6 Completed Lesson And Unit Plans Recently, I wrote a blog about 5 ways that we can learn through writing lesson plans. I also shared a resource collection of lesson and unit planning with 10 templates. We know that we can learn about lesson planning by writing out our plans and using templates, but we can also learn by reading the plans of other educators. Scholastic’s Lesson Plan Database hosts thousands of completed lesson and unit plans for grades pre-K-12 in all subjects. Better Lesson, the National Education Association’s lesson plan site, features over 3000 Common Core-aligned lesson plans developed by teachers participating in the NEA’s Master Teacher Project. Share My Lesson, the American Federation of Teachers’ lesson plan database, contains nearly 300,000 resources created by teachers. ReadWriteThink is a site developed by the The International Reading Association (IRA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) ReadWriteThink. Share your favorite lesson plans in the comment section below.
Teaching & Assessing Soft Skills The career landscape is changing dramatically. The Bureau of Labor Statistics states that the average worker currently holds ten different jobs before the age of forty. This requires a high degree of flexibility and adaptability. Students who leave high school with strong soft skills will work more harmoniously with others and be more successful tackling unfamiliar tasks. This year I am focusing on both teaching and assessing these critical soft skills. Now my teacher team uses these rubrics to give each student feedback on where he/she is in relation to mastering these crucial skills. Below are a few of the rubrics I designed. If you have strategies or resources you use to support students in developing their soft skills, please post a comment and share them!
Why Students Forget—and What You Can Do About It Teachers have long known that rote memorization can lead to a superficial grasp of material that is quickly forgotten. But new research in the field of neuroscience is starting to shed light on the ways that brains are wired to forget—highlighting the importance of strategies to retain knowledge and make learning stick. In a recent article published in the journal Neuron, neurobiologists Blake Richards and Paul Frankland challenge the predominant view of memory, which holds that forgetting is a process of loss—the gradual washing away of critical information despite our best efforts to retain it. According to Richards and Frankland, the goal of memory is not just to store information accurately but to “optimize decision-making” in chaotic, quickly changing environments. In this model of cognition, forgetting is an evolutionary strategy, a purposeful process that runs in the background of memory, evaluating and discarding information that doesn’t promote the survival of the species.
"Kids Can't Learn From Teachers They Don't Like" 1 minute read ‘Kids Can’t Learn From Teachers They Don’t Like’ by TeachThought Staff The following TEDTalk by Rita Pierson reminds us of why we all got involved in teaching to begin with. While curriculum, assessment, and instructional design may be how you parse your thinking now, at one point it probably had more to do with content, curiosity, and relationships. “Kids can’t learn from teachers they don’t like.” Indeed. 1. 2. 3. 4. How–or why–should teachers proceed focusing on relationships in lieu of academic priorities, distracting and intimidating policies, personal biases, and even challenging students? “We show up to work when we don’t feel like it, we listen to policy that doesn’t make sense, and we teach anyway…because that’s what we do. You can view the video here.
Why Flipped Learning Is Still Going Strong 10 Years Later Ten years ago two Colorado chemistry teachers unleashed a brash concept on a K-12 landscape where few questioned the age-old formula of lecture, homework, assess, repeat. It was the early days of YouTube (then two-years old), and it was getting cheap and easy to make and post videos, so the two teachers—Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams—proposed shifting lectures to videos students would watch at home, and asking students to come to class prepared to problem solve with their peers. It became know as the flipped classroom—a modern, video-based version of a model pioneered by a handful of higher ed professors during the 1990s. A few years later, the concept lit up like rocket fuel thanks in part to the catchy name, along with fast-growing home internet connectivity and a shout-out in Sal Khan’s popular TED Talk. Or maybe it stemmed from the fact that anyone could get the gist of the teaching idea in the time it takes to rattle off a sound bite. “It’s a simple model,” says Bergmann. Flipped OS
edutopia Our students are reading all day long—text messages on their phones, emailed directions about homework, apps from advertisers. They read what interests them and what helps make their world a more real, relevant, and relatable place to live. And we can tap into their interests to embed speaking, listening, reading, and writing in classes to help achieve content objectives. Keep It Real Students want to learn about things that have an impact on them in their daily lives. Example: Give students an opportunity to learn about where they live by researching how culture, religion, and traditions have shaped their community and perhaps their lives as well. Have students learn about the history of their neighborhood by researching it. Next, ask students to locate vintage pictures of their community from various websites. Finally, ask students to explain what they learned about their neighborhood. Keep It Relevant Students want to be connected to their learning and in control of it.
What Does Student Engagement Look Like? Engagement. . .it’s another one of those words that’s regularly bandied about in higher education. We talk about it like we know what it means and we do, sort of. It’s just that when a word or idea is so widely used, thinking about it often stops and that’s what I think has happened with engagement. We know that engagement is an essential part of learning. We aspire to get our students engaged because most of them don’t come to us that way. The findings do not indicate that participation is a bad thing or that it can’t engage students, just that it didn’t do so very convincingly for this cross-disciplinary cohort of more than 600. We tend to think that either students are engaged or they aren’t. In reading more about engagement, I’ve discovered that it’s a multidimensional construct—the academic way of saying it’s composed of parts. Behaviorally engaged students do what students are supposed to do in class. However, the general consensus is that engagement is “malleable.” Fredricks, J.
The engaged student vs. the compliant student The engaged student knows exactly why they are doing what they are doing while the compliant student is unable to connect the learning to anything meaningful. The engaged student is asking questions while the compliant student is simply receiving instructions and direction from the teacher. The engaged student is focused on learning while the compliant student wants to know how many points the activity is worth. The engaged student is able to track, monitor, and self-evaluate their learning while the compliant student is reliant upon the teacher to know where he/she is with their learning. The engaged student is making connections to the material and information beyond the four walls of the classroom while the compliant student is unable to see beyond the actual task itself. The engaged student doesn't have time to misbehave or make poor choices while the compliant student is one turn of the back by the teacher away from making a poor decision.
How To Ensure Students Are Actively Engaged and Not Just Compliant | MindShift | KQED News Engagement is a crucial part of learning, but ensuring students are actively engaged is more complex than whether a student is paying attention or not. As technology has made its way into the classroom many educators describe how attentive students are when on devices, but a quiet, outwardly behaved student is not the same thing as one that is truly engaged. The kind of engagement that leads to learning is three dimensional. Too often educators look at engagement as a “yes or no” question: students are either engaged or they’re not. When Almarode visits classrooms he looks for behavioral, emotional and cognitive engagement at play together. When Almarode visits classrooms he looks for eight different qualities that indicate students are engaged. Does the activity, strategy, task, or idea allow for the student to personalize his or her response? “As a teacher, as you design a task you need at least three of those characteristics in there,” Almarode said. Katrina Schwartz