Curating resources & sharing stories to empower teacher & student ownership, wonder, and daring.
A Wii remote taped to a ceiling projector. A teacher standing on desks. Twenty-five 11 year-olds offering enthusiastic technical support. This unlikely combination would become one of my greatest “aha” moments as an educator.
Continue reading “When DIY PD Goes Terribly Wrong–Or Does It?”
If you’re as passionate about improving education as we are, chances are you’ve had moments of discouragement, too. However, lately, we’ve come across several campaigns that had us smiling. We thought we’d pass on the optimism to remind us all that positive change in education happens every day–and to let you know how you can take part!
Continue reading “5 Reasons to be Hopeful About Education’s Future”
You’ve probably noticed that approaches to education and business tend to clash. After all, we spend about 13 years training students to memorize and then produce results in bubble sheets (which tends to untrain them from their natural tenacity, creativity, and passion), and then we suddenly hope they’ll be innovative and creative leaders once they join our workforce. One way to help beat this paradox: find applications for improved educational practices among the advice columns in the business world. Below are just a few examples.
Continue reading “5 Business-Inspired Tips for Progressive Classroom Management”
Have you ever played with Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button? Well, you should–and so should your students who are looking for inspiration or a challenge (especially if they feel they are always “done”).
Continue reading “The Last Digital Fast Finisher You’ll Ever Need”
After boring both my students and myself with largely direct instruction math for a couple of years, I decided to try guided math. The results? Increases in interest, one-on-one time, student initiative, and just plain joy in math learning.
Most math programs are still set up in very traditional, teacher-centered constructs. In the name of “offering support,” some even provide scripts! This is typically followed by a barrage of worksheets. Then quiz tomorrow. Spiral review. Repeat.
Perhaps the monotony would be worthwhile if we all become mathematically literate adults, but this does not seem to be the case. As the National Center for Education Statistics keeps confirming in surveys conducted since the 1980’s, most Americans’ math skills remain lacking:
It’s time to look outside the box of traditional math education in order to foster life-long mathematical illiteracy!
One day, while complaining to another teacher about how I’d started hating the sound of my own voice, she introduced me to guided math. What I found most intriguing:
I started literally the next day.
And while it took longer than that to refine my approach, the beauty of guided math is you can easily adapt your school’s math program to its structure.
Any other questions, tips, or experiences? We’d love to hear about them in the comments below!
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“You’ll use this all the time when you grow up.” “You’re developing skills you’ll need all the way through college.” “Someday, you’ll be so glad you learned another language.”
[insert eye-rolling here].
Even if true, relying primarily on these kinds of future-tense phrases to justify learning may have harmful effects. Nothing is worth draining our children’s inborn sense of discovery and enthusiasm.
The counterintuitive reality: instilling learning passion for the future only happens when we show students how to love learning today!
Think back to your classes that most sparked your passion. Chances are, those instructors made relevance a daily priority–a skill that takes purpose and deliberate planning. In our experience, that purpose and planning must consist of the following:
Students must be enabled to tailor their learning in order to find relevance. Technological options for making this happen are almost endless–but possibilities outside the high-tech box abound, too, including project based learning, genius hour, and other innovative new strategies.
Start the video below at 16 minutes for a wonderful anecdote by Sir Ken Robinson:
Anwar Masood highlights the importance & depth of the teacher-student relationship #teaching http://t.co/A2rjcd1G99 pic.twitter.com/A91opWEPQl
— Annet Kil (@AnnetKil) December 7, 2014
My first year teaching overflowed with the kinds of typical pursuits designed to prepare students for the future demands: book reports, math homework worksheets, and daily “independent study,” during which students would work for an hour on grammar, comprehension, vocabulary, and spelling. And guess where the most frequent strain on behavior occurred?
Over the years, we gradually replaced such activities with approaches that foster now learning–and I witnessed transformations in my students’ motivation, vibrance, and willingness to take risks.
How much of your student’s day involves learning for the present? Look below at tips for each part of my fifth grader’s schedule:
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It’s easy to get caught up in the frenzy of efficiency as teachers. Standards and tests and data and reports bear down on us with pressure to make every. minute. count.
There also seems to be an endless supply of initiatives to maximize our efficiency–many of which seem to simply offer more fodder for burnout, like some ideas found in the video below (at the proposition for increased class sizes for quality teachers, I could only visualize the exhausted expression of one of my mentor teachers the year they increased her first grade class size–because she could handle it, right?).
2/3/15 UPDATE: It appears that OpportunityCulture.org has removed their video after we published this post a couple of weeks ago. So, to fill you in if you missed it, the ideas we found most worrisome in the video included: 1) increasing class sizes for “excellent teachers” so more students could feel their influence (while decreasing class sizes for novice teachers); 2) implementing rotating classes for those “excellent teachers” so they could reach even more students each day; 3) an apparent oversight of the teacher-student relationship in general. Instead, their page now says the following:
“Watch this space for an updated motiongraphic, based on the experiences of the first pilot schools to implement their own Opportunity Cultures, showing the importance of models that let teams led by excellent teachers reach many more students, and let all teachers earn more and learn more—through more school-day time for collaboration and planning, and without forcing class-size increases.”
10/29/2015 UPDATE: A new video has been published. The model is explained differently, but the basis still rests on class-size increases for excellent teachers and efficiency, which still leaves us concerned about the lack of discussion on teacher-student relationships.
Kim Collazo’s response on Twitter brings to light what’s most worrisome about these kinds of ideas:
Is it just me, or is a lot of this video disturbing? What about the importance of relationships? http://t.co/QEhIraVqFo #ncadmin
— kcollazo (@kcollazo) January 14, 2015
Efficiency values time-management; empathy values taking all the time that is necessary to build relationships. Both have their place in our classrooms, but we must be careful that the more aggressive pursuits for efficiency don’t swallow up the daily opportunities to foster our relationships. To learn more about why empathy is so important in every relationship, see the poignant RSA video below in which Dr. Brené Brown describes how to discern genuine empathy.
After all, what does it matter if our students ace every test and memorize every chart if they lack the ability to connect and reach out to one another in compassion and understanding?
Whatever your subject matter, empathy should take a prominent place in all your instruction–both indirectly in general interactions with students, and directly as you point students’ attention to learning opportunities.
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