http://www.edutopia.org/blog/habits-of-mind-terrell-heick
Ways To Differentiate Instruction - Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo (This is the first post in a two-part series on differentiation) I posed this question last week: "What is the best advice you can give to a teacher about differentiating instruction?" I've shared my response in an Ed Week Teacher article that I've co-authored with my colleague, Katie Hull Sypnieski. It's titled "The Five By Five Approach To Differentiation Success."
The 4-Letter Word That Everybody’s Talking About - Head Count Denver — Here at this giant gathering of admissions officers and high-school counselors, I keep hearing the same word over and over. People have mentioned it during sessions, uttered it over coffee, and probed its meaning in conversations. The word is “grit.” It’s as good a word as any for the determination that many educators now associate with student success. Grit, as described by some researchers, is the habit of overcoming challenges, of learning from mistakes instead of being defeated by them. Changing student thinking with SOLO I'm Kate Le Fever from St Andrews College in Christchurch and I'm head of biology and SOLO coordinator at the school. SOLO taxonomy stands for structured overview of learning outcomes and it's a way of giving students an understanding of the learning process to ensure they are able to gauge where they're at with their learning and what their next steps will be. It's got five different levels of understanding where a student can be at prestructural where they know nothing, moving through to unistructural and multistructural and then finally relational and extended abstract which means they can take their knowledge and apply it to a new situation. As SOLO coordinator I have been overseeing the roll out of SOLO at school.
Frequently Requested Resources The resources below are some of our most frequently requested and are provided for you here for easy access. This article is written by Art Costa and describes the 16 Habits of Mind. It is an excellent starting place for your work with HOM. Habits Of Mind Step 1 – Valuing Habits of Mind for yourself: For the Habits of Mind to have meaning for students they have to have meaning for teachers. Exploring and unpacking what is meant by each of the sixteen habits means to you and your colleagues is a great place to begin. Once teachers see the value of the Habits, it is easier and more authentic to help our students see their value. Eg: Persisting: When have you had to persist in your professional work? How do you overcome obstacles, barriers or demanding tasks in your work?
Using Bibliotherapy with Gifted Children - Unwrapping the Gifted Hopefully we’ve all had that experience of reading a book that powerfully “spoke” to us, a book whose characters we could relate to, and whose struggles and triumphs we identified with. Taking this experience a step farther is the strategy of bibliotherapy, the process of helping the reader learn about and cope with any social or emotional struggles or developmental needs by identifying with a character in a book who shares a similar struggle or need. The reading is typically followed up by discussion with a trusted adult.
The importance of stupidity in scientific research I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else. The Art Costa Centre For Thinking Habits of Mind is knowing how to behave intelligently when you DON'T know the answer. It means having a disposition toward behaving intelligently when confronted with problems, the answers to which are not immediately known: dichotomies, dilemmas, enigmas and uncertainties. Our focus is on performance under challenging conditions that demand strategic reasoning, insightfulness, perseverance, creativity, and craftsmanship. The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information, but also knowing how to act on it. Employing Habits of Mind requires drawing forth certain patterns of intellectual behavior that produce powerful results.
Differentiating the curriculum The Policy and implementation strategies for the education of gifted and talented students: Support package: Curriculum differentiation (2004) (pdf 1345kb) provides an introduction to curriculum differentiation for gifted and talented students and is suitable for all stages of schooling. It needs to be read in conjunction with the Policy and implementation strategies for the education of gifted and talented students (revised 2004) and its companion document (2004) (pdf 270kb). The purpose of differentiating the curriculum is to provide appropriate learning opportunities for gifted and talented students.
Why does failure inspire some and demoralize others? Stanford Magazine reports on the applications from psychological research Carol Dweck's work, which uses careful experiments to determine why some people give up when confronted with failure, while others roll up their sleeves and dive in. Through a series of exercises, the experimenters trained half the students to chalk up their errors to insufficient effort, and encouraged them to keep going. Those children learned to persist in the face of failure–and to succeed. The control group showed no improvement at all, continuing to fall apart quickly and to recover slowly. These findings, says Dweck, “really supported the idea that the attributions were a key ingredient driving the helpless and mastery-oriented patterns.” Her 1975 article on the topic has become one of the most widely cited in contemporary psychology.
Differentiating Instruction Differentiating Instruction ... One Size Doesn't Fit All Effective Strategies to Improve Student Performance ! We have students in our classrooms who struggle academically and others who learn at an advanced level and accelerated pace. We can meet the needs of all learners by differentiating instruction. 50 Really Cool Online Tools for Science Teachers A 21st-century education revolves around the Internet for everything from collaboration, tools, lessons, and even earning degrees online. If you are looking for ways to integrate online learning into your science class or science degree programs, then take a look at these cool online tools that are just perfect for both teachers and students. Science Tools to Use with Students These tools offer opportunities for learning about climate, cells, the human body, nature, and more. ChemiCool.
Using The Habits Of Mind To Promote Teacher Happiness by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick, Institute for Habits of Mind A Whole Child Deserves A Whole Teacher: Using The Habits Of Mind To Promote Teacher Happiness A lot is said and written about the whole child. We often forget, however, that we should be considering the whole adult as well. A teacher’s performance in the classroom, and the resulting performances of the students, depend on a cluster of ingredients not the least of which are the teacher’s attitudes and dispositions which we refer to as Habits of Mind, which concern not only what teachers can do (abilities) but what they are likely to do.
Guide to special needs apps Complete guide to educational and special needs apps With over 300,000 apps it's easy to become overwhelmed by the number of app choices. It's also easy to spend a small fortune on a lot of useless apps. As a special needs parent I wanted to get right to the "good stuff" and figured you did too. Check out our guide that breaks down the best of the apps by skill set so you can easily find and buy apps that most benefit your child.