Group items tagged

"Concept fuels mix of confusion, frustration, and optimism Personalized learning seems like a simple concept-basically, customize teaching and learning to students' individual academic strengths and weaknesses and even their personal interests. But the reality is that the concept is creating quite a bit of confusion and frustration in the K-12 world. What is (and isn't) personalized learning? How much control should students have over when, how, and what they learn? And what about the potential overuse of digital tools in personalized learning programs?"

If you're a regular Times reader, you've no doubt enjoyed, and maybe even taught with, some of the 1,000-plus personal essays from the Magazine's Lives column, which has run weekly for decades. But did you know that NYTimes.com also regularly features personal writing on everything from love and family to life on campus, how we relate to animals, living with disabilities and navigating anxiety? In this post we suggest several ways to inspire your students' own personal writing, using Times models as "mentor texts," and advice from our writers on everything from avoiding "zombie nouns" to writing "dangerous" college essays."

A high school student annotates her award winning personal narrative: "Maria Fernanda Benavides, a winner of our 2019 Personal Narrative Contest, tells us how she hooks readers by dropping them into a scene."

"The rigidity of the current standards-based system could present a problem as personalized learning tries to grow - although some hope advocates on both sides will find compromise that strengthen both ideas. "There's a conflict in the sense that the standards and accountability movement has focused on grade-level standards," said Sara Mead, a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a Washington, D.C.-based policy group, "and the idea that equity to some extent is based on getting everybody to master the same content at the same time.""

""Instead of measuring difficulty in terms of information retrieval, or amount of homework, the new standard of personal rigor puts thinking and intelligent behaviors at the forefront. How a student expresses those personal qualities become the standard for capability and performance. In effect, we're starting to redefine what is 'hard' in school." So what happens when a school takes the shifting digital landscape seriously, acknowledging how the brain works, the essential need for intrinsic motivation, the reality of the declining value of fixed knowledge, the importance of social and emotional learning, and the critical need to focus on learning how to learn in new and dynamic ways?"

"Educator Mia MacMeekin has put together a clear infographic highlighting some of the ways teachers design "personalized" curriculum."

In a connected world, information comes at us constantly, whether we choose it or not, and we must each figure out a way to navigate it. Not for a school assignment, but for our real lives. So we've proposed an experiment. We're running a challenge that invites students to think deeply about their own relationships with news, and devise personal "news diets" that work for them. It runs from Nov. 2 to Dec. 22, 2017, and any teenager anywhere in the world can participate. The challenge has three steps: 1. Do a personal "news audit" to observe the role of news in their lives right now. 2. Experiment with their "news diets" in some way to find new sources that address any lacks they found. 3. Write a short essay or produce a short video that reflects on the process and what they learned. What did they discover about their news habits before and after they did the challenge - and what can they say about the role of news in their lives in general?

"At EL Education, we believe that this is best done consciously and intentionally. We are unafraid to say that teachers and schools shape student character. We specify what we believe they should work towards: students who are not just effective learners, but also ethical people, and active contributors to a better world. We believe that this is supported when educators elevate student voice and leadership and model a schoolwide culture of respect, compassion, honesty, integrity, and kindness. In times of crisis, small-scale or large, this also means modeling courage in standing up for those values, and standing against racism, injustice, acts of hate, and the undermining of public education. One unheralded but powerful possibility is this: giving students real material to engage with and supporting them to do work that matters to them. This is what helps students become ethical adults who contribute to a better world. In EL Education schools, this deeper learning is the daily fare of classrooms. And, it's what empowers them to engage in civil debate. If students are fearful about what may happen to them or their loved ones, we can help them research what has actually been said or proposed, and what is possible according to the U.S. Constitution as it has so far been interpreted. We can help them respond in ways that build their own agency: writing letters, like students at World of Inquiry, or making videos and organizing actions like the Melrose Leadership Academy Peace and Kindness March."

"Varya Kluev, a NJ high school student and winner of our 2019 Personal Narrative Contest, tells us why metaphor is her "go-to tool" whenever she wants to add flair to her writing."

"Adam Bernard Sanders, a high school student and winner of our 2019 Personal Narrative Contest, tells us why he likes to keep his conclusions "purposefully open-ended.""

Op-Docs is The New York Times editorial department's forum for short, opinionated documentaries, produced with wide creative latitude and a range of artistic styles, covering current affairs, contemporary life and historical subjects.   Op-Docs videos are produced by both renowned and emerging filmmakers who express their views in the first person, through their subjects or more subtly through an artistic approach to a topic. Each is accompanied by a director's statement. In December 2012, we started a new Op-Docs feature: Scenes. This is a platform for very short work - snippets of street life, brief observations and interviews, clips from experimental and artistic nonfiction videos - that follow less traditional documentary narrative conventions.

""Every young person will continue to need basic knowledge, of course," Tony Wagner said. "But they will need skills and motivation even more. Of these three education goals, motivation is the most critical. Young people who are intrinsically motivated - curious, persistent, and willing to take risks - will learn new knowledge and skills continuously. They will be able to find new opportunities or create their own - a disposition that will be increasingly important as many traditional careers disappear." So what should be the focus of education reform today?"

""The act of writing is more powerful than people think," Peterson says. Most people grapple at some time or another with free-floating anxiety that saps energy and increases stress. Through written reflection, you may realize that a certain unpleasant feeling ties back to, say, a difficult interaction with your mother. That type of insight, research has shown, can help locate, ground and ultimately resolve the emotion and the associated stress. At the same time, "goal-setting theory" holds that writing down concrete, specific goals and strategies can help people overcome obstacles and achieve. Peterson wondered whether writing could be shown to affect student motivation. He created an undergraduate course called Maps of Meaning. In it, students complete a set of writing exercises that combine expressive writing with goal-setting. Students reflect on important moments in their past, identify key personal motivations and create plans for the future, including specific goals and strategies to overcome obstacles. Peterson calls the two parts "past authoring" and "future authoring.""

""Writing is rewriting," says everyone all the time. But what they don't say, necessarily, is how. Yesterday, Tor pointed me in the direction of this old blog post from Patrick Rothfuss-whose Kingkiller Chronicle is soon to be adapted for film and television by Lin-Manuel Miranda, in case you hadn't heard-in which he describes, step-by-step, his revision process over a single night. Out of many, one assumes. It's illuminating, and I wound up digging around on the Internet for more personal stories of editing strategies, investigating the revision processes of a number of celebrated contemporary writers of fantasy, realism, and young adult fiction. So in the interest of stealing from those who have succeeded, read on."

"Language merely reflects our way of trying to make sense of the world. - Frank Smith Frank Smith (1982) says 'writing touches every part of our lives'. One of the first reasons we write is because it is a tool for communication in culture. It gives us the ability the share information over time and space with multiple individuals (explaining, recounting & opinion). It can also be used as a permanent record or as a statement e.g. in history, geography  & science genres. The third cultural aspect for writing is artistry (narrative and poetry). Finally, there is also the personal aspect to writing. Writing allows us all to reflect, express our perceptions of self, to socially dream or to be critical (memoir). By writing, we find out what we know; what we think. Ultimately though, writing is a means for us to express ourselves in the world, make sense of the world or impose ourselves upon it. The question now is why do children write at school? For these purposes? - Not often. There is a massive discrepancy between the writing done in the real-world and that of the classroom. Donald Graves says 'all children want to write'. It is just a case of allowing them to write about the things they are interested in. As Frank Smith says, 'all children can write if they can speak it.' If they can talk about it, they can write it down. The transmission of narrow decontextualized writing skills; that English is just a formal system to be learnt. The insistence on task-orientated writing. The insistence on teacher-chosen writing tasks. The insistence on the use of external stimulus (literature units, film-clips, topic-writing) at the expense of children's knowledge, interests, loves, talents and idiosyncrasies. The formal rather than functional teaching of grammar. These examples embody the 'commonsense' assumptions which claim an authority which is supposedly natural and unshakable. Writing in classrooms at present isn't seen by children as important

Op-Docs is The New York Times editorial department's forum for short, opinionated documentaries, produced with wide creative latitude and a range of artistic styles, covering current affairs, contemporary life and historical subjects.   Op-Docs videos are produced by both renowned and emerging filmmakers who express their views in the first person, through their subjects or more subtly through an artistic approach to a topic. Each is accompanied by a director's statement. Are there applications for the classroom? Anyone can submit there own Op-Doc.

"In this lesson, we explore ethical dilemmas that face normal people around the world, in all walks of life. Some of their cases are familiar, while others are obscure. But they hold one thing in common: They feature individuals who followed the guidance of their own moral code, often risking personal injury or community censure to do so. We'll ask students to examine the underlying characteristics of such episodes, and consider whether some acts are more deserving of support than others."

"Helping students fail isn't just a matter of making them feel better-it's about thinking like a scientist, farmer, designer, or CEO-failing gives me the data I need to proceed. And knowledge? Those letter grades don't mean much. An A doesn't guarantee understanding, and an F doesn't preclude it. To "fail" could mean a thousand things-which is exactly why students need help to understand it. The Role Of Failure In Learning Properly understood, failure can help students see learning as a personal journey rather than a matter of external performance. It emphasizes meaning as contextual, and distinguishes procedural knowledge from content knowledge. The primary value, then, might be in teaching students learning and knowledge rather than responsibility."

Members of the 127-year-old American Dialect Society anointed "they," the singular, gender-neutral pronoun, the 2015 Word of the Year. As in: "They and I went to the store," where they is used for a person who does not identify as male or female, or they is a filler pronoun in a situation where a person's gender identity is unknown."

"Somewhere in this stuff lie the real treasures. Full-length articles just published into the air that - it seems - haven't found a 'real' home where the words would meet thousands and thousands of eyes. Often it's obvious why: the topic might be too esoteric, too personal; a rant even. But again, that's what makes it great: unedited, unadulterated, free of compromise, lighter. The highest proof of a mind's music and voice. As I mulled all this the other day, I thought back to the best I read recently. Four came to mind on the spot:"