The most motivating factors are getting genuinely better at something, and getting recognised by those around us. Mastery and relationships motivate most.
we’re bribing students into compliance instead of challenging them into mastery
The most motivating factors are getting genuinely better at something, and getting recognised by those around us. Mastery and relationships motivate most.
Most people don't know what it looks like when they do what they do."
Instructional coaches are not evaluators. They are not a mole for administration, and the conversations they have with teachers are confidential. Their purpose is to help work with teachers and bring them to the next level.
This is about two adults working together on a goal, and the instructional coach providing effective feedback on how to meet that goal. It is not about a "gotcha" but it is about becoming a better teacher without the fear that the hammer is going to drop at any minute.
"Instructional coaches who operate from the partnership principles enter relationships with teachers believing that the knowledge and expertise of teachers is as important as the knowledge and expertise of the coach."
Absolutely. When we think about writing at the National Writing Project, we think about multimodal composition: words, audio, video, graphic texts, etc. That said, no one is abandoning words. We’re just acknowledging that today your ability to create and publish, say, a video affords opportunities for expression that go beyond just words.
Yes, absolutely. Whether in email, texts, or posting status updates, most people in the world are probably writing and publishing more words, images, video and audio now than ever before. Facebook is one of the biggest publishing platforms in the world. It’s word dependent, but it also includes audio and video—and creating audio and video are deeply compositional. The question is how can we take advantage of the fact that so many people are now creating and circulating content to improve teaching and learning.
Going public and writing for an audience is something we always cared about. Maybe the real shift is that now it’s easier and more expansive.
There’s a very narrow band of writing that is assessed in schools, and a lot is at stake on that narrow field. So the question is how do we balance helping young people do well in assessment contexts with the other stuff that might actually take them fuarther in the world?
You mentioned earlier about teachers needing to have digital lives—why is that important to connected learning?
We don’t want to just say to educators, “You do these fives steps and you’ll have active, enquiring learners.” That’s forgetting that the teacher is also a learner. We think if we have active, enquiring, connected, engaged adults, they’ll transfer that culture or learning and inquiry to young people.
How do we link what we’re learning about the creative opportunities in new digital environments to how people engage and learn in their communities and in society at large?
“We’ve added a critical new chapter to the story about music and education,” says Kraus. “Due to the overlap between neural circuits dedicated to speech and music, and the distributed network of cognitive, sensorimotor, and reward circuits engaged during music making, it would appear that music training is a particularly potent driver of experience-dependent plasticity in the brain that influences processing of sound related to academics.”
A group of Canadian scientists who specialize in learning, memory, and language in children think so. They've found evidence that pre-schoolers can improve their verbal intelligence after only 20 days of classroom instruction using interactive musical cartoons.
"From an early age, we need to give digital literacy as much importance as numeracy and literacy.
"While we welcome the introduction of the computing curriculum, we are concerned about the ability of teachers to deliver it - with more than half of our IT teachers not having a post-A-level qualification relevant to IT.