Skip to main content

Home/ Middle School Matters/ Group items tagged Class

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Troy Patterson

16 Modern Realities Schools (and Parents) Need to Accept. Now. - Modern Learning - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...eed-to-accept-now-64b98710e4e9

msm332

shared by Troy Patterson on 23 May 16 - No Cached
  • What’s happened to get people thinking and talking about “different” instead of “better?”
  • The Web and the technologies that drive it are fundamentally changing the way we think about how we can learn and become educated in a globally networked and connected world. It has absolutely exploded our ability to learn on our own in ways that schools weren’t built for.
  • In that respect, current systems of schooling are an increasingly significant barrier to progress when it comes to learning.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The middleman is vanishing as peer to peer interactions flourish. Teachers no longer stand between the content and the student. This will change the nature of the profession.
  • Technology is no longer an option when it comes to learning at mastery levels.
  • Curriculum is just a guess, and now that we have access to so much information and knowledge, the current school curriculum bucket represents (as Seymour Papert suggests) “one-billionth of one percent” of all there is to know. Our odds of choosing the “right” mix for all of our kids’ futures are infinitesimal.
  • The skills, literacies, and dispositions required to navigate this increasingly complex and change filled world are much different from those stressed in the current school curriculum.
  • In fact, instead of being delivered by an institution, curriculum is now constructed and negotiated in real time by learner and the contributions of those engaged in the learning process, whether in the classroom our out.
  • “High stakes” learning is now about doing real work for real audiences, not taking a standardized subject matter test.
  • While important, the 4Cs of creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication are no longer enough. Being able to connect to other learners worldwide and to use computing applications to solve problems are the two additional “Cs” required in the modern world.
  • Our children will live and work in a much more transparent world as tools to publish pictures, video, and texts become more accessible and more ubiquitous. Their online reputations must be built and managed.
  • Workers in the future will not “find employment;” Employment will find them. Or they will create their own.
  • Embracing and adapting to change must be in the modern skill set.
Troy Patterson

10+ Tips for Using Brain Based Methods to Redesign Your Classroom | EdSurge News - 0 views

www.edsurge.com/...ods-to-redesign-your-classroom

msm324 studentinvolvement

shared by Troy Patterson on 05 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • As adults, we make choices daily. We choose where we eat, where we sit at the table, what we order, how much we eat, what we watch or don’t watch on television, what time we go to bed, and more. As teachers, we want our students to be decisive—but how much choice do we truly allow students to make?
  • A good friend of mine often reminds me that we aren’t raising a class of second graders, but in fact, we are raising future adults.
Troy Patterson

Teachers must ditch 'neuromyth' of learning styles, say scientists | Education | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...entists-neuroscience-education

msm353 neuroscience pedagogy learningstyles

shared by Troy Patterson on 23 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Teaching children according to their individual “learning style” does not achieve better results and should be ditched by schools in favour of evidence-based practice, according to leading scientists.
  • They say it is ineffective, a waste of resources and potentially even damaging as it can lead to a fixed approach that could impair pupils’ potential to apply or adapt themselves to different ways of learning.
Shawn McGirr

Three Ring | An App for Teachers to Create Educational Portfolios of Student Work with ... - 1 views

threering.com

shared by Shawn McGirr on 10 May 12 - No Cached
  • Shawn McGirr on 10 May 12
     
    You can pull up a student's work for parent-teacher conferences, administrative meetings, formative assessment, or use as exemplars. How it works: With your smartphone, you can take a photo and tag it before you upload it. Take a picture while in class or grading.
Ron King

From a Math Class: Idea for Reassessment - 0 views

fromamathclass.blogspot.com/...idea-for-reassessment.html

SBG Assessment Reassessment

shared by Ron King on 03 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 03 Aug 12
     
    A reassessment idea for those using standards based grading (SBG).
Troy Patterson

How the Ballpoint Pen Changed Handwriting - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...402205

handwriting msm310

shared by Troy Patterson on 31 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • I can’t recall the last time I saw students passing actual paper notes in class, but I clearly remember students checking their phones (recently and often).
  • Despite the proliferation of handwriting eulogies, it seems that no one is really arguing against the fact that everyone still writes—we just tend to use unjoined print rather than a fluid Palmerian style, and we use it less often.
  • My experience with fountain pens suggests a new answer. Perhaps it’s not digital technology that hindered my handwriting, but the technology that I was holding as I put pen to paper. Fountain pens want to connect letters. Ballpoint pens need to be convinced to write, need to be pushed into the paper rather than merely touch it.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Sassoon’s analysis of how we’re taught to hold pens makes a much stronger case for the role of the ballpoint in the decline of cursive.
Troy Patterson

Updating Data-Driven Instruction and the Practice of Teaching | Larry Cuban on School R... - 0 views

larrycuban.wordpress.com/...n-and-the-practice-of-teaching

msm292 reform data

shared by Troy Patterson on 27 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • I am talking about data-driven instruction–a way of making teaching less subjective, more objective, less experience-based, more scientific.
  • Data-driven instruction, advocates say, is scientific and consistent with how successful businesses have used data for decades to increase their productivity.
  • Of course, teachers had always assessed learning informally before state- and district-designed tests. Teachers accumulated information (oops! data) from pop quizzes, class discussions, observing students in pairs and small groups, and individual conferences.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Based on these data, teachers revised lessons. Teachers leaned heavily on their experience with students and the incremental learning they had accumulated from teaching 180 days, year after year.
  • Teachers’ informal assessments of students gathered information directly and  would lead to altered lessons.
  • In the 1990s and, especially after No Child Left Behind became law in 2002, the electronic gathering of data, disaggregating information by groups and individuals, and then applying lessons learned from analysis of tests and classroom practices became a top priority.
  • Now, principals and teachers are awash in data.
  • How do teachers use the massive data available to them on student performance?
  • studied four elementary school grade-level teams in how they used data to improve lessons. She found that supportive principals and superintendents and habits of collaboration increased use of data to alter lessons in two of the cases but not in the other two.
  • Julie Marsh and her colleagues found 15 where teachers used annual tests, for example, in basic ways to target weaknesses in professional development or to schedule double periods of language arts for English language learners.
  • These researchers admitted, however, that they could not connect student achievement to the 36 instances of basic to complex data-driven decisions  in these two districts.
  • Of these studies, the expert panel found 64 that used experimental or quasi-experimental designs and only six–yes, six–met the Institute of Education Sciences standard for making causal claims about data-driven decisions improving student achievement. When reviewing these six studies, however, the panel found “low evidence” (rather than “moderate” or “strong” evidence) to support data-driven instruction. In short, the assumption that data-driven instructional decisions improve student test scores is, well, still an assumption not a fact.
  • Numbers may be facts. Numbers may be objective. Numbers may smell scientific. But we give meaning to these numbers. Data-driven instruction may be a worthwhile reform but as an evidence-based educational practice linked to student achievement, rhetoric notwithstanding, it is not there yet.
Troy Patterson

Differentiation Doesn't Work - Education Week - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...fferentiation-doesnt-work.html

msm294 differentiation education

shared by Troy Patterson on 06 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Let's review the educational cure-alls of past decades: back to basics, the open classroom, whole language, constructivism, and E.D. Hirsch's excruciatingly detailed accounts of what every 1st or 3rd grader should know, to name a few.
  • Starting with the gifted-education community in the late 1960s, differentiation didn't get its mojo going until regular educators jumped onto the bandwagon in the 1980s.
  • Differentiation is a failure, a farce, and the ultimate educational joke played on countless educators and students.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • In theory, differentiation sounds great, as it takes several important factors of student learning into account: • It seeks to determine what students already know and what they still need to learn. • It allows students to demonstrate what they know through multiple methods. • It encourages students and teachers to add depth and complexity to the learning/teaching process.
  • Although fine in theory, differentiation in practice is harder to implement in a heterogeneous classroom than it is to juggle with one arm tied behind your back.
  • 'We couldn't answer the question ... because no one was actually differentiating,'
  • "In every case, differentiated instruction seemed to complicate teachers' work, requiring them to procure and assemble multiple sets of materials, … and it dumbed down instruction."
  • It seems that, when it comes to differentiation, teachers are either not doing it at all, or beating themselves up for not doing it as well as they're supposed to be doing it. Either way, the verdict is clear: Differentiation is a promise unfulfilled, a boondoggle of massive proportions.
  • The biggest reason differentiation doesn't work, and never will, is the way students are deployed in most of our nation's classrooms.
  • It seems to me that the only educators who assert that differentiation is doable are those who have never tried to implement it themselves: university professors, curriculum coordinators, and school principals.
  • Differentiation is a cheap way out for school districts to pay lip service to those who demand that each child be educated to his or her fullest potential.
  • Do we expect an oncologist to be able to treat glaucoma?
  • Do we expect a criminal prosecutor to be able to decipher patent law?
  • Do we expect a concert pianist to be able to play the clarinet equally well?
  • No, no, no.
  • However, when the education of our nation's young people is at stake, we toss together into one classroom every possible learning strength and disability and expect a single teacher to be able to work academic miracles with every kid … as long as said teacher is willing to differentiate, of course.
  • A second reason that differentiation has been a failure is that we're not exactly sure what it is we are differentiating: Is it the curriculum or the instructional methods used to deliver it? Or both?
  • The terms "differentiated instruction" and "differentiated curriculum" are used interchangeably, yet they are not synonyms.
  • Differentiation might have a chance to work if we are willing, as a nation, to return to the days when students of similar abilities were placed in classes with other students whose learning needs paralleled their own. Until that time, differentiation will continue to be what it has become: a losing proposition for both students and teachers, and yet one more panacea that did not pan out.
Troy Patterson

Public schools aren't failing | CharlotteObserver.com - 0 views

www.charlotteobserver.com/...lic-schools-arent-failing.html

msm299

shared by Troy Patterson on 08 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • In fact, both show that American public school children are doing remarkably well.
  • For example, the NCES report shows that in schools with less than 25 percent poverty rates, American children scored higher in reading than any other children in the world. In. The. World.
  • The takeaway is simple. Our middle-class and wealthy public school children are thriving. Poor children are struggling, not because their schools are failing but because they come to school with all the well-documented handicaps that poverty imposes – poor prenatal care, developmental delays, hunger, illness, homelessness, emotional and mental illnesses, and so on.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • public school children outscored their private school counterparts, and nationally, charters are outperformed by traditional schools the majority of the time.
  • “the charter school movement [is] quickly becoming a backdoor for corporate profit.”
  • research is clear that money spent addressing the issues of child poverty are the most effective way to move test scores up
  • “Nobody understands the challenges and shortcomings of American schools better than the people who have dedicated their lives to them.” Yet educators are rarely asked for their expertise.
  • If policy makers were to listen to educators – and to students and parents – they would hear that the real crisis in public education is the loss of our collective commitment to the common good.
Troy Patterson

8 Ways to Level Up Game Based Learning in the Classroom - 0 views

www.coolcatteacher.com/ased-learning-in-the-classroom

msm315 gaming

shared by Troy Patterson on 21 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • 1. Make Your Whole Class a Game Experience
  • 2. Engage with Minecraft: Let Kids Build in the Sandbox
  • 4. Play Games for Social Good: Have a Point, Don’t Just Earn Them
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 3. Build a Game Experience into Learning: Live It and Learn It
  • 5. Game Based Platforms for Learning
  • 6. Experience Learning: Immerse Yourself in the Experience
  • 7. Go Offline or Outside: You Don’t Need Tech to Teach
  • 8. Create Solutions as You Learn: Gifts from the Hour of Code
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 60 of 68 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page