10 Characteristics Of A Highly Effective Learning Environment 10 Characteristics Of A Highly Effective Learning Environment by Terry Heick For in-person professional development from TeachThought on how to create an effective learning environment in your classroom or school, contact us today. Wherever we are, we’d all like to think our classrooms are “intellectually active” places. The reality is, there is no single answer because teaching and learning are awkward to consider as single events or individual “things.” So we put together one take on the characteristics of a highly effective classroom. 1. This is not a feel-good implication, but really crucial for the whole learning process to work. The role of curiosity has been studied (and perhaps under-studied and under-appreciated), but suffice to say that if a learner enters any learning activity with little to no natural curiosity, prospects for meaningful interaction with texts, media, and specific tasks are bleak. 2. Questions are more important than answers. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Back to School: Starting the Year on the Right Foot Back to school season can be intimidating, regardless of whether you are a seasoned teacher or fresh off the college track. Making a good impression with your students, their parents, and establishing a good working relationship amongst co-workers can make your daily teaching experience run smoother. But how can you ensure you start off on the right foot and sustain that momentum? On a recent TeachHUB post, I listed ten tips to help any teacher become a team player with his or her co-workers. I have since discovered five additional tips to help teachers begin the back to school season with success. The most important tip is to be yourself. Secondly, be approachable. Storytelling can be a powerful teaching strategy. Even seasoned teachers still feel the stress of the first few weeks. Bulletin boards are an appealing way to display student work, they can serve as... Getting your students to feel welcome, and establishing a good rapport during... Third, listen to what others have to say.
30 Habits Of Highly Effective Teachers Editor’s Note: We often look at the qualities and characteristics of good teaching and learning, including the recent following pieces: How A Good Teacher Becomes Great What You Owe Your Students Ten Secrets To Surviving As A Teacher The Characteristics Of A Highly Effective Learning Environment How To Be A Mediocre Teacher So it made sense to take a look at the characteristics of a successful educator, which Julie DuNeen does below. 25 Things Successful Teachers Do Differently by Julie DuNeen If you ask a student what makes him or her successful in school, you probably won’t hear about some fantastic new book or video lecture series. What students take away from a successful education usually centers on a personal connection with a teacher who instilled passion and inspiration for their subject. Are teachers reaching their students? 1. How do you know if you are driving the right way when you are traveling somewhere new? 2. We can’t all be blessed with “epic” workdays all the time. 3. 4. 5.
26 Questions Every Student Should Be Able To Answer 26 Questions Every Student Should Be Able To Answer by Terry Heick These questions are more about the student than you, your classroom, or education. What every student should know starts with themselves and moves outwards to your content area: self knowledge–> content knowledge. As an educator, your job is lead students to understanding, but student self-awareness and self-knowledge should precede that. If it hasn’t already come, the first day of school is probably imminent for you, and these kinds of questions could come in handy there as well. Strategies for Implementation These kinds of questions seem a bit…challenging, but if students can’t even begin to answer them, well, we have a problem don’t we? Based on some feedback we’ve gotten from our facebook community, here are a few tips to use this resource: 1. 2. Have students choose to respond to the ones the want to respond to, and skip the ones they don’t 3. 4. Each question can act as a writing prompt. 5. 6. 7. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
The Best Advice On Engaging Parents At The Beginning Of The School Year I have a fairly popular post titled The Best Sources Of Parent Engagement Advice For Teachers. I thought it would be useful to put together a different list focusing specially on advice to teachers on this topic related the beginning of a new school year. Here’s a short list — each post contains links to additional resources: Writing Letters To Parents At The Start Of The Year “I Want Parents To Know This…” 7 Questions to Ask Parents at the Beginning of the Year is by Elena Aguilar. Additional suggestions are welcome. I’m adding this post to my Collection Of “The Best…” Lists On Parent Engagement. Related
10 Timely Tips for the First Days of School 10 Timely Tips for the First Days of School By Harry K. & Rosemary Wong closeAuthor: Harry K. & Rosemary Wong Name: Harry K. & Rosemary WongSite: About: See Authors Posts (7) From the archives… Extracted from the original article. How well you begin school with an organized, consistent, and well managed classroom will determine your success and your students’ success for the rest of the school year. BEGINNING NEEDS OF STUDENTS. Comment on this article... This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2014 and is filed under *ISSUES, August 2014, Harry Wong, Newsdesk.
How a Shoe Can Teach Responsibility How a Shoe Can Teach Responsibility By Marjan Glavac closeAuthor: Marjan Glavac Name: Marjan GlavacSite: Marjan is currently a gr.6 home room teacher at Wilfrid Jury Public School in London, Ontario, Canada where he resides with his wife and two children. For more information about Marjan Glavac, his books, keynotes, training and seminars, visit him at his site at Authors Posts (51) thebusyeducator.com A number of years ago a first year teacher asked me for some help. He told me that his students took all his pencils. They took all his glue bottles. And his class set of scissors. He was angry, frustrated and hurt. “These students have no sense of responsibility,” he told me. I agreed with him. I told him they needed to be taught how to be responsible. “And how do I do that?” “Ask for a shoe,” I said. “How does a shoe teach students responsibility?” She gave an example of asking for a shoe when a student borrowed something.
How 21st Century Learning Fits Into The Common Core At a time when many teachers and parents (and students!) can feel overwhelmed by the seeming overabundance of standardized tests and educational standards more generally, it falls to the teacher to help the students and parents understand how all of this fits into the larger picture of what students will need to know and be able to do to be successful in the future. This means helping them understand how educational standards fit into 21st century learning, a concept that to many seems contradictory. The handy infographic below takes a look at how the common core standards can be pathways to success in the 21st century (though obviously they are not the only path, just a part of it). The left side of the poster with the blue background explores six 21st century skills that teachers are helping students develop through their teaching with the standards. 21st Century Skills Taught via CCSS The CCSS teach students to be: Must-Have 21st Century College and Career Skills
Crowdsourcing as a Class with Blogger The first few days of school can be a bit of a blur for students who are bombarded with syllabi and class rules. One of the ways I like to break the cycle of “sit and get” that first week of school is to use a crowdsourcing activity to put the responsibility of establishing expectations on my students. Instead of telling them what I expect, I ask them questions like: What would make this class feel like a community? My students have been in school for 10 years by the time they get to my class, so they have a pretty good idea of what makes a classroom a welcoming and safe community. The second day of school, I asked them to discuss what they thought was polite versus rude when engaging in different forms of communication. The challenge is that I don’t have enough wall space or white board to capture all of their incredible ideas. Instead of crowdsourcing on the board, which is temporary, students post their ideas directly to our class blog. Using Blogger to Crowdsource You’re all set!
Paper Circuitry Illuminates ‘Writing as Making’ There has been a great deal of buzz lately about "making" and production-centered learning. As a professor of literature and writing, I have been enthusiastic about the role "making" might play in the classroom. (Even those classrooms or courses that don't inherently seem to lend themselves to making in the most obvious sense.) On July 9, the National Writing Project and the Educator Innovator network helped launch "Hack Your Notebook Day," which featured a special writing-engineering-art "make" challenge. Could this artful hands-on approach to writing serve pedagogic goals in any significant way? What was intriguing during the "Hack Your Notebook Day" was the transformative power of this work. What a revelation to consider the palpable frustration we experienced when we couldn't make the circuits work (and the feeling of rising failure that might overcome us if we couldn't make it work). Our work with Paper Circuitry was a perfect realization of the Connected Learning experience. #1.
7 Essential Principles of Innovative Learning Big Ideas Culture Teaching Strategies Flirck:WoodleyWonderworks Every educator wants to create an environment that will foster students’ love of learning. Researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) launched the Innovative Learning Environments project to turn an academic lens on the project of identifying concrete traits that mark innovative learning environments. Their book, The Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice and the accompanying practitioner’s guide, lay out the key principles for designing learning environments that will help students build skills useful in a world where jobs are increasingly information and knowledge-based. “Adaptive expertise tries to push beyond the idea of mastery,” said Jennifer Groff, an educational engineer and co-founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign. [RELATED READING: How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World] Educators can also test ideas with students before implementing them.
How To Help Your Students Embrace Failure through Game-based Learning How To Help Your Students Embrace Failure Through Game-Based Learning By Justin W. Marquis, Ph.D. Whether our students fear the dark, monsters, heights, some other imagined horror, or something more real such as family troubles or bullying, everyone is afraid of something. In our society the fear of failure pervades everything we do in our work, our relationships, and in education. The movement to incorporate games and game-based learning in our schools is gaining momentum, but another fear prevents educators from fully realizing the full potential of game-based learning. One way of overcoming these fears, and thus helping students to learn from their failures, is to develop an understanding for how to actually use games in the classroom, and how to take advantage of the failure process that they rely on. 3 Strategies To Make Game-Based Learning Explicit There are several strategies that can be put in place by educators to help ensure that this happens. 1. 2. 3.
Appendix B, What's an Exemplar? - CORElaborate Chris Gustafson A couple of years into work with the Common Core State Standards, there’s still confusion around the purpose of Appendix B: Text exemplars and Sample Performance Tasks. Bloggers still criticize the lack of current texts listed – what’s with all those public domain choices? A lot of the controversy around Appendix B of the Common Core State Standards could have been avoided by applying some close reading strategies. The following text samples primarily serve to exemplify the level of complexity and quality that the Standards require all students in a given grade band to engage with. The words that catch my eye are “exemplify,” “suggestive,” and “guideposts.” So why do districts and schools continue to skim the first paragraph, read on down to the materials list, and copy and paste it into their book orders? Certainly we expect the complex texts we use will fit with the curriculum for our grade levels. Do some reading about the characteristics of complex texts.