Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
101 Teaching Tips - 2014
101 Teaching Tips, Half-Truths, And Random Musings
- It’s okay to close your door sometimes.
- If the students aren’t responding, do something different.
- Resist generalizations, e.g., “they’re just not getting it,” or “they’re doing great.” There is no “they”—they are 25 unique students and unique levels of performance.
- Do not focus on standards. Focus on the thinking habits of your students.
- Students will remember little of what you taught them, but will never forget the way you make them feel.
- Curiosity and questioning are the roots of all learning.
- You are a professional. Strive to project that image at all times, even when you think no one is looking.
- Be reachable to students after they leave your classroom. (Start a facebook teacher page, Google+ community, twitter account, etc.)
- Doggedly pursue uncovering what students actually understand through unique assessment forms, rather than focusing on their performance on “the” assessment.
- Pick three or four students per class as general “signposts,” and use them to guide your teaching.
- Worry less about teacher actions, more about learner actions.
- Help your students publish.
- Differentiation is not about learning styles, but about different learning experiences for different students with different needs.
- It’s okay to teach differently than the teacher down the hall.
- Smile because of what you do, not how your day is going.
- There is a degree of showmanship to teaching.
- Eat lunch with students, and sit (or stand) with them at rallies.
- Strive for diversity in everything–instructional strategies, digital platforms, media forms, grouping strategies, etc.
- Don’t try to change too many things at one time.
- No matter their appearance, actions, or behavior, talk to parents as equitable partners in the learning of their children.
- Know that it’s okay to be a crazy teacher.
- In all but the most obvious situations, resist trying to change a team, department, grade level, or other pocket of school culture. Lead by example, not words or directly challenging.
- Learn to listen to others—really listen instead of thinking of whether or not you agree, or waiting for your turn to talk.
- Thank others constantly. You never know what they’re going through. Also, no matter how bad it gets, someone somewhere would do anything for your job. Be humble and gracious.
- Find a mentor.
- You’re never as good as you think you are; you’re never as bad as you think you are either.
- Value team-building activities.
- Don’t stereotype 21st century learners. They’re nothing as a group, only revealing themselves as individuals.
- Know your own biases.
- Help students see their own potential.
- Realize that students are growing up in a world decidedly different from the one you were educated in.
- Visualize the way a lesson or activity will go before teaching it.
- Wait for quiet before you begin speaking. Have a simple, polite and consistent method of gathering students’ attention before speaking—something other than counting backwards from 5.
- If you’re planning formal learning sequences, use backwards planning.
- If you’re planning formal learning sequences, become fluent in curriculum mapping, scope-and-sequencing, etc.
- Learn your students’ names as quickly as possible, and then make sure you’re calling them what they want to be called.
- Don’t take behavior problems personally no matter their appearance. They never are.
- It’s not about you. Don’t force your way.
- You are not there to teach, you are there so that students may learn. This is an important paradigm shift, but doesn’t mean you’re not accountable when they’re not learning.
- Don’t be afraid to switch content areas, grade levels, schools, or districts.
- Teaching a content area that you don’t consider yourself super knowledgeable about can better help you understand teaching itself.
- Focus on reading and writing no matter what you teach.
- Be early to meetings. Everyone is as busy as you are.
- Learn how to compliment without sounding patronizing.
- What students go through at home is light years more important to them than today’s lesson. And that’s okay.
- Teach tolerance by modeling it.
- Intentionally brand your classroom.
- Focus as much on learning spaces as you do on processes.
- Know the difference between declarative and procedural knowledge.
- Use Bloom’s Taxonomy, 6 Facets of Understanding, or our own Understanding Taxonomy to measure understanding.
- Each day you have a finite amount of emotional energy. Use it wisely.
- Never raise your voice.
- Everyone is charismatic somehow. Know how you are and use it.
- Use “wait time” creatively.
- If you use sarcasm, be careful.
- Don’t compete with other teachers.
- Actively participate in staff meetings no matter your mood or personal feelings.
- Try blended learning, but start small.
- Use analogies—or better yet, have students create analogies.
- Concept maps are your friends—for assessment, struggling writers, pre-writing, tracking narrative structures, or simple navigating complex ideas.
- Use technology to make the classroom walls transparent.
- Use a wide variety of physical and digital media.
- Believe in yourself and your students equally.
- It’s hard for students to learn from teachers they don’t like no matter how much you’d think this shouldn’t be true.
- Have a great classroom library—especially in math, science, social studies, etc.
- Be vulnerable.
- Teach in the moment. When you leave school each day, that day is gone. Don’t constantly teach for some nebulous future or foreboding exam. Live and learn in the now.
- Create reference sheets of commonly-used practices, formulas, graphic organizers, terms, etc., and have students keep those in their binders, or digitally.
- Use write-arounds across all content areas to allow students to quietly build on one another’s thinking.
- Assume the best.
- Do all that you can to not take work home. (It’s possible.)
- Be aware of how you look to others—students, staff, parents, etc.
- Help your students outgrow you.
- Focus on learning habits and Habits of Mind.
- Become a master at asking questions. Then help your students become even better.
- Focus on macro thinking patterns—cause-effect, compare-contrast, analogous situations, patterns, systems, etc., so that you can help students do the same.
- Pay attention if students never, ever seem to want to be around you.
- If your ideas on teaching and learning aren’t evolving over time, something may be missing from your workflow.
- Use the walls of your classroom to reach out to students with words and images that resonate, and then change it more than once a year. It’s their learning space, not yours.
- Have multiple, go-to methods of grouping students based on different needs—reading level, readiness, interest, etc.
- Make sure your students are working harder than you do. If they aren’t, change that immediately.
- Change lessons and units annually.
- Allow the students to know you as a person.
- Create and use a YouTube channel for something. It’s an incredible distribution tool.
- Use twitter, blogging, or some other persistent method of staying in touch with teachers outside your building.
- Take chances in professional development.
- Learn to tell stories, jokes, and riddles. Also use puzzles, paradoxes, moving music, and startling images.
- You often have to reach students emotionally before you do intellectually.
- Model making mistakes.
- Help students learn to play with content and ideas.
- Get learner’s attention early—early in the year, in a lesson, in a unit.
- Model not knowing.
- Use positive presuppositions without patronizing.
- Prove to students that you believe in them.
- The most basic teaching pattern of all is show me, help me, let me. Consider using it.
- Have students curate their own digital portfolios.
- Anticipate misunderstandings.
- Have multiple, easy-to-access data sources from inside and beyond your classroom.
- Don’t grade everything.
- If you’re not using some form of project-based learning, have a good reason.
- Blend the physical and the digital; offline and online spaces.
Digital Footprint - Tips to Getting Started
Here are five steps to get started.
1. Google it. Ask students to Google themselves to see what and who comes up when they type their name into a search engine. It should be clear that anyone—from parents to teachers can do this and find the same information
2. Select a “safe” educational-focused social platform for students to learn responsible behavior in the classroom. Understanding digital citizenship on an educational platform will translate to their other social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
3. Help students create an online “portfolio” to showcase their work, best accomplishments, and the things that they are most proud of. A portfolio will help students curate their own identity and show the things that are appropriate for sharing.
4. Establish a “Golden Rule.” Ask students to ask themselves, “Is this something I’d be embarrassed about if my parents, teacher, or principal saw it?” before posting online. Students should know that everything they put into the “digital world” is public, and people that they don’t even know can see it.
5. Help students learn that their online persona should reflect their offline persona. Ask students to create a short video, blog or slideshow about who they are—something that reflects their good qualities and the things they want the public to know about them.
If social media platforms are embraced in the classroom rather than ignored, students will learn responsible online behavior from the start, which will carry with them through their educational and professional careers. And as the world becomes more digitally focused, they will be better prepared for what’s to come, and pass this behavior on to future generations.
Learnist Educational Apps - 2014
Education Apps
This is one of the biggest collaboration boards on Learnist, consisting of teachers from all over the globe. This is my dream collaboration–where one topic morphs into a dialog of people putting forward their best practices.
What my PLN Learned at ISTE 2013 #EdtechRI Resources
Many teachers wanted to go to ISTE 2013 and couldn’t make the trip. Alicia Sullivan put together this collaborative board to help assemble learnings from ISTE for her professional learning network #EdTechRI. EdTechRI is a group of Rhode Island educators that is heavily involved in spreading best tech practices in the region.
LSD Used In War
This board is a student board that started as an optional project and ended up as a featured board on Learnist’s homepage. Hali and Mel researched the ways LSD and other drugs were used in warfare, bringing up critical ethical questions about about warfare R&D.
The Must-Have Guide To Project-Based Learning
Project-based learning, or PBL engages students. This board, designed by several teachers, will help you start out in that direction, getting the basic skills in areas that may seem a bit more difficult.
A Love Affair With The New York Yankees
You might think this is not really an education board, but as someone who has spent a lot of time researching the impact of sports on American culture, history, mill villages, and other areas, I argue that sports are connected to many academic fields. I use sports in my classroom as a vehicle for teaching social history, economics, math, physics–anything I can integrate into the main objective. This is the first board on which I collaborated, and the Yankees are my favorite team.
Exactly What Video Games Teach Us
Video games aren’t always a waste of time. This board shows how they teach resource management, allocation, spatial skills, and a host of other things kids need to develop. They’re fun, too. Students can practice Common Core based skills through video games.
Causes Of The Civil War
This is a collaboration I did with a fellow social studies teacher, Dawn Clemens. She created the board, and I was able to add on. Collaborating on basic material allows us to bounce ideas off one another, and ultimately frees us up to spend time on other things.
Educational Apps That Actually Work
Ten educators created this board, endorsing their favorite apps for education. This is critical because there are many apps out there but they don’t do much unless people use them.
Cooking Tips And Tricks
I’ve suggested to our culinary students that they collaborate on food and culinary boards. This is not a student board, but as a Career and Technical Educator, this would be a great board to use for students in the culinary arts, and better yet, an idea for collaboration. I’m envisioning students creating boards together for recipes, cooking techniques and many other areas.
Great Classroom Blogs
This collaboration is a collection of classroom boards. Please add your classroom blog on there. We’d love to see what you’re up to and exchange ideas, connecting through this board and our blogs.
How To Use Learnist On The Web
This collaboration shows how to use Learnist for new learners. If you have an idea for an innovative use of Learnist comment on this board.
This article appeared on Edudemic in September 2013 and was written by Dawn Casey-Rowe.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Thursday, September 4, 2014
The change all our schools need
This was taken from ditch that textbook... Excellent points, and seems common sense, yet teachers cling to an industrial model for education like it is the be all of humanity... Why?
1. “Why does school stink? Because most of what students do is based on compliance.”
For decades, schools have adopted and pushed a culture of “do exactly as the teacher says.” It was a very desirable trait in employees for many, many years. But the world has changed, and so have the needs for the workforce. Employers are looking for communicators, creative thinkers and problem solvers. A culture of compliance won’t produce those attributes.
2. “Schools should be democratic, messy, loud places where kids are everywhere.”
Lehmann speaks of his joy in walking around the Science Leadership Academy armed with his iPhone taking pictures. There’s a lot to photograph because students are everywhere — creating, testing, tinkering and trying. He’s right. Schools should be democratic: students should have a voice and input in what the school looks like, stands for and teaches them. They should be messy: taking risks and giving up control are messy but can be very fruitful. They should be loud: team work and collaboration doesn’t happen in silent rows.
3. “Classes should be bridges, not silos.”
Learning doesn’t have to happen inside the four walls of the classroom anymore. Collaborative tools let students share ideas in blogs, publish their work in websites, connect with other countries through video chats and work with others around the world in shared documents. We can break down the walls and broaden our students’ horizons, or we can keep the walls up and fence them in.
4. “Technology should be ubiquitous, necessary and invisible.”
Technology can’t be a class or a special day in class. If we use it that way, it becomes the focal point instead of a tool to help us achieve more. It should be ubiquitous — everywhere — especially where it can make what we do more efficient or empower us to do more. It should be necessary, because so many things we can do with technology can’t be done without it. It should also be invisible; when schools work with technology and don’t think about it anymore, it is truly integrated.
5. “Data-driven requires good data — and good data ain’t cheap.”
So many schools base so many decisions on results of standardized tests. They can provide some solid data, but it’s not always the best, and it’s not always what schools really need. Many of them don’t give any indication of how students will perform on those critical skills mentioned earlier: communication, problem solving and creative thinking. Schools should invest — and by invest, I mean time and effort as much as money — in good data.
6. “We’ve got to build caring institutions. We teach kids, not subjects.”
Lehmann suggests that math teachers quit saying they teach math, and that first grade teachers quit saying they teach first grade. Teachers teach kids. He contends that the relationship between student and teacher is more important than the relationship between teacher and subject.
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