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Jeffrey Plaman

Why Teacher Coaching Can Fail - Julie Boyd - 2 views

julieboyd.com.au/why-teacher-coaching-can-fail

coaching fail policy technology

shared by Jeffrey Plaman on 18 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Jeffrey Plaman on 18 Feb 13
     
    Coaching is a highly sophisticated form of reflective practice. When done well, it can transform a person's professional, and often personal, life, and provides many benefits to the employer in sustaining high performance and morale. The question is, however, whether it's the coaching itself that produces the results, or if it's down to an enlightened management team, which believes in people's development and so encourages coaching, which in turn produces results. When coaching is done badly, though, it has the power to decimate a person's sense of professional worth for years into the future and to incur substantial cost while returning no benefits, or worse, significant professional damage. Leadership can become cynical about the coaching process.  Money is wasted.  Time and attention are frittered away.  Ineffective coaching is counterproductive and should be stopped as soon as it is recognized.
  • James Dalziel on 19 Feb 13
     
    If we value coaching, and we do, the question then becomes: "what are the elements of effective coaching that we can train, support, measure, and improve" - especially those that have the highest leverage for shifting those being coached perspectives and practices. The more I come to understand the power of coaching the more I appreciate that the best leaders see their primary role within an organisation as an influencer and coaching as the structure behind the myriad of interactions. I think an enlightened management team would not only be encouraging coaches but utilizing coaching strategies themselves on a regular basis.
Jeffrey Plaman

Video Training and Online Learning | Today's Online Education - 0 views

www.grovo.com

tutorial education howto Internet e-learning tutorials

shared by Jeffrey Plaman on 19 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Jeffrey Plaman on 19 Mar 12
     
    Thousands of video lessons covering Internet products you love or didn't know about. Teach and learn from your friends.
Keri-Lee Beasley

Building a Better Teacher - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...07Teachers-t.html

nytimes article teaching education training howto professional_development

shared by Keri-Lee Beasley on 23 Feb 12 - Cached
  • Keri-Lee Beasley on 23 Feb 12
     
    Article from NY Times about a man who looked at successful teachers & wrote a book about 49 ways to become a better teacher. "He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach."
Sean McHugh

sines & wonders: The ten commandments of CPD - 1 views

sinesandwonders.blogspot.co.uk/...e-ten-commandments-of-cpd.html

cpd PD InSET training professional_development

shared by Sean McHugh on 04 Aug 13 - No Cached
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 04 Aug 13
       
      OK this guy is a bit of a twazzock, but there's no denying the truth of a lot of this, especially 7, 4 and 2. The comment at the bottom is as good, if not better than the article!
  • Point 3: This depends whether you have a static or evolutionary view of language. Neologisms are always uncomfortable until familiarity breeds acceptance. In English, we've been verbing nouns for centuries. If you don't like it then you must reject Shakespeare and most other great writers who indulged in the creation of new verbs this way. Caution, self-awareness and a hint of irony can make this practice more acceptable.
  • Point 8: Providing simple frameworks to help people more easily structure and remember complex knowledge can be useful as long as one acknowledges the flaws and limitations of any model. 'It's only a model'
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • CPD isn't just about the acquisition of new knowledge from experts. Just as valuable sometimes is reflection on existing knowledge in order to share it, consolidate it, reorganise it and apply it more widely.
  • Don't give us sheets of A2 paper and ask us to "brainstorm"
  • Stop mentioning the 21st Century
  • Don't just read out your slides
Sean McHugh

How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses | WIRED - 1 views

www.wired.com/...all

education motivation teaching method professional_development technology TEL

shared by Sean McHugh on 24 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • he had happened on an emerging educational philosophy, one that applies the logic of the digital age to the classroom. That logic is inexorable: Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think.
  • In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are developing these skills.”
  • That’s why a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “So,” Juárez Correa said, “what do you want to learn?”
  • human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum.
  • inland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations.
  • n Finland, teachers underwent years of training to learn how to orchestrate this new style of learning; he was winging it. He began experimenting with different ways of posing open-ended questions on subjects ranging from the volume of cubes to multiplying fractions.
  • Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.”
  • They do it by emphasizing student-led learning and collaboration
  • Sean McHugh on 24 Sep 14
     
    In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are developing these skills." That's why a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn't a commodity that's delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students' own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion-and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.
Keri-Lee Beasley

Being a Better Online Reader - The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...being-a-better-online-reader

digital_reading online digital literacy reading technology professional_development

shared by Keri-Lee Beasley on 13 Aug 15 - No Cached
Sean McHugh liked it
  • Maybe the decline of deep reading isn’t due to reading skill atrophy but to the need to develop a very different sort of skill, that of teaching yourself to focus your attention. (Interestingly, Coiro found that gamers were often better online readers: they were more comfortable in the medium and better able to stay on task.)
  • no difference in accuracy between students who edited a six-hundred-word paper on the screen and those who worked on paper. Those who edited on-screen did so faster, but their performance didn’t suffer.
  • It wasn’t the screen that disrupted the fuller synthesis of deep reading; it was the allure of multitasking on the Internet and a failure to properly mitigate its impact.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • students performed equally well on a twenty-question multiple-choice comprehension test whether they had read a chapter on-screen or on paper. Given a second test one week later, the two groups’ performances were still indistinguishable.
  • “We cannot go backwards. As children move more toward an immersion in digital media, we have to figure out ways to read deeply there.”
  • Maybe her letter writers’ students weren’t victims of digitization so much as victims of insufficient training—and insufficient care—in the tools of managing a shifting landscape of reading and thinking.
  • In a new study, the introduction of an interactive annotation component helped improve comprehension and reading strategy use in a group of fifth graders. It turns out that they could read deeply. They just had to be taught how.
  • multitasking while reading on a computer or a tablet slowed readers down, but their comprehension remained unaffected.
  • Maybe the decline of deep reading isn’t due to reading skill atrophy but to the need to develop a very different sort of skill, that of teaching yourself to focus your attention.
  • Keri-Lee Beasley on 13 Aug 15
     
    Really interesting information on being a better online reader. The author suggests the following: "Maybe the decline of deep reading isn't due to reading skill atrophy but to the need to develop a very different sort of skill, that of teaching yourself to focus your attention. (Interestingly, Coiro found that gamers were often better online readers: they were more comfortable in the medium and better able to stay on task.)"
Katie Day

Fighting Bullying With Babies - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...fighting-bullying-with-babies

bullying empathy babies schools students psychology

shared by Katie Day on 17 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • It seems that it’s not only possible to make people kinder, it’s possible to do it systematically at scale – at least with school children. That’s what one organization based in Toronto called Roots of Empathy has done. Around babies, tough kids smile, disruptive kids focus, shy kids open up. Roots of Empathy was founded in 1996 by Mary Gordon, an educator who had built Canada’s largest network of school-based parenting and family-literacy centers after having worked with neglectful and abusive parents. Gordon had found many of them to be lacking in empathy for their children. They hadn’t developed the skill because they hadn’t experienced or witnessed it sufficiently themselves. She envisioned Roots as a seriously proactive parent education program – one that would begin when the mothers- and fathers-to-be were in kindergarten.
  • Here’s how it works: Roots arranges monthly class visits by a mother and her baby (who must be between two and four months old at the beginning of the school year). Each month, for nine months, a trained instructor guides a classroom using a standard curriculum that involves three 40-minute visits – a pre-visit, a baby visit, and a post-visit. The program runs from kindergarten to seventh grade. During the baby visits, the children sit around the baby and mother (sometimes it’s a father) on a green blanket (which represents new life and nature) and they try to understand the baby’s feelings. The instructor helps by labeling them. “It’s a launch pad for them to understand their own feelings and the feelings of others,” explains Gordon. “It carries over to the rest of class.”
  • Katie Day on 17 Nov 10
     
    how bringing babies into schools can help students develop empathy... and lessen bullying and aggression.... 
Katie Day

In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...19Industry-t.html

cognitive_science creativity ideas thinking

shared by Katie Day on 20 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Jump’s work has elements of management consulting and a bit of design-firm draftsmanship, but its specialty is conceiving new businesses, and what it sells is really the art of innovation. The company is built on the premise that creative thinking is a kind of expertise. Like P.&G. and Mars, you can hire Jump to think on your behalf, for somewhere between $200,000 to $500,000 a month, depending on the complexity and ambiguity of the question you need answered. Or you can ask Jump to teach your corporation how to generate better ideas on its own; Jump imparts that expertise in one- and five-day how-to-brainstorm training sessions that can cost $200,000 for a one-day session for 25 employees.
  • What’s clear is that in recent years, much of corporate America has gone meta — it has started thinking about thinking. And all that thinking has led many executives to the same conclusion: We need help thinking. A few idea entrepreneurs, like Jump, Ideo and Kotter International, are companies with offices and payrolls. But many are solo practitioners, brains for hire who lecture at corporations or consult with them regularly. Each has a catechism and a theory about why good ideas can be so hard to come by and what can be done to remedy the situation.
  • “We’re not only blind to certain things, but we’re blind to the fact that we’re blind to them.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • You often hear this from idea entrepreneurs: Don’t ask us for the answers. Let us help you frame the questions, so you can answer them yourself.
  • At Jump, they prefer to brainstorm with a variation of a technique pioneered in improv theater. A comic offers the first sentence of a story, which lurches into a (hopefully funny) tale, when someone else says, “Yes, and?” then adds another sentence, which leads to another “Yes, and?”— and back and forth it goes. In the context of brainstorming, what was once a contest is transformed into a group exercise in storytelling. It has turned into a collaboration.
  • Why now? Why did innovation-mania take hold in the last decade or so? One school of thought holds that corporations both rise and die faster than ever today, placing a premium on the speedy generation of ideas.
  • Other ideas entrepreneurs offer a “great man” theory, pointing to the enormous influence of Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and an author of books including “The Innovator’s Dilemma”and “Innovation and the General Manager.”
  • Dev Patnaik of Jump has his own answer to the why-now question. He contends that advances in technology over the past three decades have gradually forced management to reconceive its role in the corporation, shifting its focus from processing data to something more esoteric.
  • “Suddenly it’s about something else. Suddenly it’s about leadership, creativity, vision. Those are the differentiating things, right?” Patnaik draws an analogy to painting, which for centuries was all about rendering reality as accurately as possible, until a new technology — photography — showed up, throwing all those brush-wielding artists into crisis.
  • Most idea entrepreneurs offer what could be described as Osborn deluxe. Govindarajan, the Dartmouth professor, presents companies with what he calls the three-box framework. In Box 1, he puts everything a company now does to manage and improve performance. Box 2 is labeled “selectively forgetting the past,” his way of urging clients to avoid fighting competitors and following trends that are no longer relevant. Box 3 is strategic thinking about the future. “Companies spend all of their time in Box 1, and think they are doing strategy,” he says. “But strategy is really about Box 2 and 3 — the challenge to create the future that will exist in 2020.” He recommends to clients what he calls the 30-30 rule: 30 percent of the people who make strategic decisions should be 30 years old or younger.
  • Katie Day on 20 Dec 10
     
    long article on creativity, innovation, and people who are dedicated to the process of coming up with ideas....
Keri-Lee Beasley

Music Makes You a Better Reader, Says Neuroscience - 0 views

magazine.good.is/...music-literacy-brain

music literacy brain neuroscience

shared by Keri-Lee Beasley on 01 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “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.”
Sean McHugh

11 Ways Finland's Education System Shows Us that "Less is More". | Filling My Map - 0 views

fillingmymap.com/...tem-shows-us-that-less-is-more

teaching assessment

shared by Sean McHugh on 26 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Finland follows the basic formula that has been performed by math teachers for centuries: The teachers go over homework, they present a lesson (some of the kids listen and some don’t), and then they assign homework.
  • What if we didn’t force students who know that their talents reside outside of the world of formal academics to take three years of high school classes that they found boring and useless?  What if we allowed them to train in and explore vocations they found fascinating and in which they were gifted?
  • This system allows the Finnish teacher more time to plan and think about each lesson.  It allows them to create great, thought provoking lessons.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Elementary students in Finland often have the SAME teacher for up to SIX YEARS of their education.
  • Finland understands that the ability to teach isn’t something that can be gained from studying. It is usually a gift and passion.  Some have it, some don’t.
  • They do not try to interfere or usurp their authority and decisions.
  • Study after study
  • Imagine all of the exciting things you could do with your students if there wasn’t a giant state test looming over your head every year.  Imagine the freedom you could have if your pay wasn’t connected to your student’s test scores.  Imagine how much more fun and engaging your lessons would be!
  • teachers take their time.  They look deeper into the topic and don’t panic if they are a little behind or don’t cover every topic in the existence of mathematics in a single year.
  • math ONCE a week
  • The students get to actually understand the material before they are forced on to a new topic.
  • Finnish students have the least amount of homework in the world.  They average under half an hour of homework a night.  Finnish students typically do not have outside tutors or lessons either.
  • I won’t give you homework if you work on this while you are in my classroom.”
  • Trust is key
  • Sean McHugh on 26 Apr 15
     
    ...why are Finnish students succeeding and ours are failing?  The difference is not the instruction. Good teaching is good teaching and it can be found in both Finland and in the US.   (The same can be said for bad teaching.)  The difference is less tangible and more fundamental.  Finland truly believes "Less is More."  This national mantra is deeply engrained into the Finnish mindset and is the guiding principal to Finland's educational philosophy.
Sean McHugh

The Scientific Case For Teaching Cursive Handwriting to Your Kids Is Weaker Than You Think - 2 views

nautil.us/...ting-and-other-education-myths

teaching handwriting research

shared by Sean McHugh on 01 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • here is ample evidence that writing by hand aids cognition in ways that typing does not: It’s well worth teaching. And I confess I’m old-fashioned enough to think that, regardless of proven cognitive benefits, a good handwriting style is an important and valuable skill, not only when your laptop batteries run out but as an expression of personality and character.
  • if they have the time and inclination.
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 01 Oct 16
       
      But should we be dedicating swathes of curriculum time towards this? Surely not.
  • what teachers “know” about how children learn is sometimes more a product of the culture in which they’re immersed than a result of research and data.
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 01 Oct 16
       
      Never were truer words written.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • What does research say on these issues? It has consistently failed to find any real advantage of cursive over other forms of handwriting
  • our real understanding of how children respond to different writing styles is surprisingly patchy and woefully inadequate
  • Evidence supports teaching both formats of handwriting and then letting each student choose which works best for him or her
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 01 Oct 16
       
      Shouldn't we include touch typing here as well?
  • So was cursive faster than manuscript? No, it was slower. But fastest of all was a personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript developed spontaneously by pupils around the fourth to fifth grade
  • They had apparently imbibed manuscript style from their reading experience (it more closely resembles print), even without being taught it explicitly
  • While pupils writing in cursive were slower on average, their handwriting was also typically more legible than that of pupils taught only manuscript. But the mixed style allowed for greater speed with barely any deficit in legibility.
  • The grip that cursive has on teaching is sustained by folklore and prejudice
  • for typical children, there’s some reason to think manuscript has advantages
  • freeing up cognitive resources that are otherwise devoted to the challenge of simply making the more elaborate cursive forms on paper will leave children more articulate and accurate in what they write
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 01 Oct 16
       
      Likewise if they can touch-type instead of wrestling with ascenders and descenders...
  • the difference in appearance between cursive and manuscript could inhibit the acquisition of reading skills, making it harder for children to transfer skills between learning to read and learning to write because they simply don’t see cursive in books.
  • There’s good evidence, both behavioral and neurological, that a “haptic” (touch-related) sense of letter shapes can aid early reading skills, indicating a cognitive interaction between motor production and visual recognition of letters. That’s one reason, incidentally, why it’s valuable to train children to write by hand at all, not just to use a keyboard.
  • even if being taught both styles might have some advantages, it’s not clear that those cognitive resources and classroom hours couldn’t be better deployed in other ways.
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 01 Oct 16
       
      In other ways... the time it takes for kids to learn cursive, spread over years, compared to the relatively short time it takes to master touch-typing being a case in point.
  • that cursive is still taught primarily because of parental demand and tradition, rather than because there is any scientific basis for its superiority in learning
  • inertia and preconceptions seem to distort perception and policy at the expense of the scientific evidence
  • How much else in education is determined by what’s “right,” rather than what’s supported by evidence?
  • Beliefs about cursive are something of a hydra: You cut off one head, and another sprouts. These beliefs propagate through both the popular and the scientific literature, in a strange mixture of uncritical reporting and outright invention, which depends on myths often impossible to track to a reliable source.
  • the reasons to reject cursive handwriting as a formal part of the curriculum far outweigh the reasons to keep it.
  • This must surely lead us to wonder how much else in education is determined by a belief in what is “right,” unsupported by evidence.
  • it’s often the case that the very lack of hard, objective evidence about an issue, especially in the social sciences, encourages a reliance on dogma instead
  • There needs to be wider examination of the extent to which evidence informs education. Do we heed it enough? Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or institutional norms?
  • Sean McHugh on 01 Oct 16
     
    There needs to be wider examination of the extent to which evidence informs education. Do we heed it enough? Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or institutional norms?
Sean McHugh

How Stephen King Teaches Writing - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...379870

grammar spelling literacy writing

shared by Sean McHugh on 16 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • One either absorbs the grammatical principles of one’s native language in conversation and in reading or one does not
  • Reading is the key, though. A kid who grows up hearing “It don’t matter to me” can only learn doesn’t if he/she reads it over and over again
  • You need to take out the stuff that’s just sitting there and doing nothing
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Ask yourself what they need to get on in life, the bare minimum (like filling in a job application), and concentrate on that.
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 16 Sep 17
       
      Surely this is true of reading as well? Maybe some students need to just focus on being 'functional' readers, like reading the instructions on a job application.
  • telling the truth is the most important thing, much more important than the grammar
  • I would often ask them to describe operations that they take for granted. Ask a girl to write a paragraph on how she braids her sister’s hair. Ask a boy to explain a sports rule. These are just basic starting points, where students learn to write on paper what they might tell a friend. It keeps it concrete. If you ask a kid to write on “My Favorite Movie,” you’re opening the door to subjectivity, and hence to a flood of clichés
  • See, then say
  • A good reader digging into a good book is wonderful. Musical
  • Reading good fiction is like making the jump from masturbation to sex
  • Good teachers can be trained, if they really want to learn (some are pretty lazy). Great teachers, like Socrates, are born
  • What about teaching? Craft, or art?King: It’s both. The best teachers are artists
Sean McHugh

https://quillette.com/2021/02/20/thinking-critically-about-critical-thinking/ - 0 views

quillette.com/...ically-about-critical-thinking

thinking critical thinking

shared by Sean McHugh on 22 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • critical thinking is not a skill that can be improved through practice—like a golf swing—nor is it a “general” capability. Instead, it is an abstract description of what humans can do as a result amassing a wealth of underpinning knowledge and skills relevant to the particular context in which thinking is to be deployed
  • young children are capable of thinking critically about subjects they know a great deal about, whereas trained scientists can fail to think critically in areas where they are less knowledgeable
  • not all knowledge is created equal. We need to differentiate between knowledge and information. Much of the information stored on the Internet is pictures of kittens or videos of people singing sea shanties. This can keep increasing exponentially without any need for school children to become acquainted with it
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • we want to create a generation of critical thinkers then we must introduce them to their birthright, giving them the tools to analyze the world by teaching a structured curriculum full of powerful ideas
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