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/
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;
When I went to college to become a teacher the program was largely about learning to teach. How many seasoned educators can relate to the following story:
A few years ago, my principal called me into his office and explained that too many students were failing my language arts class. I deflected his comments as no fault of my own.“They’re not putting in the effort it takes to master the content.”
How many of us have had similar conversations and responded the same way? Saying things like they aren’t trying … are lazy … don’t have the basic skills … didn’t meet deadlines … need to learn responsibility. There is often truth to these statements. But I have come to believe that great teachers accept responsibility for motivating their students. The most effective educators establish an environment where kids not only want to succeed but feel that they can. They focus on learning, rather than focusing on teaching.
Research indicated that the top three factors related to student learning are 1) the quality of the teacher, 2) effective instructional practices, and 3) student engagement.
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.
In the second year of the project (2010-2011), participating teachers took assessments to measure their ability to choose appropriate strategies and to recognize and diagnose common student errors.
Classroom pedagogy (instructional practices) is one of the most important yet least understood factors in student achievement. This study sought to demystify effective teaching practices and provide insights into teacher evaluation and professional development. Dr. Robert Marzano has identified nine teaching strategies that have the highest impact on student learning:
1. Identifying similarities and differences 
2. Summarizing and note taking
3. Reinforcing effort and providing recognition
4. Homework and practice
5. Nonlinguistic representations
6. Cooperative learning
7. Setting objectives and providing feedback
8. Generating and testing hypotheses
9. Cues, questions, and advance organizers:
All students in participating teachers’ classrooms completed surveys about their experience in the classroom and their teachers’ ability to engage them in the course material. Recent education research has begun to explore whether students’ perceptions of the teaching they experience help in predicting how much those students learn.
The quality of the teacher has more impact on student learning than any other factor, including class size, school size, or even the social and economic status of the school. Educational stakeholders and leaders all across the United States are debating how to identify and measure effective teaching. The MET Project was launched in the fall of 2009, this two year project was designed with the goal of developing and testing multiple measures of teacher effectiveness. Two of the five areas this project identified and measured were Student Achievement and Classroom Observations. The findings of the study will be shared during the winter and spring of this current school year, 2001-2012.
