Teaching Students to Analyze Complex Nonverbal Texts. Standard 9 of the Common Core State Standards underscores the importance of students reading and writing about complex literary and informational texts, skills critical for "college and career readiness in a twenty-first-century, globally competitive society. " Using Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, my last blog toured several text-dependent strategies for teaching complex literary nonfiction. After grumbling about the CCSS's unfathomable vernation of cold reading as rigor transcendent, I argued that the assessment industrial complex conflates comprehension with test-taking literacies.
Moving past these objections, today's post observes ways in which multiple strategies and contemporary texts of different genres -- even nonverbal ones -- satisfy Standard 9 (impatient readers may be forgiven for skipping down to the section titled Strategies for Reading Nonverbal Texts to find examples of nonverbal texts and analysis strategies). No Silver Bullet Genres. Balancing Readability and Reading Fluency | On Common Core. As states from Maine to Montana implemented the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the readability recommendations shocked those teachers who find that their students already struggle to read classroom material.
But, when the crafters of the CCSS came out with “readability” recommendations (Lexile Measures), they did not arbitrarily say, “Kids can’t read. Let’s make it more difficult for them.” Knowing the research behind text complexity is critical to understanding the call for more complexity. The CCSS crafters examined college freshman textbooks and career manuals. These texts typically measure at a Lexile score of 1450. You may not agree with this direction, but those who create assessments have already increased the reading difficulty on state tests. In August 2012, the CCSSO team (Council of Chief State School Officers) revised Appendix A to approve five additional readability measures. They did not have to say “if.” Tactile reading is reading with a twist. 6 Great Videos on Teaching Critical Thinking. Critical thinking is a skill that we can teach to our students through exercise and practice.
It is particularly a skill that contains a plethora of other skills inside it. Critical thinking in its basic definition refers" to a diverse range of intellectual skills and activities concerned with evaluating information as well as evaluating our thought in a disciplined way ". All of our students think in a way or another but the question is , do they really think critically ? Are they able to evaluate the information they come across ? Are they capable of going beyond the surface thinking layer ? Critical thinking is part and parcel of what is called critical theory and hence critical literacy. 1- A Quick Guide to 21st Century Critical Thinking Skills for Teachers2- What Does Critical Thinking Mean in Education3- Great Critical Thinking Poster for your Class4- 7 Great iPad Apps to Improve Kids Critical Thinking5- A Clever Tip to Easily Develop Students Critical Thinking. The Flipped Classroom: What are the Pros and Cons? A guest post by Anne Wujcik You’ve probably heard at least a little bit about flipped learning.
Flipping a classroom (or a lesson) typically involves reversing the way instructional time is used, delivering instruction outside of classroom time and moving “homework” into the classroom. Teachers prepare short video lessons (or search out appropriate lessons and other resources on the web) that students watch at home and class time is spent on a variety of activities that allow students to dive deeply into the ideas – interactive labs, collaborative problem-solving sessions, hands-on problem solving activities, one-on-one tutoring sessions and more. Supporters claim that this approach transfers the ownership of learning to the students and makes learning – not teaching – the center of the classroom.
Sounds logical, but there are benefits and drawbacks to consider as these two teacher points-of-view make clear! Have you tried flipping some lessons or an entire class? This is Why Critical Reading is Important. Reading is one of the basic and old literacy skills in education. Its primacy in any educational system is still intact even amidst this huge encroachment of technology into every aspect of our life. The Generation X, for instance, tend to favor audio visual text over written text ( by the way text refers to any medium of communication be it a word, picture, clip. movie, play ...ect ) and you can see now how YouTube and other reputable video platforms are creating new modes of communications based primarily on audio visual data. I am not really sure whether it is true that people now read less than they used to do before this technology boom, but one thing is obvious, reading will always be the key to ones intellectual blossoming.
However, the importance of reading is not in the reading act itself but in how critically we read. This video is taken from the Crash Course Literature mini series in which John Green investigates a set of reasonable questions such as : Why do we read ? 12 Affective listening activities (by Juan Uribe. It’s a great pleasure to share affective listening activities here at the Teaching Village. I call them affective listening activities because emotions are very present in the movement, suspense, and laughter they produce. These activities also promote an engaging atmosphere that sparks creativity, enhances attention, and activates students’ memory.
Last, they present alternatives to include pronunciation, intonation, and imagination through listening in our classes. These guidelines can be used with recorded stories, movies, and even with songs. Ready? Who said that? Right, wrong, or I don’t know– Students listen to a short passage and make a statement that other students have to classify as right, wrong, or not mentioned in the listening.
Stop and repeat! Listen and mime! What next? Say it and check it! Guided imagery – Students listen to a passage with their eyes closed for 3-5 minutes. Guess their words – The teacher plays a passage and students follow it without their books. Urbandale students take hands-on role in learning. Katie Bunce’s students no longer do homework assignments. They take on quests. The Urbandale High School teacher is one of many educators in the Urbandale school district to adopt a philosophy that allows students to take a more active role in their education.
Bunce put the quest system into effect with 130 of her students in biology and human physiology classes. At the beginning of a school year, students used to worry about the points they needed to earn and what grade they had in the grade book, she said. She sought to eliminate that tension and learn more about how well the students understood the material she taught. Now, armed with ideas she learned during an education workshop a few months ago, Bunce has applied new practices to her classroom. Instead of giving daily homework assignments to her advance placement students, she created a flow chart for each unit the class is studying. “We have ongoing conversation,” Bunce said. Is Homework Too Hard For Today's Parents? - The Juggle. By Sue Shellenbarger Steve Hebert for The Wall Street Journal The ongoing debate over homework focuses mostly on kids’ mounting workloads , and some schools’ efforts to curtail them.
A growing number of parents are struggling with another homework trend that threatens to sink their juggle – an increase in extremely complicated homework projects, from neighborhood field trips to do research, to expansive dioramas or multimedia presentations to report on what students have learned, according to parents I interviewed for last Wednesday’s “Work & Family” column on homework. Chris Jordan, a mother of seven children ages 7 through 18, has seen it all.
“One of the biggest challenges for me is not to be exasperated by some of the assignments,” says Jordan, a writer for AlphaMom. She sometimes yearns for simpler times, when parents drilled their kids on the multiplication tables or lists of spelling words. Other projects demand speedy, ad hoc training in tech skills. Why Students Cheat on Tests.
On Wednesday, June 13, Nayeem Ahsan walked into a fourth-floor classroom at Stuyvesant High School with some two dozen other students to take a physics test—one of a number of Regents Exams that many New York State high-school juniors are required to take. Small and skinny with thick black hair and a bright, shy smile, Nayeem is 16. Like many teenage boys, he seems to straddle two worlds: One moment you see a man, another a boy. The son of Bangladeshi immigrants, Nayeem was born in Flushing Hospital and raised in Jackson Heights, a 35-minute subway ride to Stuyvesant in lower Manhattan. In the academically elite world of Stuyvesant, Nayeem maintains solid if unremarkable grades, and is a friendly, popular-enough kid known to take photographs of sports teams after school and post them on Facebook.
Nayeem had cased the room beforehand. Nayeem had cheated on tests before. Regents Exams are typically administered for three hours. That day, however, there was a glitch. He got bolder. Stuyvesant Students Describe Rationale for Cheating. Michael Appleton for The New York Times Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. In June, 71 students at the public school were caught exchanging answers on an exam. “It’s like, ‘I’ll keep my integrity and fail this test’ — no. No one wants to fail a test,” he said, explaining how he and others persuaded themselves to cheat. A recent alumnus said that by the time he took his French final exam one year, he, along with his classmates, had lost all respect for the teacher. “When it came to French class, where the teacher had literally taught me nothing all year, and during the final the students around me were openly discussing the answers, should I not listen?”
These are the sorts of calculations many students at Stuyvesant, New York City’s flagship public school, learn to make by the middle of their freshman year: weighing two classes against each other, the possibility of getting an A against the possibility of getting caught, keeping their integrity against making it to a dream college. When Curious Parents See Math Grades in Real Time. The Pomodoro Technique Timer — The Pomodoro Technique® Tools for Teaching: The Amazing Sticky Note. This week, I watched a science teacher use sticky notes in a very creative way. To check for understanding, the teacher gave each student a sticky note and asked each of her science students to give concrete examples of the vocabulary that they had learned in class. As the students exited the classroom, they placed the sticky note on the door. After the students all left the classroom, the teacher collected the sticky notes and was able to tell right away which students understood the concepts and which ones needed some targeted assistance.
This not only helps the teacher, but the students also were able to confront their exact understanding of what they had learned and intuitively they understand the clear message that what they did in class today was important and they are expected to learn. This got me thinking of all the other ways we use sticky notes to help students learn. Some of the ways I've seen sticky notes used in classrooms: see more see less. Teach a Kid to Argue - Figures of Speech. Why would any sane parent teach his kids to talk back? Because, this father found, it actually increased family harmony.
(First published in Disney’s Wondertime Magazine. The article was nominated for a 2007 National Magazine Award.) Those of you who don’t have perfect children will find this familiar: Just as I was withdrawing money in a bank lobby, my 5-year-old daughter chose to throw a temper tantrum, screaming and writhing on the floor while a couple of elderly ladies looked on in disgust. (Their children, apparently, had been perfect.) I gave Dorothy a disappointed look and said, “That argument won’t work, sweetheart. It isn’t pathetic enough.” She blinked a couple of times and picked herself up off the floor, pouting but quiet.
“What did you say to her?” I explained that “pathetic” was a term used in rhetoric, the ancient art of argument. Under my tutelage in the years that followed, Dorothy and her younger brother, George, became keenly, even alarmingly, persuasive. Me: “Thanks. 25 Digital Tools For Better Tutoring. Like other areas of education, tutoring has seen some radical changes in the past decade courtesy of new and increasingly innovative technologies. Students and their tutors can now interact at any time and from anywhere in the world, and tutors can create and share educational resources with their students in minutes using high-quality and often low-cost online tools. Learn more about some of the websites and resources that are helping to define the new face of tutoring by reading about a few of the best of these new tools that we’ve collected here.
Skype Through Skype, tutors and students don’t even have to be in the same country to interact with one another. In addition to high-quality video chat, the site also makes it easy to share files and even conference in other students or tutors. Here you’ll find another tool that focuses on online tutoring. Why Forgetting Is Key To Remembering. Forgetting isn’t usually thought of in relation to learning, but as it turns out, it might play a role. Herman Ebbinghaus, a German experimental psychologist from the late 19th and early 20th century, was (seemingly) curious about the way people remembered.
(And thus forgot.) What made our good man Herman unique though was in his method of study–or rather his focus group. That is, himself. Among other projects, Dr. Among Dr. He is also known for his ideas on the rate of forgetting, claiming that 90% of what is learned is forgotten by learners within 30 days–often within hours. The infographic below reviews some of his ideas–how we remember–and how quickly we forget. This is a cross-post from Online Colleges Related posts: 10th Grader Noa Gutow-Ellis: Testing Is Not Learning. Standardized tests are the bane of my existence. Why? Mainly because they don’t show an accurate portrayal of students.
Standardized testing came about during the Industrial Revolution when schools were flooded with students and the focus was not on innovative thinking, but rather on preparing students for the manufacturing workforce. Schools were established during the Industrial Revolution to get children out of harm’s way in factories. Students were not being released into a society where thinking critically–and for yourself–was important.
Standardized tests are a one shot deal. A Necessary Evil? While teachers and administrators often brush off standardized tests as a “necessary evil”, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There are other ways for students to learn more and show what they know. When it came time for the teacher to assess what we learned, he did not give us a traditional test. The real world judges you on the quality of your work, not your ability to regurgitate material. How To Cite A Tweet. H.S. Study: More Study, Less Sleep Not a Good Combo - Teaching Now.
Purdue’s student achievement technology goes national. The Three New Pillars of 21st Century Learning. Making It Stick: Memorable Strategies to Enhance Learning.