Skip to main content

Home/ Teacher Professional Development/ Group items tagged publishing

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Teachers Without Borders

Standardized Test Scores Can Improve When Kids Told They Can Fail, Study Finds - 1 views

  • As it turns out, Alcala's students aren't the only ones who can benefit from exercises like "my favorite no." A new study by two French researchers published in the Journal of Psychology: General shows how telling students that failure is a natural element of learning -- instead of pressuring them to succeed -- may increase their academic performance.
  • "We wanted to show that even if you put children in a situation where there's no pressure, the simple fact that they're confronted with difficulty could trigger a disruption in their performance."
  • To verify this hypothesis, Croizet and Autin conducted three studies among sixth graders in their city, Poitiers. In one experiment, they gave 111 sixth graders an impossible set of anagrams to solve. Then Autin told one group of kids that "learning is difficult and failure is common," but hard work will help, "like riding a bicycle." Autin asked a second group of kids how they attacked the problems after the test. When both groups, plus a control group, then took an exam that measured working memory -- a capacity often used to predict IQ -- the students Autin had counseled performed "significantly better" than both groups, especially on the tougher questions.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • He noted that similar studies in the U.S. have found that college students perform better after reading positive messages, and that he replicated the experiment by having older students tell younger students that they should "expect middle school to be difficult but doable" -- and found that state test scores increased dramatically.
  • The researchers also found that test relaxation techniques that seem obvious to most teachers, such as telling students that they can perform well, can actually make kids more anxious -- and thus perform at lower levels. "It makes sense to me," Alcala, the Berkeley teacher, said of the study. "I've been doing it [my favorite no] for four years now, and my kids' understanding is significantly better than before, as measured by test scores."
Emily Vickery

Transitions at Work » Archive » Commentary: Tuckman's team model (forming, st... - 0 views

  • American psychologist Bruce W. Tuckman developed an influential model of team development, first enunciated in a 1965 article “Developmental sequence in small groups,” published in Psychological Bulletin. Tuckman’s model traced the evolution of a team through four stages: forming, storming, norming and performing. Tuckman argued that these stages were necessary to build an effective team.
Emily Vickery

Bloom's Taxonomy - Emerging Perspectives on Learning, Teaching and Technology - 0 views

  • During the 1990's, a former student of Bloom's, Lorin Anderson, led a new assembly which met for the purpose of updating the taxonomy, hoping to add relevance for 21st century students and teachers. This time "representatives of three groups [were present]: cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists and instructional researchers, and testing and assessment specialists" (Anderson, & Krathwohl, 2001, p. xxviii). Like the original group, they were also arduous and diligent in their pursuit of learning, spending six years to finalize their work. Published in 2001, the revision includes several seemingly minor yet actually quite significant changes. Several excellent sources are available which detail the revisions and reasons for the changes. A more concise summary appears here. The changes occur in three broad categories: terminology, structure, and emphasis.
Teachers Without Borders

UPDATED: Keeping Cultural Ties Helps Mexican-American Pupils Succeed - Learning the Lan... - 1 views

  • A new study from the University of Missouri suggests that Mexican-Americans in U.S. schools fare better when they maintain a connection to their heritage. "Culture Predicts Mexican Americans' College Self-Efficacy and College Performance," published in the journal Culture and College Outcomes, shows that Mexican-Americans who continued to speak Spanish and remained attached to their cultural heritage had higher GPAs and were more successful in college.
  • He spoke about the importance of educators understanding cultural differences: "Educators need to be aware of students' home lives," Aguayo said. "Immigrant parents, in particular, tend to put more trust in educators, rather than being involved in the child's education like we normally see in the U.S. If educators can take the time to learn about the parents' culture, the educators can have a positive impact on the students' future."
  • The study adds another voice to the conversation about best practices for teaching ELLs. Arayo says that his results indicate that English-only education may hurt some students: "I understand the reasons behind English-only efforts, but the research shows that if we don't accept the cultural identity of these students in our schools, such as tolerating their native language, Mexican-Americans may not succeed."
Teachers Without Borders

What Teachers Have Learned - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • What we need are teachers who are much more competent in their subject areas!
  • I’ve seen many teachers ‘bomb’ over the years because they knew their subject matter, but not how to interact with, or be a role model for, children.
  • I am a 21-year veteran teacher who took a whole boatload of education courses in furtherance of my BA and MS degrees. They were utterly useless. The only thing that actually prepared me for teaching was student teaching. All of the other courses taught theory, but nothing practical.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • In my opinion, the effectiveness of a teacher is almost impossible to predict until you see them in the classroom for quite a while. Also, a person’s educational background and pre-selection (masters/no masters/Ph.D./Teach for America/Teaching Fellows) cannot predict how they will succeed in the classroom.
  • Empathy is what enables a teacher (or any leader, in truth) to know, in every moment, what a child needs. They know when to call on a student and when not to, when a child has problems at home, when they need to raise the bar and when to lower it.
  • Watching a great teacher interact with students is as inspiring as watching an Olympic athlete. It’s an intuitive and emotional gift and it can’t be taught or instilled with any certification. The degrees mostly just enable educators to speak a common language — a necessary aspect of a profession.
  • As a former teacher I find it interesting that all the focus is on teacher preparation. Nothing was said about class size or collaboration with other teachers. It is assumed that one teacher, in front of a class, is the answer.
  • I believe that the best preparation for teaching is a combination of pedagogy and a strong apprenticeship — a marriage of traditional preparatory and alternative certification programs. All new teachers would benefit from a year of full-time work in the classroom beside an experienced and effective teacher.
  • I left the field because I couldn’t stand this version of corruption, where everyone tries to do the easiest thing instead of the right thing.
  • Pedagogy is fine and good when you’re in academia; however, most of the education school professors haven’t been in a classroom in 20 years and have no idea what works and what doesn’t.
  • That said, I have taken professional development coursework offered through local education schools that were absolutely laughable. Sitting through a 5 hour session that culminated in making a caterpillar from an egg carton is a waste of time. I went to learn how to produce higher rates of literacy in English Language Learners — not how to produce a cute craft of little practical value.
  • I was voted as “Teacher of the Year” at the High School I teach at, and I have never taken an Education course. I have a Master’s degree in Engineering. After 20 years in industry, I became a Math and Physics teacher through the alternate route to certification here in Vermont. I have written a published article comparing the difficulties and joys of teaching with those in industry (For the Love of Kids).
  • I have come to the conclusion that an Education degree for teachers and especially for administrators is a detriment to the education of students, not an asset. How much better to bring real life experience to the classroom than the rote prescriptions taught in the Education classes.
  • teachers should be given comparable credits for spending the summer interning for an NGO or a business.
  • This means that almost all schools would rather have a student right out of college with a teaching major and no real world experience than someone who has 20+ years of working in the real world.
  • I wasn’t the best at classroom management, but then I wasn’t so terrible at it either. I was turning into an automaton, and just as alarmingly, my students were too.
1 - 6 of 6
Showing 20 items per page