Group items tagged

"Characteristics of Meaningful Reflection For student reflection to be meaningful, it must be metacognitive, applicable, and shared with others. Let's look at each of these characteristics in turn."

"Using data with students encompasses classroom practices that build students' capacity to access, analyze, and use data effectively to reflect, set goals, and document growth. Using data with students encompasses the following activities: Students use their classwork as a source for data, analyzing strengths, weaknesses, and patterns to improve their work. Students regularly analyze evidence of their own progress. They track their progress on assessments and assignments, analyze their errors for patterns, and describe what they see in the data about their current level of performance. Students use data to set goals and reflect on their progress over time and incorporate data analysis into student-led conferences."

""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.""

"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

"Research shows that reflecting after learning something new makes it stick in your brain."

great videos for standards, seminars, reflection, etc

"How you close a lesson is just as important as how you open it. Yet all too often, we run out of time. Or, we look at the clock, see our students are still working hard, and think to ourselves, why interrupt their flow? But there are proven benefits to taking even just one minute to wrap up a lesson. In those last moments, you and your students have a chance to check for understanding, reflect on what you've learned, tie up loose ends, or make sure everyone is ready for the next part of the day. You could even just take a moment to breathe! If you're looking for new ideas on how to wrap up your next lesson, here are five things you can try."

"The key to getting kids to read deeply in any format is to have them engage with the text in meaningful ways. In the digital space, that means disrupting a pattern of skipping around, writing short chats and getting lost down the rabbit hole of the internet. It means teaching kids ways to break down a complex text, find key ideas, organize them and defend them. Practicing those skills in class can be time-consuming, but it also builds good digital reading habits that hopefully become second nature. "The goal in almost all the strategies is to slow the kids down so they are focusing on this text," Hess said. "Number two is to engage them in an active way with the text, and number three you want to encourage oral discourse. And number four you want them to do some reflection." Those steps should sound familiar to teachers because they are important for any kind of reading for comprehension and analysis. The trick for teachers is to learn how to transfer these processes into the digital space and push them even further."

"The Common Core State Standards--has, in some places, contributed to narrowing students' experience of writing inside school. In that contradictory and shifting environment, the NCTE Executive Committee charged a committee to update the Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing, attempting to reflect some of the historically significant changes of recent years. What follow are some of the professional principles that guide effective teaching."

"1. Survey students about our school's writing atmosphere What role do you expect writing to play in your life during the next 5-10 years? What do you think colleges/universities expect in terms of student writing? What writing do you think is valued at your high school? What does your teacher value in terms of writing? How do you know what writing is valued at your school and in this class? In the last 2-3 years, what has positively influenced your writing? What feedback is most helpful to you as a writer? How does grading influence your writing? My colleague and I turned these questions into a Google form survey, and the results will give us lots to think about in the months ahead. This is a great opportunity to talk with students about what they value about writing and help them find ways to make their writing reflect what they value and what readers might need.  2. Separate my reading roles At the symposium, participants discussed how rarely we simply read student work as readers. 3. Create opportunities to switch "modes""

"Every day during the school year we invite teenagers to share their opinions about questions like these - on topics from hip-hop to climate change - and hundreds do, posting arguments, reflections and anecdotes to our Student Opinion feature. With this, our first-ever Student Editorial Contest, we're asking you to channel that enthusiasm into something a little more formal: short, evidence-based persuasive essays like the editorials The New York Times publishes every day."

"Out of Eden Learn is a unique online learning community designed to accompany Paul Salopek's Out of Eden Walk. Through Out of Eden Learn, students from around the world can engage in Paul's journey and all that it represents. They explore their own neighborhoods, investigate contemporary global issues, and reflect on how they as individuals fit into a broader geographical and historical context. In addition, they share their perspectives and interact with one another on an exciting digital platform that uses social media as a springboard for deep, meaningful learning. The goal is to ignite students' interest in the wider world and support them to become more informed, thoughtful, and engaged "global citizens.""

"In this Text to Text, we pair Dr. King's pivotal "I Have a Dream" speech with a reflection by the Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani, who explores why this singular speech has such lasting power."

"This media gallery from American Masters: Salinger features a series of videos that explores how Salinger felt about his writing, his struggle to be published in The New Yorker magazine, and how Holden Caulfield was a reflection of his own life. The associated materials include a background essay, discussion questions and a student activity."

" It's possible to avoid gripe sessions while providing opportunities for feedback and reflection that are strategically integrated into classroom routines. The ideas below can be insightful for students and teachers."

"What is one thing you feel supremely qualified to teach other people? This should be in stated in only a few words. Critical thinking. How to communicate. The elegance of architecture. Living through music. How to read. You don't have to be an expert here, you just have to love it deeply. And answer honestly. Now, who should you do this kind of work for? Who needs to understand this, almost as a matter of life and death? Whose life won't be the same without it? Who do you feel most natural and engaged around? There's your audience. Next, what exactly do these people want or need? How will you need to "package" and deliver this gift you feel supremely qualified to teach? If you're qualified to "give" it, this part has to reflect that. How are they going to change as a result? Now, put it all together in one sentence. There's your purpose"

" Is grading the focus, or is learning the focus? Yes, grades should and can reflect student learning, but often they can get in the way and actually harm student learning. The Dreaded Zero"

"Much of a teacher's day is devoted to instruction, with precious little time set aside for collaborating with colleagues, planning lessons or reflecting on practice, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress. The authors of "Reimagining the School Day" point out that U.S. educators spend far more time teaching lessons and less time planning them than educators in other top-performing countries. In a typical work week, U.S. teachers spend about 27 hours delivering lessons, compared with their counterparts in Singapore, who teach 17 hours each week, or to teachers in Finland, who log 21 hours a week. The authors cite a survey of 120 U.S. school districts that shows that just 45 minutes of a typical teacher's 7.5-hour workday is dedicated to planning. What's more, the authors say, teachers could benefit from observing each other, but there's no time built into the school day to do such observations. Unless, that is, schools begin to rethink the school day. The report highlights five schedules that aim to revamp how teachers spend a typical school day. All the schedules include more time for teachers to work together to plan lessons, flexible instruction blocks that allow teachers to tailor instruction to students' particular needs, and opportunities for small-group instruction and student-directed learning."

"There's something deeply personal about appraisals of our teaching. It's not just our professional competence that's wrapped up in an observation, but a sense of our worth as human beings. In walks an administrator, often at the worst possible moment, and suddenly our flaws loom in our minds like the distorted reflection in a funhouse mirror. So for those of us who die inside every time an observer walks into our classroom, what can we do about it?"

"While individual efforts are valuable, students can learn the skills of collaborating on civic issues by working together as a whole class. Here are the five broad steps they should follow: Identify issues important in their lives and community, and decide on one to address. Research the chosen issue and decide how to change or improve the situation. Plan an action, including determining a goal for change; identifying who or what body in the community has power to make the change; and deciding how to approach that person or those people. Carry out the action through letters, talks, meetings with officials, policy proposals, and activities, depending on the specific goals of the project. Reflect on the effort when it is over in order to understand their successes, challenges, and ways to continue learning in the future. Two features are especially crucial to making the experience authentic and empowering. First, students must own the key choices and decisions and figure out solutions to problems themselves, so they discover that they can do this. The teacher facilitates the work, of course, but leaves as much of the decision-making as possible to the students. Second, the work should culminate in some action focused on change in the school or community. It's not enough to just talk about change, practice mock legislatures, or serve in a soup kitchen (as valuable as these activities may be). Only when students see adults listening to them with respect, do they realize they have a voice and can make a difference in their world. Their efforts may not always succeed, but in being heard they come to value the studying, reading, writing and planning that they have done."