“Teachers at Mount Desert Elementary School in Northeast Harbor, Maine, use proven Responsive Classroom techniques — such as relationship-building morning meetings and engaging student-led activities — to get students focused and ready to learn.”
Are your student’s engaged and armed to learn? Is your classroom a “responsive” one, watch this Video and decide.
Bloom’s Revised are essential to teaching 21st Century Skills and Common Core! Great visual resources for educators. “Bloom’s Taxonomy is a useful tool for assessment design, but using it only for that function is like using a race car to go to the grocery–a huge waste of potential.” In this TeachThought post they look at better use of Bloom’s taxonomy in the classroom read more at http://www.teachthought.com/
Instead of focusing on the financial and logistical considerations when implementing 1 to 1 IPad programs we need to focus on the curriculum needs and ensure that the IPad implementation, what positive effects will they have on student learning. To read this excellent article from
TeachThought click here.
With the onset of the Common Core teachers in classrooms all over the country are expecting their students to do more than calculate the correct answers in math class. Students are expected to work through problems and demonstrate how they arrive at answers. After conferring with classmates, they also must critique the reasoning of their peers.
Math instruction will be infused with Common Core, academic standards that are set to hit California classrooms in the 2014-15 school year. The Common Core guidelines were developed by a nationwide consortium of educators and other officials. They are designed to emphasize critical-thinking skills over rote memorization and better prepare students for college and career. No more multiple-choice answers, the whole point of Common Core is to support teachers to prepare students for college and beyond.
Schools throughout California, in private and public institutions, are working to incorporate the new benchmarks into daily lessons in time for the statewide launch, which is set for fall 2014. The shift will drive systemic changes in instructional practices and outcomes from kindergarten through high school. The overarching goal of Common Core is to transform how students are taught, particularly what they must do to master math, English and other subjects.
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As we begin the steps of implementing the CCSS (Common Core State Standards) schools have been setting foundational understandings for teachers to ensure they are prepared to teach our 21st Century Learners. We have addressed best practices like Marzano’s 9 strategies for the teaching profession, ELL strategies, 21st Century skills. and technological improvements. At Grace we are also working to ensure our students have the needed foundations needed to become 21st Century learners. Over the last three years we have implemented PBIS (Positive Behavior Intervention Support), and are now looking at Art Costa’s Habits of Mind as a needed foundation for tomorrows learners. There is no one pedagogy, book, or computer program that will help us become better systems thinkers. Instead, the complexity of our worlds demand that we develop “habits of mind” to intentionally use systems principles to understand the complexity of everyday situations and to design for desired futures. The 12 Habits of Mind are:
Sees the Whole: sees the world in terms of interrelated “wholes” or systems, rather than as single events, or snapshots;
Looks for Connections: assumes that nothing stands in isolation; and so tends to look for connections among nature, ourselves, people, problems, and events;
Pays Attention to Boundaries: “goes wide” (uses peripheral vision) to check the boundaries drawn around problems, knowing that systems are nested and how you define the system is critical to what you consider and don’t consider;
The mission of the Common Core State Standards is to provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our children need for success in college and careers.
The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) encourage the highest achievement of every student by defining the knowledge, concepts, and skills that students should acquire at each grade level through an integrated standards-based system of education in which both academic content standards and “Habits of Mind” standards are an essential part of the whole.
Students say “flipped learning” classes are still the exception, not the rule. But when done right, they make a course both more challenging and more enjoyable.
I know that I have written about this teaching strategy before but as we begin 2013 it’s time to get serious about focusing on learning rather than teaching. It’s time to make those educational resolutions to improve student success in your classroom. A great starting place would be flipping!
As a teacher my self I can relate to this excerpt from the eCampusNews article:
And Freeman always received great reviews from students, even though 17 percent routinely flunked his class—a failure rate he considered “gruesome.”
Freeman knew what was wrong: His students weren’t adept at applying information in a new context to solve problems, and he told them so. But one day, a student threw the ball back in his court. He just wasn’t doing enough to prepare her for the tests; she needed his help to practice.
“I thought, I am so busted,” Freeman said. “She is right. That still rings in my ears.
Our school recently participated in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for reading and mathematics. NAEP is the largest continuing and nationally representative assessment of what our nation’s students know and can do in core subjects at grades 4, 8, and 12. Several different breakdowns of private school results are available for the 2011 results, they are Lutheran, Catholic, Conservative Christian and other Private Schools. For reference, private schools make up 25% of the nation’s schools and educate a bit over 9% of our youth so measuring and comparing student achievement from this population is statistically relevant when looking at student progress.
In 2011 Students from private schools on average outperformed students from public schools in mathematics and reading achievement at both grades 4 and 8. Students from Lutheran, Catholic, and Conservative Christian school on average performed higher than public school students. The graph below compares student achievement from the various sub groups.
As we begin this school year, there continues to be a need for our schools to change the way we foster learning in this generation of students. Our students are vastly different than the students of 5 or 10 years ago, their needs are changing rapidly because of the ever increasing technological advances, social media, educational programs, informational technology and the accessibility of devices to access the internet. These 21st century learners, or digital natives live and interact with their world in vastly different ways that their parents or teachers who are digital immigrants. The article below was written by By Laura Devaney, Managing Editor of ESchool News and shares some statistical information supporting the changing needs of students and the need for our educational system to change to meet their leaning needs.
More and more students own mobile devices, including tablets, and indicate a strong desire to use those personal learning tools in school to increase collaboration and access to resources, according to the annual Speak Up Survey, which is facilitated by Project Tomorrow.
“Students, perhaps without realizing it, are already seeking out ways to personalize their learning,” according to the report. “Looking to address what they perceive as deficiencies in classroom experiences, students are turning to online classes to study topics that pique their intellectual curiosity, to message and discussion boards to explore new ideas about their world, or to online collaboration tools to share their expertise with other students they don’t even know. Students now expect in their learning lives the same types of personalized interactions that adults already experience in our everyday lives.”
The arts are essential to every child’s education. Similar to English, math, science and the other core subjects, the d visual and performing arts) are challenging subjects with rigorous content and achievement standards at the state and national levels. They require highly qualified teachers who challenge all students, not just those who are considered artistically talented, to perform works of art, create their own works, and respond to works of art and the ideas they impart.
In addition to studying the arts for their own sake, experiencing and making works of art benefits students in their intellectual, personal, and social development, and can be particularly beneficial for students who are at risk of not succeeding in school. Research studies point to strong relationships between learning in the arts and fundamental cognitive skills and capacities used to master other core subjects, including reading, writing, and mathematics.
Involvement in the arts is associated with gains in math, reading, cognitive ability, critical thinking, and verbal skill. Arts learning can also improve motivation, concentration, confidence, and teamwork. A 2005 report by the Rand Corporation about the visual arts argues that the intrinsic pleasures and stimulation of the art experience do more than sweeten an individual’s life. According to the report, they “can connect people more deeply to the world and open them to new ways of seeing,” creating the foundation to forge social bonds and community cohesion.
