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Wiggins Advice, evaluation, grades-none of these provide the descriptive information that students need to reach their goals. What is true feedback-and how can it improve learning? Who would dispute the idea that feedback is a good thing? Both common sense and research make it clear: Formative assessment, consisting of lots of feedback and opportunities to use that feedback, enhances performance and achievement. Yet even John Hattie (2008), whose decades of research revealed that feedback was among the most powerful influences on achievement, acknowledges that he has "struggled to understand the concept" (p. 173). And many writings on the subject don't even attempt to define the term. To improve formative assessment practices among both teachers and assessment designers, we need to look more closely at just what feedback is-and isn't.

Effective Feedback - Grant Wiggins

"We often tend to think about gender as the biological differences between women and men - however, this is incorrect. Gender is what actually gets expressed - how we look, how we act and how we feel. While sex is determined by what is dictated by our biology or what is written into the chromosomes, known as genotype, it is the interaction between the genes and the environment that determines gender. The amazing thing about gender is that it is completely created by society. It is a social construct that has been accepted by many, and from the moment a child is born, they are faced with gender stereotypes from clothing to how boys and girls are treated and expectations of behaviour. The question is, how do we as educators eliminate gender stereotypes?"

"Joyce Valenza Ph.D On the librarian: What's the point . . ? The Twitter conversation April 30, 2009 @karlfisch: What's the point of having a media specialist if they aren't specialists in the media forms of the day? I was nearly finished copying and pasting, figuring out how best to post Tuesday's Twitter conversation, when I discovered that Karl Fisch (@karlfisch), who kinda started it all, already took care of that. (You likely know of Karl's very popular and provocative videos.) I am still not sure how best to frame this conversation on the place of the information/media specialist in today's school. What is clear is that a lot of smart people--people who are out there teaching, speaking, moving, and shaking--are disappointed in what they see when they see school librarians. Either we have a perception problem or we need to do some serious retooling. I'd say we have to deal with both. In a hurry. Being an information (or media) specialist today means being an expert in how information and media flow TODAY! It is about knowing how information and media are created and communicated. How to evalute, synthesize, and ethically use information and media in all their varied forms. It is about being able to communicate knowlege in new ways for new audiences using powerful new information and communication tools. Forgive me if it hurts. In my mind, if you are not an expert in new information and communication tools, you are NOT a media specialist for today. Tuesday's conversation happened in the open, on Twitter. We need to be aware that these conversations are happening where we cannot hear them--at conferences, at Board and cabinet meetings. We also need to make sure that our voices are heard and that we hear the voices of others in places like Twitter, where so many educational leaders and thinkers are chatting about us and many other things. I've selected the remarks that resonated loudest for me. (I've shuffled a bit, but you can visit Karl'

Great ideas for 6th grade response to literature discussion and writing.

I haven't taught sixth grade for 3 1/2 years now, but if I ever go back to ms, I'd incorporate this into my weekly plans. One way I get my second graders to grow their thinking is by having them respond to one another using the following prompts:  I agree with the part about…  Going back to what you said about…  One thing I noticed…  One thing I pictured…  It reminded me of…  I am not sure what you are saying. Could you say it in another way?  I agree with what you are saying because…  What you just said matches what is in my mind because…  I hear what you are saying, but I see it differently because…  If what you said is true, is it not also true that…  That is true, but… Or - That is true, and…  Could you say more?  Could you give me an example?  I would like to add on to what _________ said.  I have an example of what you just said.  I wonder why…  I was surprised to see…  Another thing that goes with that is…  So are you saying…

Use the prompts to help you summarize what is happening. 

1. OWNERSHIP is key. For this project, the students were not listening to me on why Twain was or was not a racist, they were showing me and the rest of class what they thought. They were invested in winning their argument. They knew that their work was going to determine if he was guilty or not. Although I gave the assignment, the students were in charge the rest of the way. It was their project and they wanted to do it win. When students feel they own what they are doing, they will work harder. When the audience is larger, they want to impress everyone. These are not crazy ideas, they are the results of owning the work they are doing. OWNERSHIP is a major factor in the value of PBL. 2. CREATIVITY is the another major part of the PBL and is closely linked with OWNERSHIP. Students were allowed to be creative in their work as a lawyer or witness. Witnesses needed to stay within character, but could add their own elements on the witness stand. Allowing the students to create gives them a bigger sense of OWNERSHIP. 3. Another part of the PBL is the COLLABORATION. Students were working with each other trying to decide the best plan of attack. Witnesses would meet with their lawyers and discuss how the questions they were going to ask and how they should dress. The Jury worked on group projects researching the previous public opinions on Twain and his writing. Students were sharing ideas freely with one another. I had three sections of American Lit at the time, so I had three trails running. Lawyers would help others in the other classes and trash talk the opposing lawyers as well. It was all in good fun, but the collaboration had students working hard with one another to accomplish this goal. 4. Depending on how you set up your project, CRITICAL THINKING, is also an important part of PBL. With my Twain Trail, students needed to think about both sides of the argument. Students needed to prepare their witnesses for potential cross-examination questions. They needed to

"Everybody was a good student. The kids were just encouraged to do what they like to do and what was best, and there was a structure; there was a program. It's not you ran around doing anything you felt like. I skipped a grade, but I didn't pay any attention and no one else paid any attention. Just that I was the smallest kid in the class, but the idea that somebody is a good student; somebody is not a good student - it just never arose. There were tests, but they just gave information about what's going on. This is something we ought to be doing better. The kids weren't ranked; there were no grades. There's a lot of cooperative work and cooperative projects and they encouraged us. You know, study, challenging questions, and it was extremely successful. I remember everything very well. I went into the academic high school and it's kind of like a black hole. I was able to get all As and a scholarship to go into college. I might well not have gone, except for what I learned on my own."

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." Gandhi I am an advocate of change. Change to me is about growth and learning. Change to me is about getting better. The hard part for many is that change is also about reflection. Taking a hard look at what you are doing and wondering if it is good enough is a tough practice. Taking the next step and CHANGING the practice is even harder as some take it as a sign of things that were not done right. I see it as growth. Although there is the type of DRASTIC change that happened in Rhode Island where all the teachers were fired, but that is not what I am talking about. I can ALWAYS get better and so can you. That is how I want to change.

For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong-and how we can fix it.

There is a special hashtag that isn't tied to an event like this though.  It's a common event that's happening in classrooms world-wide.  The hashtag is "comments4kids".  This is a special tag that teachers use to invite anyone who is willing to drop by and read what a class is blogging.  It's also an invitation for you to make a comment or two on what you read. 

We are all time travelers... drifting through time at a steady pace, one moment at a time. In what direction are we moving through time? Or does time move through us? How many dimensions of time are there? Though slightly allegorical, three-dimensional time offers physics new parameters, accounting for conventional and exotic physical phenomena, while maintaining the conservation of energy and symmetry groups found in physical law.  I began playing with the idea that all of physics could be reduced to just interactions between spatial and temporal coordinates. I wondered if inertia and momentum might be composed strictly of temporal components. This would require extra time dimensions. Could inertia or momentum be used as indicators of multi-dimensional time? What about charge, spin, and other properties of matter? Answers to some of these questions appeared to reside in neutrino research, specifically neutrino flavor oscillation.  The universality between Thermodynamics and Temporal Mechanics can reduce the fundamental forces of nature into a single expression, a new equivalence principle, which can be used as the generator for the evolution of time. Once Quantum Mechanics is seen through the lens of three-dimensional time, the EPR paradox looses its mystique. The speed of light may be restricted to a set speed limit within each individual frame of reference, however, frames of reference can undergo periods-of-time at varying rates of the passage-of-time. If the positive side of absolute zero is a state of condensed matter, what is on the negative side of absolute zero? Uncondensed matter?  The anti-matter aspect of the Dirac equations may have been misinterpreted. The convention is to assume that "matter" is composed of "particles" distinctly different from "antimatter" composed of "antiparticles". The assumption of one time dimension locks in this interpretation of the Dirac Equations. However, the uniform production of particles and antipa

The message of Daniel Pinks book "Drive" applies here. Paying someone more, i.e. good grades, does not make them better thinkers, problems solvers, or general more motivated in what they are doing. thanks for sharing.

Excellent summary!

Constructivism is one of those ideas we throw around in educational circles without stopping to think about what we mean by it. They are the terms that have multiple meanings, are at once highly technical and common usage and are likely to cause debate and disagreements. Constructivism in particular carries a quantity of baggage with it. It is a term that is appropriated by supporters of educational approaches that are in stark contrast to the opposing view; constructivism vs didactic methods or direct instruction. The question is what are the origins of constructivism and does a belief in this as an approach to understanding learning necessitate an abandonment of direct instruction or is this a false dichotomy?

Why I Like Prezi In my life, I have given a *lot* of presentations. In high school, they were presentations on group projects. In university, they were presentations on research projects. At Google, they're presentations on how to use our APIs. When I first started giving presentations, I used Powerpoint, like everyone else. But I kept thinking there must be a better way, and I experimented with other options - flash interfaces, interactive Javascript apps. Then I discovered Prezi, and it has become my presentation tool of choice. Prezi is an online tool for creating presentations - but it's not just a Powerpoint clone, like the Zoho or Google offering. When you first create a Prezi, you're greeted with a blank canvas and a small toolbox. You can write text, insert images, and draw arrows. You can draw frames (visible or hidden) around bits of content, and then you can define a path from one frame to the next frame. That path is your presentation. It's like being able to draw your thoughts on a whiteboard, and then instructing a camera where to go and what to zoom into. It's a simple idea, but I love it. Here's why: It forces me to "shape" my presentation. A slide deck is always linear in form, with no obvious structure of ideas inside of it. Each of my Prezis has a structure, and each structure is different. The structure is visual, but it supports a conceptual structure. One structure might be 3 main ideas, with rows of ideas for each one. Another might be 1 main idea, with a circular branching of subideas. Having a structure helps me to have more of a point to my presentations, and to realize the core ideas of them. It makes it easy to go from brainstorming stage to presentation stage, all in the same tool. I can write a bunch of thoughts, insert some images, and easily move them around, cluster them, re-order them, etc. I can figure out the structure of my presentation by looking at what I have laid out, and seeing how they fit together. Some people do this

I keep circling back to this question of what do we need to know, or to learn. It comes up so often in conversations around education and is closely connected to what we hope to achieve for our students. It is a question whose answer shapes not only what we teach but how we teach and what we assess. It strikes at the heart of how we perceive the role of education in society and the way we answer it reveals much about our personal philosophy of education. 

Andragogy From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Andragogy consists of learning strategies focused on adults. It is often interpreted as the process of engaging adult learners with the structure of learning experience. The term 'andragogy' has been used in different times and countries with various connotations. Nowadays there exist mainly three understandings: 1. In many countries there is a growing conception of 'andragogy' as the scholarly approach to the learning of adults. In this connotation andragogy is the science of understanding (= theory) and supporting (= practice) lifelong and lifewide education of adults. 2. Especially in the USA, 'andragogy' in the tradition of Malcolm Knowles, labels a specific theoretical and practical approach, based on a humanistic conception of self-directed and autonomous learners and teachers as facilitators of learning. 3. Widely, an unclear use of andragogy can be found, with its meaning changing (even in the same publication) from 'adult education practice' or 'desirable values' or 'specific teaching methods,' to 'reflections' or 'academic discipline' and/or 'opposite to childish pedagogy', claiming to be 'something better' than just 'Adult Education'. The oldest document using the term "Andragogik": Kapp, Alexander (1833): Platon's Erziehungslehre, als Pädagogik für die Einzelnen und als Staatspädagogik. Leipzig. Originally used by Alexander Kapp (a German educator) in 1833, andragogy was developed into a theory of adult education by the American educator Malcolm Knowles. Knowles asserted that andragogy (Greek: "man-leading") should be distinguished from the more commonly used pedagogy (Greek: "child-leading"). Knowles' theory can be stated with six assumptions related to motivation of adult learning:[1][2] Adults need to know the reason for learning something (Need to Know) Experience (including error) provides the basis for learning activities (Foundation). Adults need to be

Andragogy From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Andragogy consists of learning strategies focused on adults. It is often interpreted as the process of engaging adult learners with the structure of learning experience. The term 'andragogy' has been used in different times and countries with various connotations. Nowadays there exist mainly three understandings: 1. In many countries there is a growing conception of 'andragogy' as the scholarly approach to the learning of adults. In this connotation andragogy is the science of understanding (= theory) and supporting (= practice) lifelong and lifewide education of adults. 2. Especially in the USA, 'andragogy' in the tradition of Malcolm Knowles, labels a specific theoretical and practical approach, based on a humanistic conception of self-directed and autonomous learners and teachers as facilitators of learning. 3. Widely, an unclear use of andragogy can be found, with its meaning changing (even in the same publication) from 'adult education practice' or 'desirable values' or 'specific teaching methods,' to 'reflections' or 'academic discipline' and/or 'opposite to childish pedagogy', claiming to be 'something better' than just 'Adult Education'. The oldest document using the term "Andragogik": Kapp, Alexander (1833): Platon's Erziehungslehre, als Pädagogik für die Einzelnen und als Staatspädagogik. Leipzig. Originally used by Alexander Kapp (a German educator) in 1833, andragogy was developed into a theory of adult education by the American educator Malcolm Knowles. Knowles asserted that andragogy (Greek: "man-leading") should be distinguished from the more commonly used pedagogy (Greek: "child-leading"). Knowles' theory can be stated with six assumptions related to motivation of adult learning:[1][2] Adults need to know the reason for learning something (Need to Know) Experience (including error) provides the basis for learning activities (Foundation). Adults need to be

Andragogy From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Andragogy consists of learning strategies focused on adults. It is often interpreted as the process of engaging adult learners with the structure of learning experience. The term 'andragogy' has been used in different times and countries with various connotations. Nowadays there exist mainly three understandings: 1. In many countries there is a growing conception of 'andragogy' as the scholarly approach to the learning of adults. In this connotation andragogy is the science of understanding (= theory) and supporting (= practice) lifelong and lifewide education of adults. 2. Especially in the USA, 'andragogy' in the tradition of Malcolm Knowles, labels a specific theoretical and practical approach, based on a humanistic conception of self-directed and autonomous learners and teachers as facilitators of learning. 3. Widely, an unclear use of andragogy can be found, with its meaning changing (even in the same publication) from 'adult education practice' or 'desirable values' or 'specific teaching methods,' to 'reflections' or 'academic discipline' and/or 'opposite to childish pedagogy', claiming to be 'something better' than just 'Adult Education'. The oldest document using the term "Andragogik": Kapp, Alexander (1833): Platon's Erziehungslehre, als Pädagogik für die Einzelnen und als Staatspädagogik. Leipzig. Originally used by Alexander Kapp (a German educator) in 1833, andragogy was developed into a theory of adult education by the American educator Malcolm Knowles. Knowles asserted that andragogy (Greek: "man-leading") should be distinguished from the more commonly used pedagogy (Greek: "child-leading"). Knowles' theory can be stated with six assumptions related to motivation of adult learning:[1][2] Adults need to know the reason for learning something (Need to Know) Experience (including error) provides the basis for learning activities (Foundation). Adults need to be