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Sigrid Murphy

Five U.S. innovations that helped Finland's schools improve but that American reformers... - 64 views

    • anonymous
       
      Interesting Top Five
    • anonymous
       
      Answer explanation is almost as important as mathematic problem solving.  If we really want to know if a student understands ANY concept, we need to ask him/her to write their explanation.  Sometimes the understanding comes from the thinking required to do the writing - writing to make it make sense!
    • anonymous
       
      Why don't we consider relating almost every lesson to everyday life?  Seems like an obvious thing to do to me!
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    • anonymous
       
      Wow!  I think the concept of doing less of something in order to make time for experimentation is a fabulous idea!  Do you mean there are different aspects of student assessment and testing beyond a bubble sheet?  :)
  • Most of them have studied psychology, teaching methods, curriculum theories, assessment models, and classroom management researched and designed in the United States
    • anonymous
       
      Finland's successful practices are something they learned here in the U.S.  So, why aren't our teachers here in the U.S. employing those same practices successfully?
  • Professional development and school improvement courses and programs often include visitors from the U.S. universities to teach and work with Finnish teachers and leaders.
  • in an ideal classroom, pupils speak more than the teacher
    • anonymous
       
      Hooray!
  • the entire Finnish school system looks like John Dewey’s laboratory school in the U.S.
  • cooperative learning has become a pedagogical approach that is widely practiced throughout Finnish education system
  • Finnish teachers believe that over 90 percent of students can learn successfully in their own classrooms if given the opportunity to evolve in a holistic manner.
  • After abolishing all streaming and tracking of students in the mid-1980s, both education policies and school practices adopted the principle that all children have different kinds of intelligences and that schools must find ways how to cultivate these different individual aspects in balanced ways.
  • it is ironic that many of these methods were developed at U.S. universities and are yet far more popular in Finland than in the United States. These include portfolio assessment, performance assessment, self-assessment and self-reflection, and assessment for learning methods.
    • anonymous
       
      Alternative assessments!  Performance, portfolio, self-assessment, self-reflection, and assessment of learning methods...
  • Peer coaching—that is, a confidential process through which teachers work together to reflect on current practices, expand, improve, and learn new skills, exchange ideas, conduct classroom research and solve problems together in school
    • anonymous
       
      Working together and reflecting on current practices - Reflection helps to expand, improve, and provides an opportunity to learn and exchange ideas to solve problems
  • the work of the school in the United States is so much steered by bureaucracies, test-based accountability and competition that schools are simply doing what they must do
    • anonymous
       
      Sadness Abounds!  We are teaching folks what works best.  Then, they enter the classroom and get wrapped up in bureaucracies and test-based accountability to the point that teachers are just going through the motions instead of facilitating quality learning
  •  
    Pasi Sahlberg Blog Finnish education reform Originally published in Washington Post, 24 July 2014 An intriguing question whether innovation in education can be measured has an answer now. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development in its recent report "Measuring Innovation in Education: A New Perspective, Educational Research and Innovation" measures Innovation in Education in 22 countries and 6 jurisdictions, among them the U.S.
Dan Bench

Process vs Product in Maker-centered Learning - The Learner's Way - 42 views

  • by ‘Making Thinking Visible’ (MTV) can help here. MTV strategies offer two advantages to teachers and learners. Importantly they provide structure to thinking and encourage a deeper engagement with concepts and ideas. They also allow the thinking that is occurring to be made visible and thus a part of the assessment process
  • mastery of the process that students are utilising as they solve the problems they encounter in their making. How do they deal with obstacles? How did they plan their solution? How effectively do they collaborate? What did they do to understand the problem and how did they monitor their progress?  
  • Students move through phases of thinking that include empathy, needs analysis, ideation, planning, prototyping and evaluation in patterns both linear and non-linear as needs require.
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  • Failing is a part of the process and failing disrupts output based assessments. At the core of the maker philosophy is a process of ideation, iteration and emergence.
  • their Personal Passion Projects. Many of the projects fit neatly into the description of maker-centered learning. These are the projects where the students have identified a need and the solution is a product which they design and then prototype.
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    The maker movement and with it maker-centered learning brings new possibilities and challenges into the classroom. It has spawned makerspaces and students are busy designing and making products. The danger with all this frenzied making is that it is very easy to miss the point, to focus on the product and not the journey.  
Tonya Thomas

The Top Seven Trends in Workplace Learning - 43 views

  • Trainers and facilitators need to remember these numbers: 90, 20, 8, 6. 90 minutes is the ideal chunk of time for participants can learn and understand 20 minutes is how long participants can listen and retain information 8 minutes is the length of time you can talk for before before they stop listening. We are trained to focus for just eight minutes due to decades of TV watching, where ad breaks occur approximately every eight to ten minutes. 6 is the ideal number of times to present information to make sure a learner remembers the content.
  • the challenge for facilitators is to keep things changing so that learners’ RAS keep firing so they stay alert to the learning
  • short attention span
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  • It’s essential that trainers and facilitators keep learning themselves, to acquire new tools that will help them keep ensuring the training sticks!
  • And if you’ve been ignoring social media, now’s the time to reconsider because it’s clearly here to stay.
  • Blended learning is about mixing up face-to-face learning with webinars, blogging, emails, forums, video, online learning and social media.
  • trainers must move away from doing things in the same old way, must reach out to learners in new ways, personalise their learning campaigns, and help people connect to each other around issues they care about!
  • From planning phase to project end, things have to change – become familiar with new styles of presenting using multimedia, and carefully choose visuals to tell your story!
  • are you trapped in DDD – Dinosaur design and development?
  • Activity Based Curriculum Design
  • 70% of learning happens on the job 20% of learning happens through coaching and mentoring 10% of learning happens in training room and formal learning
  • BCF principle – better cheaper faster
  • no more plan-plan-do, its plan-do plan-do plan-do
  • Get used to bigger groups
  • Our community must start the shift by preparing learners for this new way of learning!
Gloria Maristany

Motivating the Child with Attention Deficit Disorder - 3 views

  • live very much in the present. Therefore, long-term goals and rewards (e.g., grades and report cards) are often ineffective motivators.
    • Gloria Maristany
       
      Reason for immediate rewards/consequences.
  • basically two time frames — now and not now.
  • This Now/Not Now worldview causes great frustration for the child, his teachers, and his parents, and must be seriously considered when designing activities and approaches for motivating the child with ADD.
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  • respond more positively to a curriculum that allows him choices and options. He will also be more likely to participate actively in tasks when there is a degree of creativity and novelty
  • the presentation should be creative, colorful, multimodal, and enjoyable.
  • pervasive and complex disorder that impacts nearly all of the child's activities and interactions.
  • The child's impulsivity ("Ready, fire, aim!") can present serious safety concerns; his distractibility makes it extraordinarily difficult for him to understand and follow instructions; his memory difficulties make even rote learning troublesome; his executive processing problems (ability to plan and prioritize) present great challenges when he attempts to plan simple daily activities; his organizational deficiencies cause him tremendous problems with homework, household tasks, and long-term projects.
  • two most important words when dealing with these special children: "support" and "challenge."
  • The adult should continually challenge the child by presenting him with activities designed to improve his behavior and his learning, while simultaneously providing him with the support that he requires to meet these goals. Support without challenge is meaningless. Challenge without support is equally ineffective.
  • Among the specific teaching strategies that may foster the child's motivation are:
  •  
    Good description of the limitations they have and how it affects them in school.
D. S. Koelling

Online Courses Should Always Include Proctored Finals, Economist Warns - Wired Campus -... - 34 views

  • Online economics students do not absorb much material from homework and chapter tests during the semester—perhaps because they expect to be able to cheat their way through the final exam.
  • she has noticed that her online students perform much worse than their classroom-taught counterparts when they are required to take a proctored, closed-book exam at the end of the semester.
  • Ms. Wachenheim’s findings parallel those of a 2008 study in the Journal of Economic Education. That study found indirect evidence that students cheat on unproctored online tests, because their performance on proctored exams was much more consistent with predictions based on their class ranks and their overall grade-point averages.
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  • Those include insisting on a proctored final exam and reminding students of that exam “early, often, and broadly, so students are ever-conscious that they will be responsible for the material in an unaided environment.”
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    "In self-paced courses, many students appeared to cram most of the homework and chapter exams into the final week of the semester. Few of them bothered to do the ungraded practice problems offered by the online publisher." First, where is the teaching? It sounds more like a case of poorly designed instruction...or a complete lack of instruction. Of course these students are not learning...they are not being taught. Also, if they are in classes which are actively taught by a teacher, then where are the formative assessments by the instructors? That teacher should know long before the final exam if the students know the material or not. A good teacher and a well developed online course would have a number of ways to determine this which do not allow for "cut and paste" or cheating. Finally, does this department test a student's memorization of material or the mastery of the concepts and and understanding of how to apply those concepts? Perhaps, there is also a need to reevaluate the assessments. Good teaching is good teaching. If a student is not learning the material, who is really to blame?
Katt Blackwell-Starnes

Blogs vs. Term Papers - NYTimes.com - 56 views

  • We don’t pay taxes so kids can talk about themselves and their home lives.”
    • Katt Blackwell-Starnes
       
      Do they really think the only purpose of a blog in the classroom is to talk about home life? Do they think educators are incapable of designing blog assignments that further the learning of the course and help students better understand the importance of audience and exigency in writing?
  • Her conclusion is that students feel much more impassioned by the new literacy. They love writing for an audience, engaging with it. They feel as if they’re actually producing something personally rewarding and valuable, whereas when they write a term paper, they feel as if they do so only to produce a grade.
Jim Aird

Feds Call on Universities for Ideas for 'Experimental Sites,' New Learning Technologies... - 32 views

  • Education, particularly K-12 education, remains relatively untouched by advances in our understanding of how people learn, how to design instruction that incorporates those insights, and the explosion in information technologies such as low-cost smartphones and tablets, cloud computing, broadband networks, speech recognition and speech synthesis, predictive analytics, data mining, machine learning, intelligent tutors, simulations, games, computer-[supported] collaborative work, and many other technologies.
Nigel Coutts

Learning and Cognitive Load - Part Two - 31 views

  •  
    There are three cognitive loads that impact the efficient formation of schemas. Extraneous cognitive load are those not directly required to master a task and have a negative impact on schema formation, reducing these is desirable and can be achieved through efficient design. Intrinsic cognitive load is that which is inherent in the task and for the most part cannot be reduced. Tasks with high intrinsic cognitive load are by nature more complex for an individual and in the long term are managed through equally complex schema. Germane cognitive load refers to the mental resources devoted to the efficient formation of schemas and is seen to have a positive effect on learning. Understanding these things will allow us to more effectively target our efforts as learners and teachers ensuring the cognitive load theory has a valuable role to play.
Barbara Moose

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/mar09/vol66/num06/Plagiarism_in... - 0 views

  • Teachers who wish to prevent plagiarism should devote extensive instruction to the component tasks of writing from sources
  • instruction should focus on
  • summarizing sources
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  • Instructional materials like these imply that teachers can stop inappropriate use of sources through three strategies: (1) teaching students from early grades the nuts and bolts of crediting all sources they use; (2) designing plagiarism-proof assignments that spell out how works should be cited and that include personal reflection and alternative final projects like creating a brochure; and (3) communicating to students that you're laying down the law on plagiarism ("I'll be on the lookout for this in your papers, you know").
  • Any worthwhile guide to preventing plagiarism should Discuss intellectual property and what it means to "own" a text. Discuss how to evaluate both online and print-based sources (for example, comparing the quality and reliability of a Web site created by an amateur with the reliability of a peer-reviewed scholarly article). Guide students through the hard work of engaging with and understanding their sources, so students don't conclude that creating a technically perfect bibliography is enough. Acknowledge that teaching students how to write from sources involves more than telling students that copying is a crime and handing them a pile of source citation cards.
  • That pedagogy should both teach source-reading skills and take into consideration our increasingly wired world. And it should communicate that plagiarism is wrong in terms of what society values about schools and learning, not just in terms of arbitrary rules.
  • through formal education, people learn skills they can apply elsewhere—but taking shortcuts lessens such learning.
  • communicate why writing is important. Through writing, people learn, communicate with one another, and discover and establish their own authority and identity. Even students who feel comfortable with collaboration and uneasy with individual authorship need to realize that acknowledged collaboration—such as a coauthored article like this one—is very different from unacknowledged use of another person's work.
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