Smart Strategies That Help Students Learn How to Learn. Teaching Strategies Bruce Guenter What’s the key to effective learning? One intriguing body of research suggests a rather riddle-like answer: It’s not just what you know. It’s what you know about what you know. To put it in more straightforward terms, anytime a student learns, he or she has to bring in two kinds of prior knowledge: knowledge about the subject at hand (say, mathematics or history) and knowledge about how learning works. In our schools, “the emphasis is on what students need to learn, whereas little emphasis—if any—is placed on training students how they should go about learning the content and what skills will promote efficient studying to support robust learning,” writes John Dunlosky, professor of psychology at Kent State University in Ohio, in an article just published in American Educator.
“Teaching students how to learn is as important as teaching them content.” [RELATED: What Students Should Know About Their Own Brains] • What is the topic for today’s lesson? Related. 5 Tools to Help Students Learn How to Learn. Helping students learn how to learn: That’s what most educators strive for, and that’s the goal of inquiry learning. That skill transfers to other academic subject areas and even to the workplace where employers have consistently said that they want creative, innovative and adaptive thinkers.
Inquiry learning is an integrated approach that includes kinds of learning: content, literacy, information literacy, learning how to learn, and social or collaborative skills. Students think about the choices they make throughout the process and the way they feel as they learn. Those observations are as important as the content they learn or the projects they create. “We want students thinking about their thinking,” said Leslie Maniotes a teacher effectiveness coach in the Denver Public Schools and one of the authors of Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century.
“When they are able to see where they came from and where they got to it is very powerful for them.” 10 ways to encourage students to take responsibility for their learning. 1. Don’t make all the decisions Allow choice. Encourage students to make decisions about how they learn best. Create opportunities for them to pursue their own interests and practise skills in a variety of ways. 2. Ask open-ended questions, with plenty of possible answers which lead to further questions. 3. Minimise standing out front and talking at them. 4. Talk about your own learning. 5. Get your students to write down what they learned, whether they enjoyed a particular learning experience, what helped their learning, what hindered their learning and what might help them next time. 6. Record student thinking and track development over time. 7. Help students to define goals for their learning. 8. If you know exactly where the lesson is leading and what you want the kids to think, then you‘re controlling the learning. 9.
Make sure you and your students know the reason for every learning experience. 10. I know there are lots more ways. Like this: Like Loading...
Dan Pink: How Teachers Can Sell Love of Learning to Students. By Jennie Rose In his new book To Sell is Human, author Daniel Pink reports that education is one of the fastest growing job categories in the country. And with this growth comes the opportunity to change the way educators envision their roles and their classrooms. Guided by findings in educational research and neuroscience, the emphasis on cognitive skills like computation and memorization is evolving to include less tangible, non-cognitive skills, like collaboration and improvisation.
Jobs in education, Pink said in a recent interview, are all about moving other people, changing their behavior, like getting kids to pay attention in class; getting teens to understand they need to look at their future and to therefore study harder. At the center of all this persuasion is selling: educators are sellers of ideas. “We have a lot of learned behavior of compliance, and hunger for external rewards and no real engagement.” Why is it moving this way? “Here’s the thing,” he said. Related. Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation. - Create a Culture of Questioning and Inquiry. 4 Comments August 14, 2013 By: Guest Blogger Nancy White Aug 13 Written by: 8/13/2013 6:00 PM ShareThis I have often suggested to teachers that when students have access to technology, whether it is provided by the school in a 1:1, BYOD, or simply the smart phone in their pocket, there should never be a question that goes unanswered –or un-followed.
What I discovered in the 300+ observations I have done for our 21st Century Learning grant work was that the problem isn’t necessarily about allowing time for students to answer questions. As the new school year begins, think about how you might begin to shift from a culture of compliance, to a culture of questioning in your classroom. Ask: “What do you wonder?” This seems like a simple thing to do – and it is! Question wall I found these in several classrooms I visited recently. Question journal Get students in the habit of collecting questions in a journal – paper or electronic. Question Formulation Technique Inquiry days. Learningtheories-full.jpg (JPEG Image, 1614 × 1145 pixels) - Scaled (57%) Why "20% Time" is Good for Schools.
Have you ever met an adult who doesn't really love what they do, but just goes through the motions in their job and everyday life? Have you spoken with men and women who constantly complain, showing no visible passion for anything in the world? I'm sure that, like me, you have met those people. I've also seen the making of these adults in schools across our country: students who are consistently being "prepared" for the next test, assessment, or grade level . . . only to find out after graduation that they don't really know what they are passionate about. These are the same students who are never allowed to learn what they want in school. Forced down a curriculum path that we believe is "best for them," they discover it is a path that offers very little choice in subject matter and learning outcomes. Enter 20% time. What 20% time allows students to do is pick their own project and learning outcomes, while still hitting all the standards and skills for their grade level.
Students Teachers.
Why Teaching Helps Students Learn More Deeply. Teaching Strategies Tulane Public Relations/Flickr Learning, and thinking, are deeply social activities. This is not the traditional view (Rodin’s iconic sculpture, “The Thinker,” is conspicuously alone in his chin-on-fist musings), but it’s the view that is emerging out of several decades of social science research. Our minds often work best in interaction with other people’s minds, and there are particular kinds of relationships that are especially good at evoking our intelligence. One is the master-apprentice relationship. “Student teachers score higher on tests than pupils who are learning only for their own sake.” Students enlisted to tutor others, these researchers have found, work harder to understand the material, recall it more accurately and apply it more effectively.
Educators are experimenting with ways to apply this model to academic subjects. Feedback from the teachable agents further enhances the tutors’ learning. Related. Online Student Communication Guidelines. To be effective, an online classroom must be a safe space where students feel their voices will be respected, supported and heard. Establishing clear guidelines for online interactions is a critical step in creating an online forum that will be successful long-term.
A stronger in-class community will form as a result of establishing and maintaining a safe space in your online site. Strategies for Creating and Maintaining a Safe Space: Use each other’s names. Using a person’s name when you respond to his/her postings creates a friendly online tone.Read questions and conversational postings carefully to avoid unnecessary confusion.Compliment your peers when they post strong responses or contribute original ideas to the conversation.Ask questions. If anything is unclear or you want further information or insight on a topic, just ask. If you have a question, there are probably other members of the group who are confused and need further clarification as well.Be considerate. Resiliency and Grit, Not Failure. At ISTE 2013 in San Antonio, Texas, Microsoft gave away over 10,000 Microsoft Surface Tablets to participants. Basically anyone that was at the conference that wanted one was going to get one for free with their registration. The majority of people that came to the conference had no idea that this was happening and I would say very few (if any) people signed up to go to ISTE to get the Surface.
I chose not to get one. I chose not to take a free tablet/computer with my registration to ISTE. As participants unpacked their devices, played with them, what they had told me was basically what I had heard in the reviews before. Here’s the thing…if Apple gave away an iPad at ISTE, I would have taken it in a second. Embrace Failure? This is not about Apple vs. Every time I hear things like this, I get worked up. Googling the definition for the term “failure”, here is the screenshot of what I found: Based on the definition above, the “Surface” was a failure at ISTE. Failure or something else?
Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit. Eight Ways of Looking at Intelligence. Big Ideas In “Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird,” poet Wallace Stevens takes something familiar—an ordinary black bird—and by looking at it from many different perspectives, makes us think about it in new ways.
With apologies to Stevens, we’re going to take the same premise, but change the subject by considering eight ways of looking at intelligence—eight perspectives provided by the science of learning. A few words about that term: The science of learning is a relatively new discipline born of an agglomeration of fields: cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience. Its project is to apply the methods of science to human endeavors—teaching and learning—that have for centuries been mostly treated as an art. As with anything to do with our idiosyncratic and unpredictable species, there is still a lot of art involved in teaching and learning. 1. Situations can be internal or external. On one level this is obvious, but on another it is quite radical. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. The Role of Mistakes in the Classroom.
Reframing and Refining the Worksheet. Worksheets matter! I know we hear a lot of talking points that tell us to get rid of them, but I think it's much more complicated than that. That call for "no more worksheets" comes from a place where that is all there is. By that I mean classrooms where students do nothing but worksheets. Often these worksheets are de-contextualized from relevant work, and this is where there's an opportunity to reframe and refine the traditional worksheet.
There is a time and place for drill and practice or individual practice -- even in a PBL project. The key is to make it appropriate and relevant. A recent visit to a PBL school jumpstarted my brain on this issue. Worksheets That Model a Career Tool Students consistently worked on a piece of paper shown below. As we design worksheets, let's consider making them look like the real-world work that students are doing -- or could be doing. Worksheet used at ACE Leadership Academy Credit: Andrew Miller Other Tips for Worksheets Rubric and Reflection.
Curriculum21.