Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"Generally teachers don't like traditional observations and they don't often result in significant improvements. Video transforms lesson observations, turning them on their head."

"...the most important thing about using video for CPD purposes is to get away from the idea of video as a management tool, and embrace it as something that you as an individual teacher can have control of."

"The idea is for teachers to start by self-reflecting, and once you are confident in doing so you can share videos with colleagues and develop coaching and mentoring relationships which are more productive and genuinely result in classroom based improvements."

Dr. Tony Wagner, co-director of Harvard's Change Leadership Group has identified what he calls a "global achievement gap," which is the leap between what even our best schools are teaching, and the must-have skills of the future:Critical thinking and problem-solvingCollaboration across networks and leading by influenceAgility and adaptabilityInitiative and entrepreneurialismEffective oral and written communicationAccessing and analyzing informationCuriosity and imagination

Shared this a couple of months ago...worth another look.

And we're thrilled to have Tony Wagner as the keynote for the Rowland Foundation's 2nd Annual Conference on School Transformation! You can preview The Global Achievement Gap here: http://books.google.com/books?ei=AWNyT-eMBOXe0gG5tsW9AQ&id=_4zBmOBP9uwC&dq=tony+wagner&q=personalization#v=onepage&q&f=false

This manual contains an introduction, three training sections, and an appendix with supplemental materials: I. How Students Benefit from Parent Involvement II. Understanding Your School III. How ... Parents Become Involved IV. Appendix

To provide an overview of the key elements of parent involvement from...

To provide a suggested format for training...

The "Collaborating for Success" Parent Engagement Toolkit is designed to provide parents with practical strategies for getting engaged in schools, and to offer schools research-based approaches to overcoming barriers to parental engagement. Parents will find strategies and information that will encourage their future or current involvement with their children's schools. The school-related approaches will support the development of new parent programs or the enhancement of existing ones.

Video of keynote address by Sir Ken Robinson at the 2011 Rowland Foundation Conference on High School Transformation. Worth a second listen.

May we have the password to gain access?

Hello Karen and others looking for the SKR video, We will be putting that video back up this week. We will also be posting that password for all Rowland Diigo members. We will also be looking to suss a few key points from the keynote. These will then be posted as short 4 to 5 minute clips.

"How have your best teachers inspired, engaged, encouraged and challenged you?" Teens on the staff of New Youth Connections magazine were asked to think this over - then they gathered for a group discussion about the best learning experiences they've had.

Top 10 Pieces of Advice from Students for Teachers 1. Be pushy. 2. Make the lesson relevant to our lives. 3. Be relatable, but please don't say: "It's time to dip, y'all!" 4. Teach us with words, sights, and sounds. 5. Be consistent and firm. 6. Believe in us. 7. Explain, explain, explain. 8. Use our time wisely. 9. Have clear objectives, clearly communicated.

There are four big benefits of flex models: Competency-based: Students progress based on demonstrated mastery; they use cohort groups and teams when and where they are helpful. Customized experience: Flex models make it easy to customize the experience for each student. Portable and flexible: Students can take a flex school on the road for a family vacation or for a work or community-based learning experience. Productive operations: Flex models have the potential for more productive staffing and facilities solutions.

Lacks detail about HOW flex learning actually works, but the basic concept is appealing.

OK...I have been trying to avoid the incessant Steve Jobs idolatry. But, it is hard to not admire his thought processes. So, here is a quick read of one of the many inspirational pieces that are out there.

Master the message. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can't communicate your ideas, it doesn't matter.

See genius in your craziness, believe in yourself, believe in your vision, and be constantly prepared to defend those ideas.

Article based on The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the 5 Skills of Disruptive Innovators Focus on concluding three chapters, People, Processes, and Philosophies, which draw on and offers 15 takeaways for Principals and School-Leaders.

What You Can Do to Become Stronger Innovation Leaders in Your School: 1. Own as Principal the role of Innovator-in-Chief: You can't delegate innovation. 2. Make your practice of "active innovation" visible. 3. Create complementary teams in school leadership. 4 . Observe closely what other principals and schools are doing. 5. Arrange for employee swaps. 6. Ask "Why?" 7. Seek people who had invented something, held deep expertise in a particular knowledge area, and demonstrated a passion to change the world. 8. Remember that innovators want to work with and for other innovators. 9. Embed innovation as an explicit, consistent element of performance reviews. 10. Develop formal and informal processes to facilitate knowledge exchanges. 11. Network externally. 12. Practice Beta testing and Prototyping. 13. Build many small, diverse teams. 14. Communicate and reinforce that Innovation is everyone's job. 15. Make innovation an explicit core value of your school. 16. Give more time for innovation. 17. Create "a safe space for others to innovate. 18. Model your risk taking and your learning from failure.

The book is framed around the Five Core Skills of Innovators, a framework highly valuable for ourselves and our students: What are we doing to do more of and become better at *Associating, *Questioning, *Observing, *Networking, *Experimenting.

The 5 Attributes of Content Curation are … Seeking, Sorting, Synthesizing, Socializing, and Sharing. *Seeking is when students Identify, Investigate, Explore, and Inquire into an idea or question. *Sorting is when students Collect, Organize, and Contextualize those pieces that they discover. *Synthesizing is when those students then make Connections between information and ideas, when they Make Sense of these things and go on to Innovate and Create NEW information and ideas. *Socializing is when students Communicate, Collaborate, Revise, and Peer Assess as part of the LEARNING process. *Sharing is when students Propose ideas, solutions, and brand NEW questions. It is when they Publish and Present these things that show again as Dr. Wagner says…"What they can do with what they know."

"'The tests we rely on so heavily really don't measure creative thinking and they don't measure common sense thinking, wisdom, ethics, work ethic - they don't measure your character,' Sternberg said. In his view, students go to college to develop into active and engaged citizens. If colleges kept that ultimate goal in mind in their admissions process, it would send a message to high schools about the skills that universities value and want to see in prospective students."

"Science Leadership Academy (SLA), a public magnet high school in Philadelphia is a fairly young school, just eight years old. But in that short time, it's developed a reputation around the country as a shining example of the merits of inquiry-based learning approach. Colleges sometimes have a difficult time understanding the school's approach to developing autonomous, critical thinkers. For example, SLA doesn't offer Advanced Placement (AP) courses, because making students take a summative test at the end of the year is antithetical to the concept of allowing students to guide their own learning based on interest and collaborative work - and just as importantly, the value of the incremental learning process."

On the Minerva Project... "In fact, in the first year the students will take four courses: Multi-modal Communication, Complex Systems, Empirical Systems, and Computational Sciences. The intention is for traditionally separate subjects to be integrated if they involve complimentary skills. COMPETENCY-BASED UNIVERSITIES As the Minerva experiment develops, some existing universities are taking steps to award college credit based on skills learned, not the amount of time they've been enrolled."

"... one of the world's leading psychologists, Professor Carol Dweck visited the RSA to discuss how students' mindsets shape their motivation and learning. She discussed new research showing: a) how parents' and teachers' praise can create fixed mindsets and undermine children's motivation, b) how fixed-mindset school environments can decrease the representation of women and minorities, and c) how teaching students a growth mindset increases their success in school."

Is "grit" something that educators need to develop in students? Or rather, is grit inherent in all children? If so, instead of asking if it needs to be developed in their learning, should we be more introspective and work on not suppressing it through our teaching?

Praising a student on process and effort contributes to their learning and their desire to learn more. Praising success based on intelligence has the opposite effect...it actually inhibits growth. What implications does this have on how we assess student learning and communicate those assessments?

"Twitter has emerged both as an important source of news, information, and resources for educators, as well as a valuable way to engage in a meaningful professional learning network. This webinar will provide a useful overview of Twitter and how it can inform and support the ongoing development and networking of K- 12 educators." Webinar THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2013 | 3:00-4:00 PM EST

The Rural Trust's Global Teacher Fellowship program will be awarding up to 25 fellowships in 2014 to support the professional and personal development of rural teachers. The awards (up to $5,000 for individual teachers and $10,000 for a team of two or more teachers) support teachers' participation in self-designed summer learning experiences and a two-day place-based learning institute in the fall following their summer experience. This fellowship is a stand-alone grant not meant to supplement other grant funds for larger projects. Teachers are encouraged to center their learning in an international travel and study experience, out of which they develop interdisciplinary, place-based learning curricula aligned with their specific state and local content standards.

There are a number of Rowland fellows that might be able to use this to supplement / expand their existing work.

Laura Mina mentioned Maker-Spaces at the last planning meeting. It seemed that there were a few Fellows who had were interested and might have had a few questions. This short NPR piece is timely and includes some time around a BTV Maker Space.

"Maker spaces have become hotbeds of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. Now, governments, universities and big corporations are taking notice - and beginning to invest in them." I personally believe for a number of reasons that every Vermont HS should have a Maker Space. First it is a place to encourage interdisciplinary work centered around elements of PBL. Second, it would allow students to connect with their communities to solve real problems with real solutions. And finally and perhaps most importantly, because it would help move the idea of "Libraries" being places where students go to find Information...to being places to the idea that they are places where students go to Interact & Collaborate around Ideas.

"...Farm-Based Education Conference. The goal of the conference is to provide networking opportunities and support to the farm-based education community." There is a "scholarship" offered through the VT Dept. of Agriculture to attend the conference. Conference Scholarship

Often in groups such as this multiple variations of a tag topic are created by different users. To help ensure that our collective bookmarks are easily searchable, here is a list of preferred tags for the Rowland Foundation Group's library. When entering a tag that is more than one word, please use "quotes" around that tag. This will keep your tag singular, such as Achievement Gap rather than separating them into Achievement and Gap. Preferred Tags Achievement Gap Authentic Assessment Collaborative Teaching Community Partnerships Confrence document Experiential Education External Learning Opportunities Family and Parent Partnerships Formative Assessment Grant Opportunity PDF Place-based Education School Change Service Learning Sir Ken Robinson Student Voice Thematic Instruction video

Service-Learning can… 1. Improve character values and responsible behavior. 2. Improve academic outcomes for students. 3. Promote a sense of connectedness to the school and the community 4. Promote social-emotional skills. 5. Promote civic participation.

"...research indicates that service learning can: *increase students' personal, interpersonal and social development (Billig 2000) *increase motivation, student engagement, and school attendance (Billig 2000) *and, lead to new perspectives and more "positive lifestyle choices and behavior." (Civic Literacy Project 2005)"