Mentormob...not just for putting together lessons anymore. Now you can put together an opportunity for students to practice some upper-level skills.
Our middle school is in its second year of its 1:1 laptop initiative. While I understand they had some infrastructure issues last year when they first rolled those laptops out, this year seems to have gone much more smoothly for them. They are really doing a nice job of integrating technology in their classrooms, and below is an example from a science teacher's room: Create your own Playlist on MentorMob! Students designed their own labs testing the effectiveness of various products, summarized the results on one slide, and then the teacher put all of their results together in a MentorMob playlist. What a great idea for not only collecting and displaying student work in an electronic format, but also for allowing students to evaluate other students' work without the the fuss of emailing, scrolling up and down through Edmodo posts, or sharing documents. After putting all of the student work in the playlist (which, if you know Mentormob, is pretty stinking easy), just shoot out the link to the playlist to students via email or an LMS, and students have multiple samples to evaluate and practice giving feedback. And you don't have to use Mentormob if you don't want to-you can use any learning playlist tool out there (such as Blendspace).
Mentormob...not just for putting together lessons anymore. Now you can put together an opportunity for students to practice some upper-level skills. One of my roles in my new-ish (it's starting to feel not so new anymore, which I think is a good thing) role is planning professional development regarding the shifts in literacy instruction that the Common Core Standards require. I have been focusing on close reading, which I believe is a fundamental skill that students need in order to squeeze out all the meaning from text they can. It also forces students to grapple with a complex text, giving them strategies for how to handle tough reading. In my opinion, close reading is much better than what I used to see all the time in my classroom: telling students to read something and the only thing going on neurologically was motor neurons firing when their eyeballs moved back and forth across the page. Below is a sample presentation that I will be giving to our middle school staff this week regarding close reading, if you'd care to check it out. It was my first time using PowToon, so please forgive any errors you see in the timing. You can check out the resources I used in it here and here and here. Close reading really means getting students to re-read. But it doesn't mean that they simply fire those motor neurons again to move their eyeballs across a page of text a second time; it means students are re-reading in order to dig deep into the various levels of textual meaning. It means getting students to annotate while they read so they can be active questioners of the text; it means giving students questions that require they go back to the reading to find evidence to support their answers. It also means developing student skills at generating their own arguments that are backed with evidence, not just opinions that come from prior experience. Further, it means getting students to develop strategies for finding meanings of those tier two vocabulary words on their own, and seeing why the author used those particular words in the first place. It teaches students to slow down when they read, and forces them to see how a reading hangs together as a whole by analyzing its parts.
In other words, it teaches students to think. And, not only that, it teaches them skills they will actually need to use independently after they graduate. Much more useful, in my opinion, than most of the content that is held sacrosanct in classrooms these days. Does it take more time to do a close read? Yep. In fact, that's the one complaint I hear the most about close reading--that it takes too much class time. But any skill such as this will take more time to teach students at first. If it is done consistently by all teachers over the course of a school year, then it will become a habit that takes less and less time on the part of the teacher and the student. And, like I said, it makes students do that "thinking" thing--and teaches them a skill to help them do that thinking on their own, well after they leave your classroom and your content behind. Yesterday I attended the TechCon conference, a one-day conference put on by the Illinois Association of School Business Officials (IASBO). I went to a lot of great sessions (a Google+ session put on by Hank Thiele as well as a Google Chrome presentation put on by Bryan Weinert; can you tell I'm a Google girl?), but Ryan Bretag's session titled "Agility and Agency: Designing a Future Minded Learning Environment" at the end of the day was the one that really left me with a multitude of morsels for pondering. I have organized these morsels into a bulleted list below, mainly because my type-A savage beast is soothed by bulleted lists.
There was a lot to think about in one session, as you can see. But it was all centered around being future-minded in regards to learning rather than on traditional notions. I don't think that we can afford not to be mindful of educating students for their futures--not if we really want to do right by them. Photo credit: Espen Faugstad via Flickr I spent the morning in 7th grade. Specifically, I spent the morning in 7th grade science and math classes. Here's what I saw:
But mostly I saw some teachers who were already amazing throwing the work of learning back on to their students, and amazing students meeting that challenge. It was a wonderful way to start the day. It's been quite the whirlwind getting acquainted with my new position. One of my main roles this year is helping our ELA, Math, and Science teachers align their curricula to the Common Core as well as give them strategies for classroom implementation. Workshops are held during each month for meetings with each of those content areas, and I prepare the resources and activities for that time. I usually do this in a learning playlist tool of some kind; below are some Science & Math examples. Create your own Playlist on MentorMob! ELA and Math worked on unpacking the standards and aligning their curricula last year under the guidance of another professional development professional, and this year they are finishing any remaining alignment and working on the first stages of mapping curricula in a UbD framework. While this does mean a lot of data entry at first, the end result will be a K-12 curriculum that will be accessible to all in the district via a curriculum mapping software, and it will be in a common format with which everyone is familiar. From that point, groups can begin to have discussions about revising and refining their curriculum through the software itself, and can see how well the spiral of skills is being maintained, implemented, and assessed across all grade levels.
The challenge right now is getting beyond the specifics of filling in the UbD framework and see that larger vision of a cohesive, dynamic, and interactive curriculum. There was a lot of time and effort spent last year rewriting curricula in various formats per content area that are excellent for use in the classroom and guiding groups of teachers teaching the same course or grade level; however, all of those different formats will not serve to bring the curriculum together in a way that everyone in the district can understand and use in a meaningful way. Also, the UbD framework forces reflection concerning what is taught and why it is taught, looking at the curriculum from a vastly different angle. This can be very uncomfortable for people, and can cause some frustration. I am sympathetic to the struggle; I've been through the mapping process as a teacher, and the last thing I want to cause or see is frustration over this. However, I don't believe you ever grow in your own teaching practice if you don't ever examine and reflect upon what you're doing in the classroom and why you're doing it. And with the increasingly ambitious skills students are required to have under the Common Core, teachers are going to have to get out of their comfort zones at times and take risks in the classroom by trying new things or modifying and updating what they already have students doing in regards to their learning. Those types of changes only come after some reflection has taken place. But we also need to look outside of the four walls of a classroom and see the bigger curriculum picture, because the skill progressions in the Common Core require it. While each grade or course may be very aware of their piece of the puzzle, it is necessary to see the other curricular pieces and how they fit together in order to really serve students and their learning well. And, like I've said before, the UbD mapping is just a starting point for a valuable professional process--a place where good conversations, discussions, and decisions about curriculum and student learning begin. This morning I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School regarding pretty much all of my favorite topics: focusing instruction on learning, designing assessment focused on learning, and changing grading practices focused on learning. Yes, I can't help but notice that "learning" theme, too. Crazy crazy. Below is the presentation that was used during my little talk (you can also access it here as a Google Presentation), and we had a most excellent question and answer session afterwards which I wish I had recorded--the questions were that good. I think there will be some absolutely amazing things going on in that school in the very near future. I haven't blogged in a while. It's not that I haven't wanted to blog; in fact, I've wanted nothing more than to sit down and pour out my thoughts about anything and everything regarding my fancy new position. But time and other factors (i.e., training for my second marathon, sleeping, eating, exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen) have taken me away from my blogging. Since blogging has in the past often served as the duct tape holding the fragments of my sanity together, I am hereby resolved to blog much more often so as not to edge any farther into the realm of complete insanity. What's helping to preserve small chunks of my sanity lately is a book called Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning by John Hattie. He wrote his original book titled Visible Learning in 2008, and it was a pretty intense, data-laden complex read. But this recent 2012 release has all sorts of easier-to-understand goodness just for teachers. As the title states, the focus is on maximizing the impact of influences on student learning. He points out that, when you look at everything that influences student learning, almost everything works. ("All that is needed to enhance achievement is a pulse.") That means that simply providing proof that something works isn't enough; teachers must reflect on what they're doing in the classroom and see if it is having a positive effect that is worthwhile and making a visible difference in student learning. Below are some nuggets from the first chapter, which have gotten me all fired up as of late: "The remarkable feature of the evidence is that the greatest effects on student learning occur when teachers become learners of their own teaching, and when students become their own teachers." "Fundamentally, the most powerful way of thinking about a teacher's role is for teachers to see themselves as evaluators of their effects on students." "What I am not saying is that 'teachers matter'; this cliche is is the most unsupported claim from the evidence in Visible Learning...What does matter is teachers having a mind frame in which they see it as their role to evaluate their effect on learning." My take on the above quotes is this: teachers can't make instructional, curricular, or assessment-related decisions with a "what's easiest for me" mindset (the rationale for such decisions often comes wrapped in a thin veneer of student-centeredness, unfortunately). I've seen that too often, and I've seen student learning suffer as a direct result--with everyone scratching their heads wondering why students aren't getting better at this whole "learning" thing when all the decisions being made are geared towards making adults' lives easier (or maintaining the status quo) instead of doing what's right for student learning. I've said it before and I'll say it again-what's easiest for us is rarely what's good for student learning. Educators need to shift their mindset and start making decisions based on looking at what they're doing in the classroom and the size of the dent it's making in student learning. Teachers need to, according to Hattie, "know thy impact" and evaluate themselves and their classroom practices so they can help students be better learners. How do they need to evaluate themselves? By examining their classroom practices through the eyes of their students. We can't give students the skills they need to become their own teachers if decisions are being made that only benefit the teacher, not the student. Teaching students to be their own learners, independent learners, is hard work on everyone's part. It can feel overwhelming at times. It requires lots of formative feedback, observation, data collection, time, conversations, assessments, reassessments, metacognition, failure, and the teacher knowing a range of learning strategies to teach to students to give them tools in their learning toolboxes so students know how to fix what's broken when failure strikes hard and often.
It takes work. Lots of it. But the end result is so worthwhile. What it boils down to is this: We're here for the students, not ourselves. Decisions need to be made after looking through the eyes of students, not at our own self-interests. |
Upcoming Presentations:About the Author
I'm a K-12 Curriculum Director who loves to put things in parentheses (like this) and overuse hyphens--like this. I also abuse semicolons with wild abandon; I just can't help it. Crazy Teaching: Just Doing What Makes Sense by Terie Engelbrecht is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Archives
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Action-Reaction What It's Like on the Inside I Taught My Dog to Whistle Teach Science (.net) ThinkThankThunk My Island View Life of an Educator Edumacation Developing Education Real Teaching Means Real Learning Against the Wind for the love of learning The Tempered Radical McSquared Delta Scape Shifting Phases |