I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages.
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shared by Holly Barlaam on 16 Dec 10
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Science Fix - 91 views
www.sciencefix.com
blog teacher teacher blog education teacher resources science resources middle school science science demos
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The Coach in the Operating Room - The New Yorker - 37 views
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the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.
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They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.
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always evolving
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no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.
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For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers.
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So, instead of having students take test after test after test, why don't we just have coaches who observe and sit and discuss and offer suggestions and divide the number of tests we give students in half and do away with half? Are we concerned about student knowledge? student performance? student ability? student growth or capacity for growth? What we really need to identify is what we value!
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California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting. Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.
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they did not necessarily have any special expertise in a content area, like math or science.
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The coaches let the teachers choose the direction for coaching. They usually know better than anyone what their difficulties are.
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The conversation with the coach and the coach listening and learning what the teacher would like to expand, improve, and grow is probably the most vital part! If the teacher doesn't have a clue, the coach could start anywhere and that might not be what the teacher adopts and owns. So, the teacher must have ownership and direction.
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teaches coaches to observe a few specifics: whether the teacher has an effective plan for instruction; how many students are engaged in the material; whether they interact respectfully; whether they engage in high-level conversations; whether they understand how they are progressing, or failing to progress.
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must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at.
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most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.
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The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short.
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So coaches use a variety of approaches—showing what other, respected colleagues do, for instance, or reviewing videos of the subject’s performance. The most common, however, is just conversation.
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“What worked?”
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“What else did you notice?”
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something to try.
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Good coaches, he said, speak with credibility, make a personal connection, and focus little on themselves.
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“listened more than they talked,” Knight said. “They were one hundred per cent present in the conversation.”
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trying to get residents to think—to think like surgeons—and his questions exposed how much we had to learn.
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one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years.
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watch other colleagues operate in order to gather ideas about what I could do.
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routine, high-quality video recordings of operations could enable us to figure out why some patients fare better than others.
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It’s teaching with a trendier name. Coaching aimed at improving the performance of people who are already professionals is less usual.
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modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things
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We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.
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Review: How to teach Secondary Science by @CatrinGreen - 13 views
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We all remember science lessons from our school days. Whether the lessons were with the more 'characteristic' teachers in the school, or whether you all released the gas taps when the teacher foolishly left the room, we all seemed to miss the link that science is life! And what an opportunity science teachers have in releasing the magic of life to their pupils, answering BIG questions like "Why am I like my parents?", or "What will my life be like in 2050?", or "Why is Pripyat a deserted town?"
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eChalk: Teaching resources for interactive whiteboards and data projectors - 2 views
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Powerful interactive resources designed for whole-class teaching. Online educational games, classroom resources and lesson activities for interactive whiteboards and data projectors. Put some fun into your lessons with our exceptional science, maths, English language, literature, history, music physical education and modern foreign languages software." />/css/resourceList.css
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Rookie head of science - toughest year yet? by @secretsciteach - 6 views
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"Starting in the final term before I officially started in September was tough. I wasn't anticipating having such a full teaching timetable and my own classes were incredibly unsettled. I found it difficult to establish myself as an average science teacher let alone attempt to lead a department. I was seriously considering if I had made the right move! I remember one student in what I thought was a difficult Year 9 class saying "sir why don't you go and get the head of science" to which I replied "I am the head of Science!"."
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shared by Steve Kelly on 26 Mar 15
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What would an exceptional middle and high school computer science curriculum include? -... - 48 views
www.quora.com/ter-science-curriculum-include
high school school computer computer science middle school curriculum science coding code programming include
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This isn't a complete answer, but one thing the very first introductory classes should require is that the students turn off all their electronic computers and actually learn to walk through algorithms with a computer that exists only on paper. (Or, I suppose, a whiteboard or a simulator.) This exercise would give the students a grounding in what is going on inside the computer as a very low level.My first computer programming class in my Freshman year of high school was completely on paper. Although it was done because the school didn't have much money, it turned out to be very beneficial.Another class I had in high school, that wouldn't normally be lumped into a Computer Science curriculum but has been a boon to my career, was good old Typing 101.
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If you followed the CS Unplugged curriculum your students would know more about CS than most CS grads:http://csunplugged.orgIt's a really great intro to basic computer science concepts and very easy for students to understand. Best of all you don't even need a computer per student if your school doesn't have the budget,
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For younger students, I think that the ability to make something professional-looking, like a real grown-up would, is paramount. Sadly, I think this means that LOGO and BASIC aren't much use any more*.
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So, we have a few choices. You can try to write phone apps that look just like real phone apps, design interactive websites that look just like real interactive websites, or do something with embedded systems / robotics. Avoid the temptation to make these things into group projects; the main thing every student needs to experience is the process of writing code, running it, debugging it, and watching the machine react to every command.
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It is important to consider what an 11 to 18-year old is familiar with in terms of mathematics and logical thinking. An average 11-year old is probably learning about fractions, simple cartesian geometry, the concept of units, and mathematical expressions. By 15, the average student will be taking algebra, and hopefully will have the all-important concept of variables under his/her belt. So much in CS is dependent on solid understanding that symbols and tokens can represent abstract concepts, values, or algorithms. Without it, it's still possible to teach CS, but it must be done in a very different way (see Scratch).
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At this point, concepts such as variables, parenthesis matching, and functions (of the mathematical variety) are within easy reach. Concepts like parameter passing, strings and collections, and program flow should be teachable. More advanced concepts such as recursion, references and pointers, certain data structures, and big-O may be very difficult to teach without first going through some more foundational math.
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I tend to agree strongly with those that believe a foundational education should inspire interest and enforce concepts and critical thinking over teaching any specific language, framework, system, or dogma.
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The key is that the concepts in CS aren't just there for the hell of it. Everything was motivated by a real problem, and few things are more satisfying than fixing something you really want to work with a cool technique or concept you just learned.
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As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks May Become History - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create — and share — lessons
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And they think of knowledge as infinite
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With California in dire straits, the governor hopes free textbooks could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
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“I don’t believe that charters and vouchers are the threat to schools in Orange County,” he said. “What’s a threat is the digital world — that someone’s going to put together brilliant $200 courses in French, in geometry by the best teachers in the world.”
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“We believe that the world is going digital, but the jury’s still out on how this will evolve,” said Wendy Spiegel, a Pearson spokeswoman. “We’re agnostic, so we’ll provide digital, we’ll provide print, and we’ll see what our customers want.”
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At Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., students use computers provided by the school to get their lessons, do their homework and hear podcasts of their teachers' science lectures. Down the road, at Cienega High School, students who own laptops can register for "digital sections" of several English, history and science classes. And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create - and share - lessons that incorporate their own PowerPoint presentations, along with videos and research materials they find by sifting through reliable Internet sites.
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Lawrence Hall of Science - 24/7 Science - 137 views
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From Free Technology for Teachers: has two basic sections, a game section and an activities section. The games section offers twenty-five online games for students to play independently. The hands-on activities section offers thirteen hands-on science learning activities that students can do with the supervision of their teachers or parents to learn about plants, animals, and Earth science.
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shared by Michael Sheehan on 09 Feb 13
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Learning Never Stops: Symphony of Science - Science Based Music Videos - 95 views
seekoutlearning.blogspot.com/...ience-science-based-music.html
learning symphony science based music videos
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Kelly Dau liked it
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Educational Leadership:Teaching for the 21st Century:21st Century Skills: The Challenge... - 119 views
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Critical thinking and problem solving, for example, have been components of human progress throughout history
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What's actually new is the extent to which changes in our economy and the world mean that collective and individual success depends on having such skills
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Many reform efforts, from reducing class size to improving reading instruction, have devolved into fads or been implemented with weak fidelity to their core intent. The 21st century skills movement faces the same risk.
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some of the rhetoric we have heard surrounding this movement suggests that with so much new knowledge being created, content no longer matters; that ways of knowing information are now much more important than information itself. Such notions contradict what we know about teaching and learning and raise concerns that the 21st century skills movement will end up being a weak intervention for the very students—low-income students and students of color—who most need powerful schools as a matter of social equity.
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First, educators and policymakers must ensure that the instructional program is complete and that content is not shortchanged for an ephemeral pursuit of skills
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Second, states, school districts, and schools need to revamp how they think about human capital in education—in particular how teachers are trained
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At other times, we know that we have a particular thinking skill, but domain knowledge is necessary if we are to use it.
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if skills are independent of content, we could reasonably conclude that we can develop these skills through the use of any content. For example, if students can learn how to think critically about science in the context of any scientific material, a teacher should select content that will engage students (for instance, the chemistry of candy), even if that content is not central to the field. But all content is not equally important to mathematics, or to science, or to literature. To think critically, students need the knowledge that is central to the domain.
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Another curricular challenge is that we don't yet know how to teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity, and innovation the way we know how to teach long division.
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But experience is not the same thing as practice. Experience means only that you use a skill; practice means that you try to improve by noticing what you are doing wrong and formulating strategies to do better. Practice also requires feedback, usually from someone more skilled than you are.
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We must plan to teach skills in the context of particular content knowledge and to treat both as equally important.
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education leaders must be realistic about which skills are teachable. If we deem that such skills as collaboration and self-direction are essential, we should launch a concerted effort to study how they can be taught effectively rather than blithely assume that mandating their teaching will result in students learning them.
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Even when class sizes are reduced, teachers do not change their teaching strategies or use these student-centered method
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These methods also demand that teachers be knowledgeable about a broad range of topics and are prepared to make in-the-moment decisions as the lesson plan progresses.
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Unfortunately, there is a widespread belief that teachers already know how to do this if only we could unleash them from today's stifling standards and accountability metrics. This notion romanticizes student-centered methods, underestimates the challenge of implementing such methods, and ignores the lack of capacity in the field today.
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measures that encourage greater creativity, show how students arrived at answers, and even allow for collaboration.
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When students first encounter new ideas, their knowledge is shallow and their understanding is bound to specific examples. They need exposure to varied examples before their understanding of a concept becomes more abstract and they can successfully apply that understanding to novel situations.
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shared by Jay Swan on 10 Aug 10
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50 Really Cool Online Tools for Science Teachers - 153 views
www.onlinedegreeprograms.com/...ine-tools-for-science-teachers
Science Education Teachers biology chemistry physics resources tools
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A 21st-century education revolves around the Internet for everything from collaboration, tools, lessons, and even earning degrees online. If you are looking for ways to integrate online learning into your science class, then take a look at these cool online tools that are just perfect for both teachers and students.
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shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 15 Apr 12
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Computer Science Teachers Association - 44 views
csta.acm.org
CS4HS computerscience programming ComputationalThinking education association international
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"The Computer Science Teachers Association is a membership organization that supports and promotes the teaching of computer science and other computing disciplines. CSTA provides opportunities for K-12 teachers and students to better understand the computing disciplines and to more successfully prepare themselves to teach and learn."
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Science Fair Project Ideas, Answers, & Tools - 3 views
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Book Review: Neuroscience for Teachers by @teacherled_RCTs @EllieJane1980 & @idevonshire - 8 views
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"Gradually, an important and growing evidence of the impact of understanding neuroscience in terms of learning and education has started to inform pedagogy, along with a better appreciation of how we learn. Yet, there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding to what neuroscience science is, and many within the education sector would struggle to explain the principles, science and research to recognise how the brain processes information. Fundamentally, neuroscience literally means the 'science of the nervous system', making use of the principles and many techniques from the main science disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology."
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Book: 45 Secrets That All High School Teachers Need to Know by @RichardJaRogers - 36 views
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Mastering the art of teaching appears to be easier for some colleagues than others. Some teachers just seem to have a presence, gaining respect and credibility from students, colleagues and parents alike. Did they undergo some mysterious, magical training that wasn't covered during your teacher training course? Well, no. They just have mastered how to manage their working relationships, using their personalities to generate rapport, which is respected by students of all age. It's not rocket science - it's far more complicated than that. Personality and behaviour clashes in classrooms are inevitable, but looking at all the different elements of daily interactions can help you gain respect from students and colleagues alike...
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Despite Obama's Urging, Policy Stymies Science Students, Teachers Say - NYTimes.com - 18 views
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In middle school, science fair projects are typically still required — and, teachers lament, all too often completed by parents.
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In many schools, science fairs depend on teachers who shoulder the extra work. They supervise participants and research, raise the money for medals and poster boards, and find judges — all on their own time.