Specific writing strategies can play an important role in boosting reading comprehension. That's the bottom-line finding of a new analysis of research.
The report, out today from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, says that teachers can improve students' reading skills by having them write about what they are reading, teaching them writing skills, and increasing how much they write.
So many great health and science lesson plans running around. This is from the American Heart Association and is three lessons to help kids. This from the site:
"Sudden Cardiac Arrest can strike anyone, anywhere - and a victim's chance of survival depends on the people around them. Be the Beat offers free games, music, videos and giveaways to educate teens about recognizing a cardiac arrest, calling 911, CPR and using an AED, while they have fun!
Schools play a vital role in this movement to train teen lifesavers. As a complement to your CPR and AED program, or other curriculum, check out our free resources and register now so we can keep you updated on the latest news. Then, encourage your students to play and learn on Be the Beat. Together we can create the next generation of lifesavers!"
With summer approaching in the USA and the inevitable tragic drownings that always happen - your teaching could save someone's life!
The JUMP Math workbooks are meant to be used in conjunction with our extensive Teacher Resources to enable students to practise and explore subtle variations on the lessons and to enable teachers to rapidly assess progress. For each lesson, there is a clear and highly effective lesson plan, which enables teachers to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of teaching to the whole class while tailoring to individual needs. Each lesson is carefully designed to generate deep, subtle, transferable mastery of key concepts. Lesson plans include ideas for contextualizing the math, questions and tasks that allow students to discover mathematical concepts, games, activities, and innovative extension questions that keep "fast" students engaged and learning while teachers help others to master the key objectives.
Here is an interesting point as I research inquiry based learning and move to look in a database that is largely built from overseas. Many places called "inquiry" "enquiry" so in this set of lessons across the curriculum, I have to search using the term "enquiry" to turn up what have been tagged as "inquiry based" lesson plans.
There are many nuances like that as you start looking at best practices across the world to remember. Eventually, hopefully, language searches will translate between common languages (like English) to help us bridge best practices.
If you're looking into inquiry-based learning (or equiry-based depending upon where you're from) - this is a database of lesson plans from Kindergarten up in different categories.
There's a big push on at our school for explicit teaching; this guide provides a useful summary of the main instructional methods available to teachers.
Website to teach you about how the food got to you! This is a really neat website for elementary teachers who discuss food production. There is a resource for teachers as well. As a farm girl, it is great to see a site that discusses the importance of farming. This is so important for kids to understand.
We garden at our school and it is great!
I highly recommend that elementary and middle schools at least sign up for a school code for woogi world - this is a great tool suggested by Hoover City schools for teaching digital citizenship. My daughter (my intrepid tester of all kid virtual worlds) loves it and says she thinks it is great for kids.
As Jim Nehring at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell observed,
“Progressive schools are the legacy of a long and proud tradition of thoughtful
school practice stretching back for centuries” — including hands-on learning,
multiage classrooms, and mentor-apprentice relationships — while what we
generally refer to as traditional schooling “is largely the result of outdated
policy changes that have calcified into conventions.”
Progressive educators are concerned with helping children become not only good
learners but also good people
Learning isn’t something that happens to individual children — separate selves
at separate desks. Children learn with and from one another in a caring
community, and that’s true of moral as well as academic learning.
Interdependence counts at least as much as independence
Progressive schools are characterized by what I like to call a “working with”
rather than a “doing to” model.
A sense of community and responsibility for others isn’t confined to the
classroom; indeed, students are helped to locate themselves in widening circles
of care that extend beyond self, beyond friends, beyond their own ethnic group,
and beyond their own coun
“What’s the effect on students’ interest in learning, their desire to
continue reading, thinking, and questioning?”
Alfred North Whitehead declared long ago, “A merely well-informed man is the
most useless bore on God’s earth.” Facts and skills do matter, but only in a
context and for a purpose. That’s why progressive education tends to
be organized around problems, projects, and questions — rather than around lists
of facts, skills, and separate disciplines
students play a vital role in helping to design the curriculum, formulate the
questions, seek out (and create) answers, think through possibilities, and
evaluate how successful they — and their teachers — have been
Each student is unique, so a single set of policies, expectations, or
assignments would be as counterproductive as it was disrespectful.)
they design it with them
what distinguishes progressive education is that students must construct
their own understanding of ideas.
A school that is culturally progressive is not necessarily educationally
progressive. An institution can be steeped in lefty politics and multi-grain
values; it can be committed to diversity, peace, and saving the planet — but
remain strikingly traditional in its pedagogy
A truly impressive collection of research has demonstrated that when students
are able to spend more time thinking about ideas than memorizing facts and
practicing skills — and when they are invited to help direct their own learning
— they are not only more likely to enjoy what they’re doing but to do it better.
Regardless of one’s values, in other words, this approach can be recommended
purely on the basis of its effectiveness. And if your criteria are more
ambitious — long-term retention of what’s been taught, the capacity to
understand ideas and apply them to new kinds of problems, a desire to continue
learning — the relative benefits of progressive education are even greater.[5]
Students in elementary and middle school did better in science when their
teaching was “centered on projects in which they took a high degree of
initiative.
For starters, they tell me, progressive education is not only less familiar but
also much harder to do, and especially to do well. It asks a lot more of the
students and at first can seem a burden to those who have figured out how to
play the game in traditional classrooms — often succeeding by conventional
standards without doing much real thinking. It’s also much more demanding of
teachers, who have to know their subject matter inside and out if they want
their students to “make sense of biology or literature” as opposed to “simply
memoriz[ing] the frog’s anatomy or the sentence’s structure.”[12] But
progressive teachers also have to know a lot about pedagogy because no amount of
content knowledge (say, expertise in science or English) can tell you how to
facilitate learning. The belief that anyone who knows enough math can teach it
is a corollary of the belief that learning is a process of passive absorption —a
view that cognitive science has decisively debunked.
If you want to understand what FLOE does and how it can help you use free resources to help all learners, then you can watch this video. This is for everyone in special education and especially those developing curriculum for those in special education. The first year it is free and after that they do charge for the service, I believe.
Google Digital Literacy Tour along with videos. Here are some great lessons and videos and a full curriculum. Just realize that you should involve students in discussions and activities, this is a pretty poor candidate for lecture-based delivery because it is changing so quickly. I use Digiteen but these are great resources. (Hat tip to Theresa Allen for sending this through the Digiteen google group.)
"Dr. Robert Lindberg, President and Executive Director of the National Institute of Aerospace, envisions a new way to introduce Engineering into the K-12 curriculum by exploring the distinctions between Science and Engineering; between the Natural World and the Designed World; and between the Scientific Method and the Engineering Design Process."
Expand your curriculum with our timesaving educational resources that use technology to improve instruction across all content areas and grade levels. Find current resources that align with standards, promote higher-order thinking, and support the development of writing skills. Monitor student research and writing, evaluate student performance, and create bilingual online lessons, classroom calendars, and quizzes in less time than traditional methods
(1) modeling the use of new technologies in communicating to students, teachers and the general public; (2) ensuring that technology becomes integral to teaching 21st-century skills from critical thinking and problem solving to collaboration and information literacy in the classroom; (3) boosting Web 2.0 applications and tools as key components of student learning; (4) offering professional development in these technologies and deploying the online tools that help teachers create learning communities among themselves; and (5) requiring better balanced assessments of student work—including project-based learning enhanced by technology tools—in an age driven by NCLB-oriented testing and better use of data from the assessments to help students improve their performance.
Asking any leader to model effective strategies makes sense, but shouldn't the imperative of offering professional development in newer communications tools come first? Some district leader's I can see jupming into new tools and ways to communicate, but you can't expect all veteran leaders to adopt new tools without the development and support they'll need.
I'm curious to know in how many districts does the Superintendent serve as the curriculum leader capable of making the sweeping changes to move a district towards project-based learning. I have an inkling that many superintendents find niches that make them valubale, whether it's focusing on assessment, community relations, curriculum, or something else.
The revised edition also includes a self-assessment for superintendents to evaluate how far their districts have come along the technological curve. CoSN’s CEO Keith Krueger explains that his organization’s research shows that many district leaders are behind that curve, and the new document opens with a letter:
e cautions that the large-scale changes CoSN is advocating are most likely to happen for district leaders who are not engaged in dozens of other initiatives. “Everybody wants the superintendent to be in the middle of everything,” Reeves explains. “The real acid test is whether you can execute the ‘not-to-do list,’” adding that superintendents need to resist establishing too many priorities.
Each of the five areas featured in “Empowering the 21st Century Superintendent” includes a set of resources and a series of action steps for superintendents and district leadership teams. For instance, in the 21st-century skills section, leaders are urged to improve their own such skills, create a vision for integrating them into K12 instruction, audit the district’s strategic plan to see which might be missing and adjust professional development accordingly.
Love the pragmatism in this quote. Good acknowledgement that district superintendents are engufed in far too much at times, and thus tech-integration may not realistically happen. Good to know that the framework provided by CoSn also includes some directions for district tech teams.
The updated 2006 copy of the National Reading Panel teacher's guide to give a framework for using the findings of the 200 national Reading Panel in the classroom. This is another guidebook for teachers and curriculum directors.