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Aaron Davis

Digichild | Early Childhood Australia - 0 views

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    Dan Donahoo on technology in early childhood. Interesting reflections.
Aaron Davis

Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom: Why Formative Assessments Matter - 0 views

  • Formative assessments are simply little gauges or indicators of how students are progressing towards a learning goal
  • 2) Real-Time Feedback
  • 3) Building It In
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  • 1) Ticket out the door
  • Over time the students felt comfortable enough to tell me when they really didn't like the learning style I was using or that they enjoyed a particular way I presented the content. I had a better grasp on the learning my students were doing and they had a better grasp on the content. It was a definite win-win. 
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    An interesting reflection on formative assessment and some simple ideas of how to incorporate it into the classroom.
Aaron Davis

Sticking to the 'Main Thing'-A positive leadership reflection | Educational Leadership ... - 0 views

  • One of the first leadership decisions I made was to work with staff to audit our schools meta-curriculum. That is all of those programs, events, celebrations, operational arrangements and practices which are not core to the teaching and learning that happens inside classrooms.
  • My mantra was to “give teachers permission to spend their time improving the learning of the students in their class with minimal disruption”.
  • Students are spending less time out of classrooms and more time focused on their own learning.
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    A great post from Jason Borton discussing how he worked with his leadership team to refocus his school on learning.
Aaron Davis

Gender and Group Work - HuntingEnglishHuntingEnglish - 0 views

  • What is the ideal number for the group size for this task? Are students clear about what effective collaboration looks like and sounds like? What are the group goals and individual goals for this task? Are they clear to the students? How are you going to fend off ‘social loafing’? Should personality differences influence our grouping decisions? Are there introverts in the classroom that should receive particular attention as we decide upon grouping students? How should we group in relation to ability or skill levels? Are the groups separate by ability or mixed, or randomised? Does this make a difference?
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    Alex Quigley explores the topic of group work. Rather than a clear answer, he provides a excellent series of reflective questions to guide things. If we accept the notion of the 'wisdom of crowds', then what is the magic number for group size? There is no fixed answer, but research evidence shows that any group size above six is unlikely to be effective. Why is this? Well, successful group work relies on group goals, but alongside individual responsibility. With too many students in a group it is too easy for social loafing (students putting in less effort when they know they can because other group members pick up the slack) to happen. Better to have a smaller groups, such as trios or fours. Of course, even then, they'll need training.
Aaron Davis

THINKING TOOLS - 0 views

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    Using thinking tools is one way to "make thinking visible" and help our students explain their thoughts in a simple and explicit way. As the team from Project Zero themselves say "Visible Thinking includes a large number of classroom routines, easily and flexibly integrated with content learning, and representing areas of thinking such as understanding, truth and evidence, fairness and moral reasoning, creativity, self-management, and decision making. It also provides tools for integrating the arts with subject-matter content. Finally, it includes a practical framework for how to create "cultures of thinking" in individual classrooms and within an entire school."
Aaron Davis

How do you know if effective teaching is occurring in your school? | Educational Leader... - 0 views

  • Apart from just observation, which is very important, what rigorous processes can we implement to reflect upon and use to answer this question?
  • The analysis of the information collected is not intended to give individual feedback to teachers but to provide whole school information about strengths and weaknesses in the implementation of formative assessment strategies.
  • A high level of trust among staff is important to ensure the authenticity and success of the Walkthrough process. It is seen as a supportive way to ensure that we hold each other accountable for achieving our scoreboard.
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  • Raising the performance of our entire teaching team is the focus as well as each teacher taking individual responsibility for improving their implementation of quality teaching practices.
Aaron Davis

You have a Class Blog - Now what? | Celia's reflections - 0 views

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    A great discussion about classroom blogs and how to get the most out of them.
Aaron Davis

10 ways to make meetings (and lessons) meaningful… | What Ed Said - 0 views

  • Does every meeting in your school relate to or result in learning?
  • Does every lesson in your classroom contribute to meaningful learning, rather than completion of work?
  • ‘Have you ever had to sit through a whole hour when you felt like the substance of the meeting could have been handled in five minutes?’
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  • 3 Have we incorporated feedback from previous meetings?
  • 1. Have we identified clear and important meeting objectives that contribute to the goal of improving learning?
  • 2. Have we established the connection between the work of this and other meetings in the series?
  • 8. Have we put time allocations to each activity on the agenda?
  • ‘Have you planned a thoughtful meeting only to have it derailed by a couple of rogues participants who have their own agendas?’
  • 5. Have we built in time to identify and commit to next steps?
  • 6. Have we built in time for assessment of what worked and what didn’t in the meeting?
  • 7. Have we gathered or developed materials that will help to focus and advance the meeting objectives?
  • 4. Have we chosen challenging activities that advance the meeting objectives and engage all participants?
  • 9. Have we ensured that we will address the primary objective early in the meeting? 
  • 10. Is it realistic that we could get through our agenda in the time allocated?
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    A great post from Edna Sackson about the possibilities and potentials associated with improving meetings (and lessons)
Aaron Davis

Questions to Ask Oneself While Designing Learning Activities | User Generated Education - 0 views

  • Here are some questions I ask myself as I go through this process: Will the learning activities provide learners with opportunities to tap into their own personal interests and passions? Will the learning activities offer the learners the chance to put them “selves” into their work? Will the learning activities provide learners with opportunities to express themselves using their own authentic voices? Will the learners find the learning activities engaging? interesting? relevant? useful? What “cool” technologies can be used to help meet both the instructional and the learners’ goals? Will the learning activities provide learners with opportunities to have fun and to play? Will learners be able to do at least some of the work independently? Will the learning activities give all of the learners opportunities to shine? Will the learners get the chance to share their work with other learners, with a more global audience?
Aaron Davis

The perils of “Growth Mindset” education: Why we’re trying to fix our... - 0 views

  • By now, the growth mindset has approached the status of a cultural meme.
  • Regardless of their track record, kids tend to do better in the future if they believe that how well they did in the past was primarily a result of effort.But “how well they did” at what?
  • even some people who are educators would rather convince students they need to adopt a more positive attitude than address the quality of the curriculum (what the students are being taught) or the pedagogy (how they’re being taught it).
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  • An awful lot of schooling still consists of making kids cram forgettable facts into short-term memory. And the kids themselves are seldom consulted about what they’re doing, even though genuine excitement about (and proficiency at) learning rises when they’re brought into the process, invited to search for answers to their own questions and to engage in extended projects.
  • the most salient feature of a positive judgment is not that it’s positive but that it’s a judgment; i
  • the first problem with this seductively simple script change is that praising children for their effort carries problems of its own, as several studies have confirmed: It can communicate that they’re really not very capable and therefore unlikely to succeed at future tasks. (“If you’re complimenting me just for trying hard, I must really be a loser.”)
  • what’s really problematic is praise itself. It’s a verbal reward, an extrinsic inducement, and, like other rewards, is often construed by the recipient as manipulation.
  • books, articles, TED talks, and teacher-training sessions devoted to the wonders of adopting a growth mindset rarely bother to ask whether the curriculum is meaningful, whether the pedagogy is thoughtful, or whether the assessment of students’ learning is authentic (as opposed to defining success merely as higher scores on dreadful standardized tests).
  • the series of Dweck’s studies on which she still relies to support the idea of praising effort, which she conducted with Claudia Mueller in the 1990s, included no condition in which students received nonevaluative feedback. Other researchers have found that just such a response — information about how they’ve done without a judgment attached — is preferable to any sort of praise.
  • We need to attend to deeper differences: between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and between “doing to” and “working with” strategies.
  • Dweck’s work nestles comfortably in a long self-help tradition, the American can-do, just-adopt-a-positive-attitude spirit.(“I think I can, I think I can…”) The message of that tradition has always been to adjust yourself to conditions as you find them because those conditions are immutable; all you can do is decide on the spirit in which to approach them. Ironically, the more we occupy ourselves with getting kids to attribute outcomes to their own effort, the more we communicate that the conditions they face are, well, fixed.
  • It isn’t entirely coincidental that someone who is basically telling us that attitudes matter more than structures, or that persistence is a good in itself, has also bought into a conservative social critique. But why have so many educators who don’t share that sensibility endorsed a focus on mindset (or grit) whose premises and implications they’d likely find troubling on reflection?
  • the real alternative to that isn’t a different attitude about oneself; it’s a willingness to go beyond individual attitudes, to realize that no mindset is a magic elixir that can dissolve the toxicity of structural arrangements. Until those arrangements have been changed, mindset will get you only so far. And too much focus on mindset discourages us from making such changes.
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    "An awful lot of schooling still consists of making kids cram forgettable facts into short-term memory. And the kids themselves are seldom consulted about what they're doing, even though genuine excitement about (and proficiency at) learning rises when they're brought into the process, invited to search for answers to their own questions and to engage in extended projects. Outstanding classrooms and schools - with a rich documentary record of their successes - show that the quality of education itself can be improved. But books, articles, TED talks, and teacher-training sessions devoted to the wonders of adopting a growth mindset rarely bother to ask whether the curriculum is meaningful, whether the pedagogy is thoughtful, or whether the assessment of students' learning is authentic (as opposed to defining success merely as higher scores on dreadful standardized tests). "
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