Week of February 12

Thursday Thoughts February 12

An emphasis is finally being placed on creativity in education, however I can tell you that it is something that scares the living daylights out of administrators.  Well, I shouldn't generalize all administrators so I will just speak for myself.  You see, one of the characteristics of a principal is that we like things to be orderly and fall into place.  Creativity is hard because there is no right or wrong answer with it.  You don't get credit for it on a standardized test and although it's right for kids, it's a hard thing to measure(and therefore foreign to administrators). But I must say that you are making a believer out of me!  I am impressed with what is taking place in the classrooms and the way that students' are expressing themselves and exploring their interests in ways that are.....creative.  Many thanks to those of you who are inviting us down to see the creative ways students are learning at MBES.  Please continue to share.  Seeing really is believing!

 



Staff Spotlight

This week I would like to shine the spotlight on Traci Fleck and Reema Ajmera.  Traci and Reema have their hands full with a couple of new students that started after winter break.  They have not only worked to get the new students acclimated to the class, but they have also had to ensure that the other students do not adopt the behaviors of the new classmates.  Traci works closely with parents to alleviate any fears or concerns that they may have as it relates to starting a new program in the middle of the school year.  Both ladies work together to provide a classroom environment that allows students to grow at their own pace.  They are patient with their students and know their unique needs.   Traci and Reema, thank you for the work that you are doing in your classroom. 

 

 

 

4C's: Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, Critical Thinking Skills

 

The Things That Linger After They’ve Forgotten Everything You Taught

03/05/2014, Terry Heick,

The Things That Linger After They’ve Forgotten Everything You Taught
by Terry Heick

Learning has nothing to do with content.
If we’re talking about learning as a personal manifestation of some kind–the two-way flow of referential schema in a fluid act of recognition and sense-making–then learning is something that happens completely inside the mind, and is, by definition then, a kind of illusion.
In education, we try to make this learning visible through assessment, observation, dialogue, and other cognitively violent acts meant to shatter that privacy. For teaching purposes, of course.

But ultimately learning is about the learner themselves. Content never changes as a result of the student-content interaction. It is mindless and neutral; students are mindful and biased.
Put simply, learning is the deeply personal act of framing your own experience on some foreign thing–like trying your own hat on a mannequin. Your hat is your sense-maker, and the mannequin is what is being made sense of. You understand both better as a result of the interaction.

The Things That Endure
As an educator, you have likely been trained to think of teaching and learning as a standards-backward process.
And this training was necessary because it doesn’t come naturally for everyone; it required you to unlearn old habits—starting with a book, project idea, or video for example—and start instead with a clear learning goal, and then establish what you’d accept as evidence of having met that goal.
At this point you’d have yourself the outline of an assessment, and, well, you’re halfway to having a unit. This, more or less, is how the planning of teaching and learning goes.
This is not an attempt to have you rethink that approach—not today anyway. Rather, the idea here is to look instead at what other factors that tend to linger long after the content has been forgotten.

5 Critical Abstractions Of Learning: The Factors That Tend To Linger

1. How You Make Students Feel
How do students feel after a conversation with you? Curious? Enthusiastic? Uncertain? Brow-beaten? Intimidated?
When they read learning feedback from you, what does their internal voice say? Yes, this has as much to do with their personality as it does anything you say or do, but it’d be nice to know just the same, yes?
Doesn’t how you make students feel matter? Can you promote high levels of understanding and inquiry if they’re constantly looking to align and comply rather than inquire and self-direct?
And further, how you can leverage your personality as a teacher–your natural gifts as a communicator, motivator, or content expert–to optimize how you make them feel.
2. The Discoveries They Make About Themselves
Dove-tailing nicely behind how you make them feel are the discoveries they make about themselves under your guidance. Key strategies here are prediction, reflection, and metacognition.
Prediction
How might it go? How might I learn? What might I find?
Reflection
What happened? What did I see? Where did I see it? How did I respond?
Metacognition
How did this event change my thinking? What were my sources for creativity or curiosity? When was I at my best?
How students feel about themselves–and what they sensed that you did accordingly–will easily outlast any bit of content they take from your class.
3. The Networks, Communities, Habits, & Tools You Help Them Discover & Use
Networks, communities, habits, and tools matter greatly because within each is a kind of self-sustaining system that whirs on without you. These are things that, with your guidance, can be set into motion and then left alone to build on themselves endlessly, or topple over on themselves and crash.
In your class, a student discovers a MOOC that explores viral evolution, and meets scientists, grad students, doctors, and field workers from global organizations doing this work every day.
It could be an app or related tool–expert, informed use of Google search, deft organization of Evernote, or some other bit of technology that they will pluck from your curriculum and use everywhere.
Or maybe they stumble on a subreddit that hosts daily discussions on how technology is changing culture. And in this subreddit, they encounter questions, people, theories, texts, videos, and ideas that are a kind of ecology to spur learning so nuanced and diverse you couldn’t possibly reproduce it yourself.
Communities, habits, and tools last.
4. Learning Strategies
Not the simple cognitive actions like “analyze” and “evaluate” that function more like assessment tools, but rather literally figuring out how to learn.
What’s worth understanding? What useful things do others around me create? What sense of purpose do others around me live by? What citizenships am I a member of, and what does that suggest that I understand?
How can I use existing, inspiring models that are already everywhere around me to drive my learning?
How can questions lead to understanding? And how can I form better questions on my own without having them flung at me constantly?
You can call it a self-directed learning model, or simply strategies that students use to learn, the result is the same: Lasting processes that students can transfer on their own, endlessly, independent of content forms or application.
An abundance or lack of accessible learning strategies will impact your students forever.
5. Reading Habits
Reading habits have an inertia about them–hard to start, and hard to stop.

 

 Technology Tidbits

http://jmathpage.com/- Hundreds of math learning and math teaching resources and games

News & Notes

 The General Transfer window is open February 23-March 13.  Please stop by if you would like more information on the process.  Employees with two or more years of service in FCS are eligible to participate in the transfer process.