background preloader

Better teaching

Facebook Twitter

Online Teaching Ideas. 4 Tips for Getting to Know the Blended Instructional Model. The days of talking at students are finally over.

4 Tips for Getting to Know the Blended Instructional Model

I recall many a college class filled to the brim with students feverishly taking down notes, as our professor talked at us. Sounds familiar? Probably. Recently, I finished my Masters degree in what was a new environment for me: blended classes. The experience allowed me to further communicate with my colleagues and classmates in a manner that I hadn't been accustomed to. I left this experience determined to bring the concept to my classroom, and due to the Common Core's adoption, we all need to embrace this concept. Tip #1: Kids Aren't as Tech Savvy as You Think Like most subjects, your students' knowledge in regards to technology will vary. True, I had the occasional student that could hack into a supercomputer, but that student was generally rare.

Realistically, you might to be forced to instruct students on how to use various mechanisms for your class. Tip #2: Be Wary of Online Textbooks and Online Classes. Deeper Learning Video Series. Teach Close Reading and Powerful Writing. If you can’t stand the research, get out of the classroom? In Dan Willingham’s superb book ‘why students don’t like school’, one of his provocative conclusions is that ‘the mind is not designed for thinking’.

If you can’t stand the research, get out of the classroom?

The problematic combination of effort, uncertainty and mental availability leads us to be, in John Hattie’s words, ‘highly selective about what we pay attention to’. Although Willingham is pragmatic and optimistic about solutions to this issue, his Realpolitik starting point is salutary and useful. If, to use Robert Coe’s definition, pupils are learning when they are ‘thinking hard’, their capacity to dislike and avoid learning things should hardly surprise us. A similar analysis could easily be applied to the question of ‘why teachers don’t like research’. Of course there are structural, system-wide barriers to teachers’ engagement with research, and more could be done to incentivise the profession. With all this in mind, I went to my first researchED conference on Saturday.

What are my grounds for optimism? Comments. 7 Survival Skills For Modern Teachers And Students. Walk into a school, airport, shopping mall, or even a church and the image is always the same, teens and tweens have their heads down, ear buds on, and a mobile device in their hand.

7 Survival Skills For Modern Teachers And Students

This generation is commonly referred to as Generation Z and they are coming of age with a new set of rules, expectations, and mannerisms. Born between 1995 and 2009, the oldest of this generation is coming of age this year and headed off towards adulthood. What can they expect of their future work experiences? What will employers expect of them? What can educators continue to do? Does Gen Z Learn Differently? There is plenty of research and articles circulating around out there about how this generation learns and what the future workforce will hold for them. The Pluses Come With Minuses, Too. But just as technology has provided this generation with many strong technical attributes it has also produced its share of negative traits. In just a few years there will be five generations in the workforce. Becoming A Whole Teacher. Becoming A “Whole Teacher” By Joining The Two Minds Of Educators by Terry Heick In his essay Two Minds, Wendell Berry, unsurprisingly enough, offers up two tones of thought produced by two kinds of “mind”—Rational, and Sympathetic.

Becoming A Whole Teacher

One is driven by logic, deduction, data, and measurement, the other by affection and other wasteful abstractions—instinct, reverence, joy, and faith. These minds struggle for to manifest in our collective behavior. That is, they both seek to control our actions–what we say and do. Berry explains their distinctions: “The Rational Mind of is motivated by the fear of being misled, of being wrong. The Sympathetic Mind is motivated by fear of error of a very different kind: the error of carelessness, of being unloving. It’s no surprise that these two minds exist in education as well. You’re told to be data-based—that is, to design learning experience with “strategies” that are suggested by some measurement you’ve taken. This is your Rational Mind. Research shows professors work long hours and spend much of day in meetings. Professors work long days, on weekends, on and off campus, and largely alone.

Research shows professors work long hours and spend much of day in meetings

Responsible for a growing number of administrative tasks, they also do research more on their own time than during the traditional work week. The biggest chunk of their time is spent teaching. Those are the preliminary findings of an ongoing study at Boise State University -- a public doctoral institution -- of faculty workload allocation, which stamps out old notions of professors engaged primarily in their own research and esoteric discussions with fellow scholars. “The ivory tower is a beacon — not a One World Trade Center, but an ancient reflection of a bygone era — a quasar,” John Ziker, chair of the anthropology department at Boise State University, says in a new scholarly blog post in which he discusses his faculty workload findings.

Ziker’s Blue Review post continues: “It is harder to count — and to account for — service and administrative duties.