technology is a powerful tool for driving productivity and quality, in schooling as elsewhere; the problem is not with the technology, but with how we've used it.
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Technology as "Hamburger Helper" - Rick Hess Straight Up - Education Week - 32 views
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99 percent of the time, the biggest impact of technology is optimizing familiar tasks and routines--freeing up talent, time, and dollars for better uses
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"Technology can be a powerful lever for rethinking schools and systems. But it's the rethinking that matters, not the technology. Technology provides tools to help solve problems smarter, deliver knowledge, support students, extend and deepen instruction, and refashion cost structures. Unfortunately, too many educators, industry shills, and technology enthusiasts seem to imagine that the technology itself will be a difference maker."
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The Coach in the Operating Room - The New Yorker - 37 views
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I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages.
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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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The fantasies driving school reform: A primer for education graduates - The Answer Shee... - 5 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQA5vwzLU_blog.html
education reform poverty teachers gr8 speech research black minority poor
shared by Steve Ransom on 14 May 12
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Let me repeat: black elementary school students today have better math skills than white students did only twenty years ago.
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As a result, we’ve wasted 15 years avoiding incremental improvement, and instead trying to upend a reasonably successful school system.
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But the reason it hasn’t narrowed is that your profession has done too good a job — you’ve improved white children’s performance as well, so the score gap persists, but at a higher level for all.
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Policymakers, pundits, and politicians ignore these gains; they conclude that you, educators, have been incompetent because the test score gap hasn’t much narrowed.
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If you believe public education deserves greater support, as I do, you will have to boast about your accomplishments, because voters are more likely to aid a successful institution than a collapsing one.
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In short, underemployment of parents is not only an economic crisis — it is an educational crisis. You cannot ignore it and be good educators.
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equally important educational goals — citizenship, character, appreciation of the arts and music, physical fitness and health, and knowledge of history, the sciences, and literature.
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If you have high expectations, your students can succeed regardless of parents’ economic circumstances. That is nonsense.
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health insurance; children are less likely to get routine and preventive care that middle class children take for granted
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If they can’t see because they don’t get glasses to correct vision difficulties, high expectations can’t teach them to read.
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Because education has become so politicized, with policy made by those with preconceptions of failure and little understanding of the educational process, you are entering a field that has become obsessed with evaluating only results that are easy to measure, rather than those that are most important. But as Albert Einstein once said, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.
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To be good educators, you must step up your activity not only in the classroom, but as citizens. You must speak up in the public arena, challenging those policymakers who will accuse you only of making excuses when you speak the truth that children who are hungry, mobile, and stressed, cannot learn as easily as those who are comfortable.
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Atul Gawande: How Do Good Ideas Spread? : The New Yorker - 36 views
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Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and antiseptics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century.
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The idea spread like a contagion, travelling through letters, meetings, and periodicals. By mid-December, surgeons were administering ether to patients in Paris and London. By February, anesthesia had been used in almost all the capitals of Europe, and by June in most regions of the world.
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On October 16, 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital, Morton administered his gas through an inhaler in the mouth of a young man undergoing the excision of a tumor in his jaw.
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Four weeks later, on November 18th, Bigelow published his report on the discovery of “insensibility produced by inhalation” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal.
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There were forces of resistance, to be sure. Some people criticized anesthesia as a “needless luxury”; clergymen deplored its use to reduce pain during childbirth as a frustration of the Almighty’s designs.
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Yet soon even the obstructors, “with a run, mounted behind—hurrahing and shouting with the best.” Within seven years, virtually every hospital in America and Britain had adopted the new discovery.
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Sepsis—infection—was the other great scourge of surgery. It was the single biggest killer of surgical patients, claiming as many as half of those who underwent major operations
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nfection was so prevalent that suppuration—the discharge of pus from a surgical wound—was thought to be a necessary part of healing.
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In the eighteen-sixties, the Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Lister read a paper by Louis Pasteur laying out his evidence that spoiling and fermentation were the consequence of microorganisms. Lister became convinced that the same process accounted for wound sepsis.
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Lister had read about the city of Carlisle’s success in using a small amount of carbolic acid to eliminate the odor of sewage, and reasoned that it was destroying germs. Maybe it could do the same in surgery.
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During the next few years, he perfected ways to use carbolic acid for cleansing hands and wounds and destroying any germs that might enter the operating field.
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Surgeons soaked their instruments in carbolic acid, but they continued to operate in black frock coats stiffened with the blood and viscera of previous operations—the badge of a busy practice.
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It was a generation before Lister’s recommendations became routine and the next steps were taken toward the modern standard of asepsis—that is, entirely excluding germs from the surgical field, using heat-sterilized instruments and surgical teams clad in sterile gowns and gloves.
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Maybe ideas that violate prior beliefs are harder to embrace. To nineteenth-century surgeons, germ theory seemed as illogica
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The technical complexity might have been part of the difficulty. Giving Lister’s methods “a try” required painstaking attention to detail.
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Back to school with wikis | ZDNet - 45 views
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The idea is really quite simple: “The most simple thing that could possibly work” (Ward Cunningham) for personal/social learning environments in schools would rather be based on wikis than on an LMS like Moodle…One would have a wiki farm (one wiki for each class and year, and probably an over-all school wiki) with some simple routines and templates. (To do this right would be crucial.)…For the Wiki itself, it would be best to use an Open Source wiki platform (DokuWiki) running on own server, or on a community-driven server specialized in offering wiki-platforms for schools. Possible would be also Wikispaces (as white label service), Google Sites (as part of Google Apps Edu), or even Confluence (because it has all the features of a full & stable enterprise wiki system and is still not expensive).
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CriticalThinking.org - Teaching Tactics that Encourage Active Learning - 126 views
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"Tactics that Encourage Active Learning Use the following tactics during class to ensure that students are actively engaged in thinking about the content. Students should be called on randomly (using the deck of cards method for instance) so that everyone participates. When students do not know when they will be called on they are much more likely to remain alert and engaged in the learning process. Students should be routinely called upon to: Summarize or put into their own words what the teacher or another student has said. Elaborate on what they have said. Relate the issue or content to their own knowledge and experience. Give examples to clarify or support what they have said. Make connections between related concepts. Restate the instructions or assignment in their own words. State the question at issue. Describe to what extent their point of view on the issue is different from or similar to the point of view of the instructor, other students, the author, etc. Take a few minutes to write down any of the above. Write down the most pressing question on their mind at this point. The instructor then uses the above tactics to help students reason through the questions. Discuss any of the above with a partner and then participate in a group discussion facilitated by the instructor."
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academiblog: 15 Tips for Postponing Writing Procrastination - 2 views
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Open your brain so there is flow.
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Yeah well, for some this can be quite demotivating - having a clean and empty document on your computer that screams for attention and at the beginning shows nothing but the fact that you haven't done anything yet. So instead of opening an empty document, I always suggest my students should use a good writing software that helps them to produce text naturally and "on the go". For this, my personal choice is Citavi.
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Paige - Closing Argument - 0 views
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Freeman wrote in the research article
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Mark Fenton expressed in the article “Battling America’s Epidemic of Physical Inactivity: Building More Walkable, Livable Communities” many different things we can do to help the obesity problem in America. Fenton states, “We must create environments in which physical activity becomes a routine part of the day for more Americans.” By creating a more pedestrian friendly atmosphere it will encourage people to walk or bicycle to their destination instead of always using their automobiles. I agree with what Fenton is trying to explain within in his research. Children learn by the examples that are being set around them. If they see everyone driving in their cars every where they go the only thing they have in their heads is, “I can’t wait until i can drive.” Instead of realizing they can go the same exact distance on their bike and be much more healthy than if they were driving a car. Fenton expresses, “We all must become role models by walking and cycling whenever possible and inviting others to do so with us.” People don’t like feeling abnormal; they want to do what other people are doing around them. Which is a very true assumption on Fentons part, we must become the role models for the youth around us. We set the standards of what is acceptable and what isn’t. We need to change the “norms” while it’s still possible and contribute to reversing the obesity problem
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A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 40 views
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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."
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education.
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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.
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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.
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Contingent faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners.
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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.
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Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence.
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Educational Leadership:How Teachers Learn:Fostering Reflection - 27 views
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Another way to help teachers become better at reflection is to create study groups that introduce teachers to these four modes of thinking and explore which aspects of teaching call for each mode. Discussions and role-plays can help teachers see which routine decisions can be made through technological or situational thinking and which may require the deliberate or dialectical modes. I
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Finally, to foster higher levels of reflection, encourage teachers to ask themselves questions about their classroom practice. Prompts like the following promote frequent reflection: What worked in this lesson? How do I know? What would I do the same or differently if I could reteach this lesson? Why? What root cause might be prompting or perpetuating this student behavior? What do I believe about how students learn? How does this belief influence my instruction? What data do I need to make an informed decision about this problem? Is this the most efficient way to accomplish this task?
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entrepreneur-blog-es - 6 views
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TEENS20/01/2014 Adolescents were interviewed and most obesity problems, causing psychological problems and wanted to be thinner.
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ANOREXIA20/01/2014Anorexia nervosa is a potentially life-threatening condition in which an obsession with thinness leads to severe dieting and excessive weight loss.
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10 Team-Building Games For The First Day Of Class - 111 views
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by TeachThought Staff Team-building activities are great. Not only can they help establish routines, tone, and expectations, they're also fun, and can help learners feel comfortable. Though many older students in high school and college may groan at their thought, they're usually fun, and great ways to help students feel at ease.
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Encourage Students to Use AAC by Supporting Communication Partners: Help embed AAC use ... - 2 views
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speech-language pathologists hope to accomplish with augmentative and alternative communication (AAC)
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In her inclusive kindergarten classroom, she tried an AAC app with a basic grid display on a mobile tablet and made measurable progress with it. However, Lily’s team felt the AAC app lacked depth, so they switched her to a more advanced version
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Response: Ways to Cultivate 'Whole-Class Engagement' - Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazz... - 106 views
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we need to ensure that we are implementing a series of factors that elevate our students' focus and level of concern.
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Your odds of keeping your students on task go up when you mix things up and keep the energy feeling fresh.
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Work to establish a classroom culture in which it is understood that, with every task they perform, students know there is a strong possibility that they will have to share out their results in front of their peers.
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Total Participation Techniques frame the context so that all students are responding to higher-order prompts in low-risk settings.
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