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Roland Gesthuizen

Is All This Student Data Changing the Way Teachers Teach? | MindShift - 59 views

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    "Some teachers are embracing student data to inform their teaching, while others believe there's a risk of an over-reliance on hard numbers that doesn't take into account the human factor."
D. S. Koelling

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 40 views

  • at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years."
  • What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?
  • students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences—rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields—tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers.
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  • Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities.
  • It has become difficult to give students honest feedback.
  • As the college-age population declines, many tuition-driven institutions struggle to find enough paying customers to balance their budgets. That makes it necessary to recruit even more unprepared students, who then must be retained, shifting the burden for academic success away from the student and on to the teacher.
  • Although a lot of emphasis is placed on research on the tenure track, most faculty members are not on that track and are retained on the basis of what students think of them.
  • Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education.
  • It is impossible to maintain high expectations for long unless everyone holds the line in all comparable courses—and we face strong incentives not to do that.
  • Formerly, full-time, tenured faculty members with terminal degrees and long-term ties to the institution did most of the teaching. Such faculty members not only were free to grade honestly and teach with conviction but also had a deep understanding of the curriculum, their colleagues, and the institutional mission. Now undergraduate teaching relies primarily on graduate students and transient, part-time instructors on short-term contracts who teach at multiple institutions and whose performance is judged almost entirely by student-satisfaction surveys.
  • Contingent faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners.
  • Many colleges are now so packed with transient teachers, and multitasking faculty-administrators, that it is impossible to maintain some kind of logical development in the sequencing of courses.
  • Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence.
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    So many issues here to deal with. Good read.
Nigel Coutts

Taking time to design programmes for understanding - The Learner's Way - 4 views

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    Identifying what our children need to learn is one of the most important processes within education. For the teacher this is the question they engage with as they design their teaching and learning units. By no means is this an easy task and the teacher must balance multiple factors to ensure that the programmes they design provide their students with the learning they require. Even the most effective sequence of lessons is of little value if what it sets out to teach has little importance in the lives our learners are likely to lead. 
Mr. Stanley

Teaching Document Design, Not Formatting Requirements - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of H... - 69 views

    • LuAnne Holder
       
      This would be a great activity for introductions.
  • One of my colleagues asks her students to sketch their names using a typeface that conveys something about themselves
  • One thing I do is bring in the style manuals from different local companies and show students how each company expects different things
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  • Students in all disciplines are more than capable of producing and analyzing visual work in amazingly rich and complex ways.
  • many faculty members continue to specify detailed formatting requirements for student writing.
  • Your paper must be double-spaced, 12 point Times New Roman, with one-inch margins.
  • Such draconian formatting requirements stifle students’ creativity and cut off any critical thinking about what should be a crucial part of any writing-intensive classroom, namely visual design.
  • Teaching Document Design, Not Formatting Requirements
  • well-meaning and thoughtful teachers establish hard and fast formatting rules that may make their lives easier, but do a disservice to their students.
  • By making these requirements, we are telling them not to think critically—or even at all—about the visual layout of their documents.
  • We are telling them we value conformity over creativity, practicality over originality, our needs over theirs.
  • It all starts with students recognizing that design is a part of what they do when they write.
  • the rules we give our students should be negotiable, and in order for them to be negotiable, we need to talk to our students about those rules, why they exist, what the consequences of breaking or following them are, and so on.
  • Your paper should be readable and take into consideration the needs of your audience.  Most importantly, though, you should have fun and be creative with your design.
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    Teachers need to allow their students more room to creatively use visual design, and at the same time, teach students to be aware. Forcing students to follow exact formatting requirements is counterproductive.
Marc Safran

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants - 1 views

  • Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
  • today's students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors
  • we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed
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  • The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn - like all immigrants, some better than others - to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their "accent," that is, their foot in the past.
  • There are hundreds of examples of the digital immigrant accent. 
  • our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language
  • Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the same as they have always been, and that the same methods that worked for the teachers when they were students will work for their students now. But that assumption is no longer valid. Today's learners are different.
  • So what should happen?  Should the Digital Native students learn the old ways, or should their Digital Immigrant educators learn the new? 
  • methodology
  • learn to communicate in the language and style of their students
  • it does mean going faster, less step-by step, more in parallel, with more random access, among other thing
  • kinds of content
  • As educators, we need to be thinking about how to teach both Legacy and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives.
  • Adapting materials to the language of Digital Natives has already been done successfully.  My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content.
  • "Why not make the learning into a video game!
  • But while the game was easy for my Digital Native staff to invent, creating the content turned out to be more difficult for the professors, who were used to teaching courses that started with "Lesson 1 – the Interface."  We asked them instead to create a series of graded tasks into which the skills to be learned were embedded. The professors had made 5-10 minute movies to illustrate key concepts; we asked them to cut them to under 30 seconds. The professors insisted that the learners to do all the tasks in order; we asked them to allow random access. They wanted a slow academic pace, we wanted speed and urgency (we hired a Hollywood script writer to provide this.)   They wanted written instructions; we wanted computer movies. They wanted the traditional pedagogical language of "learning objectives," "mastery", etc. (e.g. "in this exercise you will learn"); our goal was to completely eliminate any language that even smacked of education.
  • large mind-shift required
  • We need to invent Digital Native methodologies for all subjects, at all levels, using our students to guide us.
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    Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
Frederick Eberhardt

Powerful Learning: Studies Show Deep Understanding Derives from Collaborative Methods |... - 85 views

  • In essence, students must learn how to learn, while responding to endlessly changing technologies and social, economic, and global conditions.
  • students learn more deeply if they have engaged in activities that require applying classroom-gathered knowledge to real-world problems.
  • developing inquiring minds
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  • Studies of problem-based learning suggest that it is comparable, though not always superior, to more traditional instruction in teaching facts and information. However, this approach has been found to be better in supporting flexible problem solving, reasoning skills, and generating accurate hypotheses and coherent explanations.
  • design challenges need to be carefully planned, and they emphasized the importance of dynamic feedback.
  • When students have no prior experience with inquiry learning, they can have difficulty generating meaningful driving questions and logical arguments and may lack background knowledge to make sense of the inquiry.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Absolutely true. I discovered this when I used inquiry-based methods with my students in Qatar who were used to rote learning. They truly did not know where to start. They first needed to learn *how* to be inquisitive.
  • Requiring students to track and defend their thinking focused them on learning and connecting concepts in their design work
  • All the research arrives at the same conclusion: There are significant benefits for students who work together on learning activities.
  • groups outperform individuals on learning tasks and that individuals who work in groups do better on later individual assessments.
  • In successful group learning, teachers pay careful attention to the work process and interaction among students.
  • "It is not enough to simply tell students to work together. They must have a reason to take one another's achievement seriously.
  • She and her colleagues developed Complex Instruction, one of the best-known approaches, which uses carefully designed activities requiring diverse talents and interdependence among group members.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Interesting... worth checking out.
  • They require changes in curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices -- changes that are often new for teachers and students.
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    A scholarly article with tremendous real-world practical implications and suggestions. Love this.
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    A scholarly article with tremendous real-world practical implications and suggestions. Love this.
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    Vocational Education meets Research in the dynamic classroom of Linda Darling-Hammond, 2008. The students are doing the research, teaching and learning. They control their own destiny and they are taking the world by storm! They are not waiting to be taught, they are teaching each other and themselves as teams of researchers. Darling-Hammond, L. (2008). Powerful learning: what we know about teaching for understanding. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Roland Gesthuizen

What measures the best teacher? More than scores, study shows - 1450 WHTC Holland's Hom... - 138 views

  • researchers found they could pick out the best teachers in a school and even predict roughly how much their students would learn if they rated the educators through a formula that put equal weight on student input, test scores and detailed classroom observations by principals and peers
  • Judging teachers primarily by student performance on state tests, for instance, turned out to be highly unreliable, with little consistency from year to year. Judging them chiefly by a principal's observations failed to identify those teachers who could be counted on to boost student proficiency on state math and reading tests.
  • This should be a very big red flag to all those policy makers who think they can have test-based accountability be half or more of a teacher's evaluation
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    "(Reuters) - Effective teachers can be identified by observing them at work, measuring their students' progress on standardized tests - and asking those students directly what goes on in the classroom, according to a comprehensive study released Tuesday."
Brianna Crowley

When Teachers Cheat: Looking Good, Being Bad - Teaching Ahead: A Roundtable - Education... - 16 views

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    Elementary teacher and 2007 Arkansas Teacher of the Year Justin Minkel explores why a system of standardized testing and the desire to look good rather than BE good, causes disasters like the recent cheating scandals. 
anonymous

7 Characteristics Of A Digitally Competent Teacher - 220 views

  • We’ve mused in the past on the kinds of things teachers might be expected to do with technology in the classroom, what they should be able to do with an iPad (assuming they have iPads),
Sharin Tebo

A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days - a sobering lesson learne... - 56 views

  • But students move almost never. And never is exhausting.
    • Sharin Tebo
       
      This was no different in my experience. There was not one class where I was asked to move to work with someone else. However, there was opportunity for engagement with others, where the teacher let the students do the talking and the working. 
  • sitting passively.
    • Sharin Tebo
       
      Passive engagement is how I would describe most students to 'sat and got' while the teacher spoke. However, this was not the case in 100% of classes I shadowed/participated in.
  • build in a hands-on, move-around activity into every single class day. Yes, we would sacrifice some content to do this – that’s fine.
    • Sharin Tebo
       
      We typically do this in a language learning class, so it was tiresome for me to not have the opportunity to move around and engage with others. 
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  • High School students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90% of their classes.
  • It was not just the sitting that was draining but that so much of the day was spent absorbing information but not often grappling with it.
    • Sharin Tebo
       
      This was not true for all my classes today when I shadowed. The teacher in one class served as a model to annotate an article while we did the same. We were left to our own devices to write the main idea in 2-3 sentences, too. We also had to sum up our learning by analyzing topics in some pretty tough questions in Physics, and the final question was to put it all together and list a real-world example. I thought this was clever.
    • deniseahlquist
       
      Early in my career, I also was asked to shadow students (when we were choosing schools for a funded project) and it was definitely one of the most eye-opening experiences I've had. I could not believe how resentful and angry I felt at the end of the day and I think of myself as someone who just loves to learn, but I did so little of it in most of the classes. After the experience, I was no longer surprised that students struggle to stay focused, and I redoubled my efforts to help support teaching and learning experiences that actively engage learners in building understanding. Highly recommend this experience for any teacher, coach or administrator.
  • If I could go back and change my classes now, I would immediately: Offer brief, blitzkrieg-like mini-lessons with engaging, assessment-for-learning-type activities
  • set an egg timer every time I get up to talk and all eyes are on me. When the timer goes off, I am done.
  • Ask every class to start with students’ Essential Questions or just general questions born of confusion from the previous night’s reading or the previous class’s discussion.
    • Sharin Tebo
       
      This was listed on the board in one class, but it was not discussed. 
  • Teachers work hard
    • Sharin Tebo
       
      Yes, they do work hard, but is it productive and best for student learning to be doing everything while students are passive? Why not make the kids do the heavy lifting so it is best for them?
Brianna Crowley

Autonomy and Collaboration: The Strengths of Online Teacher PD - Teaching Ahead: A Roun... - 24 views

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    One teacher gives her perspective on online communities as professional development for teachers
Dimitris Tzouris

How to Make Better Teachers «Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech - 43 views

  • Reflective Practitioner
  • Reflective Practitioner.  
  • The reflective writing has been valuable but definitely the nearly 4,000 comments have been even more of a learning experience. This is the single best professional development experience I've had.
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  • Hire a teacher, give them a blog. Get them to subscribe to at least 5 other teachers in the district as well as 5 other great teachers from around the globe. Have their principal and a few central office people to subscribe to the blog and 5 other teachers as well. Require them to write at least once a week on their practice. Get conversations going right from the get go. Watch teachers get better.
Roland Gesthuizen

5 myths about teachers that are distracting policymakers - The Answer Sheet - The Washi... - 111 views

  • Political leaders at every level are demanding we evaluate and pay teachers based on student test scores and value-added statistical formulas. If that turns out to be a bad strategy, the long-term ramifications for the nation could be staggering.
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    "Now's the time to transcend the usual debates over how to make our schools better and our teachers more effective - and break free of the myths that keep us fighting 20th century battles. Instead we need to look hard at the realities, framed by research evidence as well as the challenges teachers face everyday"
Nigel Coutts

Teacher Agency vs The Collective Voice - The Learner's Way - 6 views

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    With good reason, much is made of learner agency but the concept of teacher agency is important too. If we hope to build a profession in which we are all self-navigating life-long learners, we must acknowledge the role that teacher agency plays. 
Martin Burrett

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?"
Brianna Crowley

Home - 4 views

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    This website discusses the standards of effective teacher leadership. It also outlines and defines the role of a teacher leader. Progressive perspective on the teaching profession and its potential future of differentiated pathways. 
Bob Rowan

Should Students Evaluate Their Teachers? | Edutopia - 66 views

  • online survey of 1,883 students from 10 European countries
  • what the students expect
  • what they experience from their instructors
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  • looked at three characteristics
  • personality
  • classroom environment
  • teaching style
  • gap of 35 percent between what students expected and what professors were able to deliver
  • professors did best at being "confident" and "rational"
  • worst at being "inspiring"
  • wanted inspiring teachers that are approachable
  • clear idea of student requirements
  • good communicators
  • be alert to struggling students
  • student evaluations prove to be the most effective at providing specific information for formative evaluations
  • should be an important part of teacher evaluations
  • Informally, teachers are graded all the time
  • you could administer a formal climate survey
  • At the end of every test or quiz, put in a few non-graded questions
  • What did you like most about learning this topic
  • What was most difficult
  • could the teacher have done a better job
  • What would you recommend to improve this course? What do you want to see more of in this class? Less of?"
  • 21st-century education E-newsletter
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    The author reflects on student evaluations, citing a study that asked students what they expect from their professors (also talks about how it applies to K-12 schools)
Jim Tiffin Jr

What makes an interactive whiteboard interactive? - Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk... - 25 views

  • But many advocates of this technology (myself included), see IWBs as genuine means of bringing more interactivity, more student-focus into classrooms of traditional teachers
  • What we don't want to forget is that someone who is coaching a teacher is not really looking for "good technology use" but for just good educational practices. Having an IWB is not going to change a lecturer into something else.
  • Any item in the Instruction domain can be enhanced using an IWB.
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  • just because a teacher has an IWB doesn't mean it has to be used every minute of the day. And yes, a teacher can create truly interactive lessons without using any technology whatsoever.
  • use the SmartNotebook software that works with the hardware to organize materials, to find and share lessons, and to seamlessly blend multimedia into lessons.
  • While popular (2007, 2010, interactive white boards (IWBs) are controversial even (or especially) among technology enthusiasts. The major complaint is that the use of these devices reinforces the "sage on the stage" teaching methodology. "The IWB is little more than a fancy overhead projector and its touch sensitive screen is only used to save the teacher a couple steps back to the computer to change a slide."
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    Blog post that articulates some of the best practices for incorporating an interactive white board (IWB), like a SMART Board, into your classroom in meaningful and instructionally sound ways.
Clint Heitz

Flipping the Classroom: A revolutionary approach to learning presents some pros and con... - 73 views

    • Clint Heitz
       
      Why not create multiple types of videos? YouTube allows "choose your own path" videos that can let you alter the video based on the responses during viewing.
    • Clint Heitz
       
      Great way to provide equitable access opportunities
  • Teachers need to figure out what they want to get out of a flipped classroom, says Marine City High’s Ming. “What’s the purpose of doing it? Is it because you’re looking for more time in your curriculum to do hands-on activities?” An AP government teacher told Ming the best part of teaching his class was holding class discussions. The flipped classroom helped him get through the material with time to spare for conversation.
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    • Clint Heitz
       
      The purpose is always the key. Don't try to implement this "just because" or excessively. It is a great tool, but not always the right one.
  • Watching videos also means more sitting in front of devices. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends kids limit “screen time” to two hours a day because too much exposure has been linked to obesity, irregular sleep, behavioral problems, violence, and less time for play.
    • Clint Heitz
       
      Why not flip it with podcasts that students can listen to while walking, driving, etc.
  • Students need to feel as though their teachers are guiding them to the best materials, not merely giving them a list of videos to watch, says Valenza
  • “Teachers should keep posing the ‘why,’” says Bob Schuetz, the technology director at Palatine High School in Illinois. “Why am I doing this? Why is it beneficial to students?”
  • “The teacher walks around and helps everyone. It’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card for teachers not to teach.” It’s also not a way for kids to get out of doing anything at home. “Flipping what the kid does means they do the work ahead of time, come to class, and debrief,” explains Michelle Luhtala (aka the
  • “The end goal is personalized education. The flipped classroom is just a means to that end.” Students can use the videos to learn at their own pace—any time or place, says Roberts. “These students can replay their teacher’s explanation of a new concept as many times as they need to without fear of holding up the rest of the class.”
  • a librarian at Bullis School in Potomac, MD, gives students videos, Web pages, and screenshots about the nuts and bolts of the library, which frees up more time to devote to their research projects.
  • ure, some kids will ignore the video. “The same kids who don’t currently do their homework will not watch the lecture,” says McCammon. “But as you start making your class more engaging, kids who don’t usually do their homework will start doing it because they want to participate in the class.” Kids write questions down while they’re watching the video, and then the first 10 minutes of class is for discussion of what they’ve seen.
Greg Brandenburg

News Flash: High School Students Are Bored - Teaching Now - Education Week Teacher - 51 views

  • 35 percent of the bored students, however, indicated that the source of their boredom was a lack of interaction with their teacher
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    Students desire more interaction with their teachers
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