessons of earlier reforms are clear: trying to get students to think without altering basic high school structures, will be no more than washing and waxing a jalopy."

"This web site provides personal, practical, and published materials collected to help you cultivate critical thinking skills in your students, especially first-year students. How these materials are organized These materials are contained in 14 modules--ten focused on specific critical thinking skills, and four on specific teaching methods. These modules are then categorized using Halpern's (2003) framework for teaching critical thinking skills across disciplines. According to this framework, well-rounded critical thinking instruction helps students acquire: 1. a critical thinking attitude or habit of intellectual deliberation; 2. individual intellectual skills like analysis and inference; 3. the ability to use these skills in new contexts, and 4. the ability to reflect upon and evaluate one's own thinking (metacognition)."

Theories of Learning in Educational Psychology John Seely Brown: Cognitive Apprenticeship

An approach to teaching that leads with active questioning.