Skip to main content

Home/ MVIFI Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation/ Group items tagged groups

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Meghan Cureton

Grades Suffer When Class Time Doesn't Match Students' Biological Clocks - Inside School... - 1 views

blogs.edweek.org/...es_suffer_when_class_time.html

Learning schedule neuroscience sleep brain

shared by Meghan Cureton on 04 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • "An important piece of the story is that it's not just about making the life of a teenager easier by saying maybe we can make classes later," said Benjamin Smarr, a postdoctoral psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley who studies circadian rhythm disruptions and learning.
  • As it turned out, taking a class schedule mismatched to your biological clock took a toll on students' grades, as the chart below shows. 
  • Early-rising "larks" had a grade advantage in morning classes, they found. Night owls performed better in afternoon and early evening classes, but the researchers also found these students tended to struggle more than those with earlier circadian rhythms in general. The researchers believe this was because their schedules were the farthest off "normal" class schedules, and the actual class times often varied significantly from day to day, making it difficult for these students to develop any consistency.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Most high schools don't really have the option to make multiple sessions of the same class at different times, but Smarr said for those who use software that can track the timing of students' activity, it may be worth getting a sense of when different groups of students are likely to be most alert when scheduling core classes. Other forms of technology may also help, he said, allowing students to access classes or rewatch lectures at different times of the day.
T.J. Edwards

What IS the difference between competencies and standards? | reDesign - 2 views

www.redesignu.org/een-competencies-and-standards

shared by T.J. Edwards on 23 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Competencies, on the other hand, tend to emphasize the application of skills, knowledge and dispositions rather than content knowledge.
  • Competency-based models approach content as the backdrop, while putting essential skills and dispositions front and center. In this way, content serves as the context for practicing and demonstrating “transferable” competencies that can be applied in different contexts.
  • In competency-based models, the entire system must change. Students advance upon mastery  when they are ready, not when an arbitrary academic calendar suggests that they should be.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Optimally, competencies are broad enough that student pathways and demonstrations of proficiency can be vastly different, organized to encourage and nurture student passions and questions.
  • Competencies sit above standards in terms of grain size.
  • competencies tend to encompass an interrelated set of skills, knowledge, aptitudes, and/or capacities.
  • competencies are often constructed as groupings of related skills or attributes that are purposefully designed to be explicit, measurable, transferable, and empowering to students
  • Competencies define skills that are practiced and developed continuously. They are not “one and done,” like many standards, which are course-based and attached to specific grade levels or bands.
  • in truly competency-based systems, PLDs are not attached to specific grade levels
  • we believe strongly that we must guard against tying PLDs to age-based grades or cohorts.
  • PLDs are guideposts to mastery
  • When learning outcomes are defined in terms of the application of skills or the synthesis and creation of new knowledge, we’re then talking about a much more sophisticated assessment type
  • competence is about successful application of skills and knowledge to achieve a particular purpose, not simply to show basic levels of understanding
  • In a true competency-based system, students can’t fail. Instead, students receive concrete and specific feedback on their work, and are provided with opportunities for additional practice and support in order to develop and demonstrate growth in their competencies.
  • Mastery-based grading and promotion policies are radically different in competency-based systems because promotion is based on mastery of specific skills, not on completion of courses made up of arbitrary and highly varied bundles of content, skills, and concepts.
  • As competency-based education gains ground in formal K-12 schooling, there is a very real chance that the movement could lose the “spirit” of its intent and become yet another, albeit more refined, form of standards-based learning
  • In competency-based models, performance level descriptors (PLDs) clarify the developmental journey from novice-to-expert or to "mastery."
  • Quite differently, competency-based models reach back centuries, with early apprenticeship learning that created pathways for mastery and gainful employment. Think: Medieval craft guilds, masonry, baking, carpentry, shoemaking.
Meghan Cureton

How to Design a School That Prioritizes Kindness and Caring | MindShift | KQED News - 1 views

ww2.kqed.org/...rioritizes-kindness-and-caring

advisory kindness character

shared by Meghan Cureton on 10 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • You can’t just snap your fingers, and show a video, and it’s done,” she said. Rather, the school needed to adopt a philosophy of kindness that was “infused and woven through
  • initiatives had to seem to come from within, organically
  • They also do a “mix-it-up” exercise, borrowed from Borba’s book, that moves students around in advisory groups to blend grade levels. And to get teacher buy-in, select students attend occasional faculty meetings to share what excites them about their project and how their classmates are responding.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Simple changes can have an outsized effect. Knowing the names of all the students in school, being generous with “hellos,” and encouraging teachers to greet every student by name in class, for example, are low-burden but powerful exercises,
  • “kindness strategies” are short and focused, rooted in relationships, carried out repeatedly, and related to actual events in school,
  • Two of the most fruitful exercises Carrollwood Day embraced, both borrowed from the Harvard project, were “Circle of Concern” and “Relationship Mapping.”
Meghan Cureton

ChangeLeaders Community - 0 views

www.changeleaders.community/...1372192

learning community

shared by Meghan Cureton on 29 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • How often do you see learners being ‘blamed’ for not understanding a challenging idea or concept, rather than that being a reflection on the teaching? To what extent is the learning architecture of our schools, the grading, grouping, and scheduling really allowing our students to learn most deeply and powerfully?
  • The reality is that today’s schools were simply never designed to change proactively and deeply —they were built for discipline and efficiency, enforced through hierarchy and routinization.    
  • It comes down to reframing our understanding of schools as learning organizations.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But how much evidence do you have that your colleagues also see themselves as learners, be they teachers, principals or superintendents? How open and transparent are they about their learning? About what and how they are learning? And what and how do they learn from their mistakes? Being vulnerable, transparent and open are now prerequisites for modern leaders who are true learners
  • And finally, what about you? What have you learned about your learning? How self-aware are you about how you learn? How do you learn best, and what are the conditions that make that possible for you?
Nicole Martin

Before You Study, Ask for Help - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...arter-ways-to-study-1502810531

shared by Nicole Martin on 04 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • planning ahead, quizzing themselves on the material and actively seeking out help when they don’t understand it.
  • pick out the main points in their notes
  • I was teaching her while simultaneously teaching myself” the material—a study technique that enabled her to ace the test.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • High-achieving students take charge of their own learning and ask for help when they’re stuck,
  • sought out extra study aids
  • asked instructors for help during office hours
  • self-regulated learning: the capacity to track how well you’re doing in your classes and hold yourself accountable for reaching goals.
  • Top students spend more time in retrieval practice, he says—quizzing themselves or each other, which forces them to recall facts and concepts just as they must do on tests. This leads to deeper learning, often in a shorter amount of time, a pattern researchers call the testing effect.
    • Nicole Martin
      Nicole Martin on 04 Jan 18
       
      Students who struggle with retrieval need even more specific guidance than this.
  • Students who formed study groups and quizzed each other weekly on material presented in class
  • Studying in general tends to be more productive when it’s done in short segments of 45 minutes or so rather than over several hours,
  • doing practice problems repeatedly until he no longer needed his notes to solve them—a highly effective strategy.
  • Many teachers in middle and high school try to teach good study habits, but the lessons often don’t stick unless students are highly motivated to try them
‹ Previous 21 - 26 of 26
Showing 20▼ items per page