nly by building positive relationships within the school
3More
Education World: Assistive Technology for Challenged Kids - 40 views
-
-
It is important to understand that there are a variety of students with different learning needs. While we can utilize different teaching strategies for students who have learning disabilities, it is important to remember that there are students with physical disabilities who need a different kind of help. This article really shows us the different types available, gives examples of different students and their experiences, and provides various resources for the parent and teacher to utilize in order to find out what assistive technology may be best for their child or student. less than a minute ago
-
-
-
1More
Revealing our Lifelong Learning - 31 views
-
Few would argue that life-long learning is a worthy goal with real benefits for our long term mental health and happiness. Engaging with new ideas, concepts and ways of doing things is the ideal strategy for a healthy mind and a disposition towards better understanding the world and challenging our entrenched beliefs.
19More
How to Develop Positive Classroom Management | Edutopia - 87 views
-
while 80 percent said that classroom-management training, conflict resolution, guidance counseling, and mediation are effective for improving discipline.
- ...16 more annotations...
-
school staff should work together as much as possible to foster consistency in expectations, and discipline methods, throughout the school
-
"What happened?" and "Who else has been affected?" to "What do you need to do now to repair the harm?"
10More
It's Not the Assessment - It's How You Use It | Assessment in Perspective - 78 views
-
We acknowledge that there is so much that is out of our control right now when it comes to assessment, but we believe we need to also remember what we can control.
-
These assessments can help a teacher determine the type of small group and whole class instruction that needs to be done to support her readers in using strategies effectively and flexibly. This type of analysis is typically not required — only the list of levels needs to be turned in.
-
When we simply look at these students based on the numerical score they achieve on these assessments, we lose so much data. Knowing a student or group of students did not reach a benchmark helps us determine that these kids need support, but it does not tell us the type of support they need.
- ...6 more annotations...
-
Another way to translate assessments into day-to-day teaching is to use your conferring notebook while you are doing your required assessments.
-
It is so helpful to take a little the extra time after each assessment to think about what you learned, and how you can use that data tomorrow to lift the quality of your instruction.
-
we believe that what is most important is that you can assess the full profile of a reader and you use the assessment data to inform your teaching
-
Sometimes it is better to stay the course with the tools we have and understand it is the best decision for our district at this point in time.
Word Decoding and Phonics | Reading Rockets - 1 views
14More
Creating a Culture of Inquiry | Edutopia - 78 views
www.edutopia.org/...lture-of-inquiry-andrew-miller
SDW SDWLIT literacy Culture inquiry SDWLeadership
shared by Sharin Tebo on 11 Nov 15
- No Cached
-
creating a culture of inquiry takes constant work. Teachers need to establish it from the first day in the classroom, and work to keep it vital throughout the year. Here are some important things to know about creating that culture, and some ideas that you might consider.
- ...11 more annotations...
-
When we make a change or set an expectation for how a classroom will operate, we begin to affect the climate. It takes time for something to become a part of the culture
-
A culture of inquiry will not happen overnight, but the right climate for it is much easier to establish.
-
Teachers should use a variety of strategies, such as structured protocols and question starters and stems, to support students in asking effective questions.
-
Rather than focusing on the answer, they should focus on the process of inquiry that begins when the question is asked.
-
Do our assignments focus on complexity and justification? Do we honor student voice and choice in these assignments? Are students allowed choice in what they produce and voice in what the assignment will look like? Do we create assignments and assessments that allow students to investigate their own questions aligned to the content that we want them to learn?
-
A culture of inquiry can only become the classroom norm if there is commitment from all stakeholders -- parents, students, teachers, administration, and more. Simply saying that we are an inquiry-based classroom and doing an occasional inquiry-based activity is not indicative of a culture of inquiry.
32More
The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek - 48 views
-
there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
-
it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children
-
Students are labeled as "creative" if they display a knack for art or music, and sometimes in writing, however, they are rarely recognized as creative in math or science where a lot of creativity is not only needed, but excellent for learning within those very two disciplines.
-
This is precisely why creativity education is important. It is needed everywhere, not just in the arts. Those teaching outside of arts education need to start recognizing the importance of creative thinking as well.
-
- ...23 more annotations...
-
When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
-
The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process.
-
When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions. Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with. Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.
-
those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better
-
Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.
-
What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.
-
kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.
-
highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.
-
When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates. They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.
-
solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others
-
When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.
-
The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach
-
those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.
-
The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer
-
“As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”
-
In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.
-
there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
21More
The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens: Scientific A... - 103 views
-
prevented them from zooming out to see a neighborhood, state or country
-
Because of these preferences—and because getting away from multipurpose screens improves concentration—people consistently say that when they really want to dive into a text, they read it on paper
-
Surveys and consumer reports also suggest that the sensory experiences typically associated with reading—especially tactile experiences—matter to people more than one might assume.
- ...14 more annotations...
-
When reading a paper book, one can feel the paper and ink and smooth or fold a page with one's fingers; the pages make a distinctive sound when turned; and underlining or highlighting a sentence with ink permanently alters the paper's chemistry.
-
Although many old and recent studies conclude that people understand what they read on paper more thoroughly than what they read on screens, the differences are often small. Some experiments, however, suggest that researchers should look not just at immediate reading comprehension, but also at long-term memory.
-
When taking the quiz, volunteers who had read study material on a monitor relied much more on remembering than on knowing, whereas students who read on paper depended equally on remembering and knowing.
-
E-ink is easy on the eyes because it reflects ambient light just like a paper book, but computer screens, smartphones and tablets like the iPad shine light directly into people's faces.
-
People who took the test on a computer scored lower and reported higher levels of stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper.
-
Although people in both groups performed equally well on the READ test, those who had to scroll through the continuous text did not do as well on the attention and working-memory tests.
-
Subconsciously, many people may think of reading on a computer or tablet as a less serious affair than reading on paper. Based on a detailed 2005 survey of 113 people in northern California, Ziming Liu of San Jose State University concluded that people reading on screens take a lot of shortcuts—they spend more time browsing, scanning and hunting for keywords compared with people reading on paper, and are more likely to read a document once, and only once.
-
When reading on screens, people seem less inclined to engage in what psychologists call metacognitive learning regulation—strategies such as setting specific goals, rereading difficult sections and checking how much one has understood along the way
-
Perhaps she and her peers will grow up without the subtle bias against screens that seems to lurk in the minds of older generations.
-
Participants in her studies say that when they really like an electronic book, they go out and get the paper version.
-
When it comes to intensively reading long pieces of plain text, paper and ink may still have the advantage. But text is not the only way to read.
BBC launches new education strategy to encourage UK social mobility - 4 views
11More
Strategies for online reading comprehension - 92 views
-
We traditionally think of reading in terms of sounding out words, understanding the meaning of those words, and putting those words into some contextual understanding.
-
If the kind of text our students are encountering in these online travels is embedded with so many links and media, and if those texts are connected to other associated pages (with even more links and media), hosted by who-knows-whom, the act of reading online quickly becomes an act of hunting for treasure, with red herrings all over the place that can easily divert one’s attention.
-
As educators, we need to take a closer look at what online reading is all about and think about how we can help our students not only navigate with comprehension but also understand the underlying structure of this world.
- ...8 more annotations...
-
to begin addressing the hyper-reading of young people might start with the process of elimination, by helping readers remove the clutter on the web pages they encounter.
-
Colorado State University offers a useful guide to reading on the web. While it is aimed at college students, much of the information is pertinent to readers of all ages and could easily be part of lessons in the classroom.
-
Navigate a path from one page in a way that is clear and logical. This is easier said than done, since few of us create physical paths of our navigation
1More
Educator Resources - 71 views
Teaching Reading Comprehension - 10 views
Frequently Overlooked Google Search Tools and Strategies - 202 views
www.freetech4teachers.com/...-overlooked-google-search.html
google search search tools tools resources
shared by Wayne Holly on 25 Sep 14
- No Cached
1More
Meeting the Needs of ELL Students in the Literature Classroom - 43 views
-
This article emphasizes that ELLs benefit when literature teachers include techniques that make the learning more accessible. I like the idea of connecting the literature to a real project. I do this same activity with my adult ELLs every semester. For example, this semester they are reading "Breaking Through", a true story about a boy whose parents are undocumented agricultural workers. It is a great story of perseverance and "grit" that shows how immigrants make this country stronger. I am going to pair the reading with a group project called "The Immigrant Experience in Houston". My students will research an immigrant group and chronicle the melting pot that is Houston. They will create a Power Point Presentation and share their research with the class. Food samples always get 5 extra points!
13More
7 Key Considerations for Online and Blended Learning Programs -- THE Journal - 19 views
thejournal.com/...blended-learning-programs.aspx
tie tieclass flipped blended online learning blended learning
shared by clbrink on 01 Jun 18
- No Cached
-
Online courses provide students with a level of flexibility and choice
- ...8 more annotations...
-
four- to five-day orientation course
7More
Precompetitive appraisal, performance anxiety and confidence in conservatorium musician... - 0 views
-
Primary and secondary appraisals formed theoretically consistent and reliable evaluations of threat and challenge. Secondary appraisals were significantly lower for students who viewed the performance as a threat. Students who viewed the performance as a challenge reported significantly less cognitive anxiety and higher self-confidence. Findings indicate that the PAM is a brief and reliable measure of cognitive appraisals that trigger precompetitive emotions of anxiety and confidence which can be used to identify those performers who could benefit from pre-performance intervention strategies to manage performance stress.
-
Music performance anxiety (MPA) can be controlled when musicians cognitively restructure their own thoughts and feelings about their performance by anticipating symptoms of anxiety and turning them to constructive use
-
The cognitive interpretation, or appraisal, of an initial emotional response, such as fear, exerts a proximal influence on performance
- ...4 more annotations...
-
and substantially determines if performers will suffer emotion-related detriments or profit from emotion-related benefits
-
Emotions that are too weak or intense and feel unpleasant lead to lower motivation, distracted attention, and reduced performance.
-
On the other hand, appropriately intense emotions which feel pleasant and are expected to help future performance are more likely to lead to increased effort, better decision making, and hence enhanced performance
-
Mann-Whitney U tests of mean ranks showed that compared to students who viewed performance as a threat (MThreat = 7.00, SDThreat = 0.99), students who viewed performance as a challenge (MChallenge = 5.02, SDChallenge = 1.91); reported significantly less cognitive anxiety at pre-recital (U = 21.00, z = -2.167, p = .028) and significantly higher self-confidence both at the start of semester, (MThreat = 4.79, SDThreat = 0.90; MChallenge = 6.42, SDChallenge = 1.08; U = 29.50, z = -3.555, p < .001) and pre-recital (MThreat = 4.45, SDThreat = 0.72; MChallenge = 6.55, SDChallenge = 0.98; U = 2.50, z = -3.104, p < .001, Figure 2).
1More
Teaching Remotely for Grades K - 12 | Free Resources and Strategies - 12 views
5More
How Clear Expectations Can Inhibit Genuine Thinking in Students | MindShift | KQED News - 45 views
-
to understand better how expectations operate as a cultural force in learning groups, we have to make a distinction between two types of expectations: directives and beliefs.
-
very clear standards for students about points, grades, and keeping score, one sees a belief that school is about work and that students must be coerced or bribed into learning through the use of grades
-
one sees the belief that learning algebra is primarily about acquiring knowledge of procedures rather than developing understanding, and that memorization and practice are the most effective tools for that job. This theory of action, “One learns through memorization and practice,” made it hard for Karen to bring out and facilitate students’ thinking. Instead, thinking existed as an add-on to the regular rhythm of the class, something she did as an “extra” to the regular work of the class. Through her strong focus on grades and passing the course, even if one is “no good at mathematics,” Karen sent the message that our abilities are largely fixed and that “getting by” was all that some could hope to accomplish. One might not understand algebra, but with effort one could at least pass the course. Finally, in her efforts to promote order and control, certainly worthwhile and important goals in any classroom, Karen tilted the balance toward students’ becoming passive learners who were dependent on her.
- ...1 more annotation...
-
five belief sets are as follows: • Focusing students on the learning vs. the work • Teaching for understanding vs. knowledge • Encouraging deep vs. surface learning strategies • Promoting independence vs. dependence • Developing a growth vs. a fixed mindset