LearnTeachLearn...repeat

Three great Open Court Reading sites!

Sat, 14 Aug 2004 15:52:36 +0000

I\'ve been getting a lot of hits from two places so I decided to investigate them. What I found is that they are great OCR resource sites, filled with High Frequency Word lists and printable flash cards, lesson plans for integrated projects, and links that support OCR units. They are:

First Grade OCR Resources
Ceres USD: OCR Resources

Our new district, District 5, has created a website to support OCR implementation. It is District5 Elementary Literacy and it also has say great links.

Habits of Mind - thinking about thinking

Sat, 7 Aug 2004 18:12:06 +0000

\"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.\" Aristotle

\"These Habits of Mind transcend all subject matters commonly taught in school. They are characteristic of peak performers whether they be in homes, schools, athletic fields, organizations, the military, governments, churches or corporations. They are what make marriages successful, learning continual, workplaces productive and democracies enduring.\" Educator\'s website

Our new academic year is in full swing and we are passed the initial learning about \"Effort Based Learning\" and have plunged into developing our knowledge about strategies that create an atmosphere of effort, based upon metacognition.

To that end, we are currently studying Habits of Mind (HoM). In particular, we\'re looking at what HoM labels \"Input-Processing-Output,\" which are comparable to Bloom\'s Taxonomy, and how to move classroom discussions toward higher level thinking by examining and altering the questions we pose in the classroom. Coupled with questioning and discussion, we\'re digging more deeply into Thinking Maps to further our understanding of which Thinking Map goes with which thinking skill as defined by HoM and Bloom\'s Taxonomy.

Here\'s a helpful way to visualize our thinking about HoM and infusing our lessons with high level thinking skills from University of Georgia, College of Education, Habits of Mind. Notice that HoM/Bloom\'s Taxonomy serve as the top and bottom of the cube--patterns of thinking and reasoning about content that we wish to become well established in our students.

Using our skills in Backward Mapping, our goal then is to examine questions we already use with our students to develop content, alter the questions so that they lead to high level thinking, and use appropriate Thinking Maps to help students internalize the specific thinking process involved (metacognition.)

The Capacity Cube from University of Georgia, College of Education, Learning Framework is an excellent way to approach our study because its focus is that learning is not linear--rather, they are about: \"Building relationships and associations and applying fundamental ways of thinking and doing are key to constructing meaningful knowledge.\"

More from Using the Capacity Cube Model:
\"When applied to the implementation of the Learning Framework in school mathematics, the Capacity Cube model can ensure that students and teachers focus on higher-level reasoning, problem solving, and critical thinking - as well as content objectives. Learning activities should not attempt to isolate one cell or one dimension of the Capacity Cube, but should emphasize the relationships and interactions of the dimensions. While a lesson may be designed to emphasize reasoning in geometry using rubber band models, that same lesson will likely include communicating, patterns, measurement and scale, and perhaps, elements of trigonometry. This integrated approach will ensure that students are engaged in activities that are more than rote drill and practice, more than presentation of facts or rules.
â¢ The Habits of Mind of problem solving, communicating, reasoning, and making connections are ways of thinking about problems and real world situations that may be geometric, algebraic, arithmetic, or probabilistic.
â¢ The Vehicles for Understanding and Doing are meaningful ways to approach problems.
â¢ The Mathematical Big Ideas, are the culmination and refinement of mathematical thinking, and are ideas that will help students make sense of and operate in their current and future lives.\"
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Here\'s another very good resource for approaching science and math content with HoM skills.
Habits of Mind Benchmarks in Science and Math

Effort Based Learning

Wed, 12 May 2004 23:19:16 +0000

Wow--It has been a long time since I posted here! I haven\'t stopped blogging--oh no, not at all! I\'ve been blogging on my other blogs: blahblahblog and BlogHeads. But, I haven\'t posted here because I\'ve been so very busy.

I just finished working on a grant writing team. We wrote a school reform design grant. I\'m really excited about it because the basis of the grant is focused on turning our school around from \"Aptitute Based Learning\" to \"Effort Based Learning.\"

Effort Based Learning, as called the Incremental Learning Theory, basically posits that instead of basing our teaching on student aptitude--some students have more aptitude/ability to learn than others/bell curve--we should focus our teaching on helping students learn based on the right types of effort--meaning teaching challenging Standards based tasks coupled with metacognitive skills within a structured, highly scaffolded progression of skills and concepts with multiple opportunities for practice and revision.

Now, what does all this mean? This means that we will be learning many new scaffolding strategies, so that both teachers and students articulate and understand the standards, how to apply the criteria, and how to know when to use which strategies (metacognition and self regulated learning.)

Read this wonderful article: Principles of Learning for Effort-Based Education by Lauren Resnick. I will be posting here more often, using this blog as a place to unfold the understanding and implementation of Effort Based Learning at our school. I welcome any comments, ideas, suggestions.

Thoughts on Standards Based Instruction and teaching

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 04:23:59 +0000

I\'ve been researching Small Learning Communities and the Principles of Learning for a school reform grant and came across this article, Reconcilable Differences? Standards-Based Teaching and Differentiation by Carol Ann Tomlinson, in Educational Leadership magazine.

\"Standards and Differentiation
There is no contradiction between effective standards-based instruction and differentiation. Curriculum tells us what to teach: Differentiation tells us how. Thus, if we elect to teach a standards-based curriculum, differentiation simply suggests ways in which we can make that curriculum work best for varied learners. In other words, differentiation can show us how to teach the same standard to a range of learners by employing a variety of teaching and learning modes.

Choose any standard. Differentiation suggests that you can challenge all learners by providing materials and tasks on the standard at varied levels of difficulty, with varying degrees of scaffolding, through multiple instructional groups, and with time variations. Further, differentiation suggests that teachers can craft lessons in ways that tap into multiple student interests to promote heightened learner interest in the standard. Teachers can encourage student success by varying ways in which students work: alone or collaboratively, in auditory or visual modes, or through practical or creative means.\"

Elements of genre

Thu, 26 Feb 2004 03:35:00 +0000

Looking to get your students to articulate elements of a genre?
One of our 5th grade teachers wanted her students to dig deeper into the criteria for a narrative--here\'s what she did:
â¢ She decided to present her class with an anchor paper that received a score of 1 (on a scale of 1-4).
â¢ Using the overhead, the teacher led the class in reading the piece.
â¢ A discussion followed about why the class thought the paper scored 1. Students were able to articulate that the paper was missing key elements: the setting was not described, the flow of events did not make sense, the setting was abruptly switched in an ackward way with no logical purpose, there was no dialogue, and the characters were not developed.
â¢ The teacher asked students to give a few examples of how they might revise the piece, keeping in mind the genre elements discussed.
â¢ Students offered several examples which the teacher, using her editing marks to model revision, applied to the achor paper.
â¢ The teacher gave pairs of students a copy of the anchor paper and asked them to revise it, keeping in mind the genre elements discussed.
â¢ Finally, students shared their revised papers with other groups and then some shared with the class.

This was a very successful way for students to understand how elements of a genre function to create quality writing. And, when students worked on their next writing task, a personal narrative, they were able to work effectively using a Criteria Chart to guide them through the stages of the writing process.