Just-in-Time vs. Just-in-Case Learning: Implications for Personal Professional Development | Welcome to NCS-Tech! I’ve been thinking a lot lately about professional development, personal learning networks, conferences, workshops, motivation … for different reasons. Think of the last time you learned something new that mattered to you, really made a difference in your teaching. Was it from a book, a magazine or a video? At a professional development workshop? Regardless of the venue, you probably learned it from a colleague, or other educator, someone experienced with a particular topic. More importantly, WHY did you learn? In my experience, the most effective professional development is needs based and delivered by knowledgeable professionals at a time and place most convenient to the knowledge seeker. Consider the typical classroom teacher or district administrator. What if you could learn… Exactly what you needed to know (or where to look)…Anytime, anywhere it was convenient…From real people – educators like us, locally and around the world… And what if it was all FREE? They have a need. -kj-
Making e-learning work It’s 10 a.m. on a Monday. Do you know where your Psych 101 students are? It’s becoming more likely that they aren’t in your classroom. Nearly 30 percent of higher education students now take at least one course online, and that number is on the rise, according to a College Board survey. It found that more than 5.6 million students took at least one online course in fall 2009, a 21 percent increase over the previous year. As the technology advances, chances are most psychology educators will be asked to teach an online course at some point. • Promote schedule flexibility. Now, researchers are even finding that this flexibility may spur more critical thinking. • Get to know your students. “On average, blended approaches combining online and face-to-face instruction had better student outcomes than conventional instruction,” says educational psychologist Barbara Means, PhD, director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International and a coauthor of the meta-analysis.
Inquiry-based Learning: Explanation What is inquiry-based learning? An old adage states: "Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand." The last part of this statement is the essence of inquiry-based learning, says our workshop author Joe Exline 1. Inquiry implies involvement that leads to understanding. Furthermore, involvement in learning implies possessing skills and attitudes that permit you to seek resolutions to questions and issues while you construct new knowledge. "Inquiry" is defined as "a seeking for truth, information, or knowledge -- seeking information by questioning." A Context for Inquiry Unfortunately, our traditional educational system has worked in a way that discourages the natural process of inquiry. Some of the discouragement of our natural inquiry process may come from a lack of understanding about the deeper nature of inquiry-based learning. Importance of Inquiry Memorizing facts and information is not the most important skill in today's world. The Application of Inquiry
Promoting lifelong learning in psychology The learning that takes place after a psychologist earns a doctoral degree is a crucial but often-overlooked part of the field’s educational continuum, APA Executive Director for Education Cynthia D. Belar, PhD, said kicking off APA’s 2010 Education Leadership Conference on Sept. 11. The annual meeting, during which psychologists visit policymakers on Capitol Hill to advocate for psychology’s educational priorities, focused this year on lifelong learning in psychology. “We have paid more attention to undergraduate and graduate education in psychology than to professional development and lifelong learning — despite the fact that much more time is spent in the course of one’s career than in the preparation for that career,” Belar told more than 130 representatives of psychology education and training groups, psychological membership organizations, APA divisions and APA governance groups. Although there’s evidence that CE works, she said, the research base is not yet strong enough.
Reverse Instruction: 21 slides, 5 minutes This is a five minute presentation I am making today as part of an NAIS 3 hour workshop, Becoming A School of the Future: The conversation continues. The slides themselves are almost entirely image driven; my talking points for each slide are below. Notes on slides: Slide 2. (NB: I love this particular photo of a lecturing teacher, but the teacher in question actually lectures rarely and is one of my school’s best practicioners of reverse instruction). Slide 3. Slide 4. Slide 5. Slide 6. Slide 7. Slide 8. Slide 9: Flip teaching entails teachers redeploying the content delivery, whether through using the free resources of Khan Academy, MIT, and other such sites, or, and this is just as important, by making their own lectures available for studentsvia podcast, vodcast, webvideo, Slide 10 and narrated powerpoints. Slide 11. Slide 12. Slide 13. Slide 14: And for more ability of teachers to work closely to support students. Slide 15: Ditto Slide 16. Slide 17. Slide 18. Slide 19. Slide 20.
Is Memorization Bad for Learning? Making kids memorize too much is the problem with U.S. schools, according to a new movie documentary, "Race to Nowhere." This movie, produced by a housewife and first-time film maker, is being embraced all across the country by teachers and parents . It is a hot item, especially in New Jersey, where the teacher's union is using the movie as a propaganda weapon against Republicans and Governor Christi. assistant editor, James Freeman, has done us all a favor by challenging the merits of this movie. I am not a uninformed housewife. I wrote a book recently, (available at Amazon), that focuses on the damaging consequences of misplaced blame. For example, the movie places blame on George Bush for the "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) law. Progressives also falsely blame insufficient funding for education . Few people, especially teachers, blame the teachers. A lot of kids think they are smarter than they really are. Here's a paradox. • misguided education professional • devalued memorization.
Classroom Guide: Top Ten Tips for Assessing Project-Based Learning Facebook Edutopia on Facebook Twitter Edutopia on Twitter Google+ Pinterest Edutopia on Pinterest WHAT WORKS IN EDUCATION The George Lucas Educational Foundation What's Inside the PDF? Keep It Real with Authentic Products Don’t Overlook Soft Skills Learn from Big Thinkers Use Formative Strategies to Keep Projects on Track Gather Feedback -- Fast Focus on Teamwork Track Progress with Digital Tools Grow Your Audience Do-It-Yourself Professional Development Assess Better Together BONUS TIP: How to Assemble Your PBL Tool Kit
Learning: No Pain, No Gain The "best" teachers are the one's who make learning easy. At least that is what the poorer students say. They may be wrong. Kent State psychology professors have just reported a study of this matter with college students. Other research that I have summarized elsewhere shows that students likely do not know material as well as they think they do. Easy learning, as in a single cramming session, is deceptive. In the Kent State studies, college-aged students were asked to study for a week a pack of 48 flashcards that paired Swahili vocabulary words with their English translations. In a study recently reported at an American Educational Research Association meeting in by Katherine Rawsom at Williams College, students studied 35 Swahili-English word pairs on flash cards. Students had predicted just the opposite. The deceptiveness of ease of learning was reinforced in a study reported in Psychological Science by Nate Kornell and collaborators at three other universities. Sources:
New Guide Offers Assessment Tips for the Classroom Recently, I watched a team of ninth-graders share their vision for a city of the future. They had clearly done their research, investigating everything from the politics of ancient Athens to the principles of sustainable design in the 21st century. They summarized their findings online and then took their learning a step further to design a 3-D model of their ideal city. As their classmates and teachers gathered around the scale model, the young urban designers pointed out the innovative features of their metropolis. If we hope to offer students more real-world learning experience like this one, we need to be willing to reconsider how we assess learning. PBL Strategies I've organized these tips to follow the arc of a project-first planning, then active learning, then culminating event, and, finally, reflection. Project-based learning and authentic assessment are made for each other. Big Questions Ahead style="margin-left: 20px;"> Click here to download the guide, and then pass it along!
More on Jazz-band Teaching and Learning I probably need to explain a couple of learning principles mentioned in the original post on jazz-band teaching and learning. One principle is operant conditioning, which is inherent in band classes. It will truly pay off to find creative ways to employ operant conditioning in academic-course classes, because it is the most powerful teaching technique I know of. I assume they teach this in colleges of education, because kindergarten teachers do a version of it all the time with the “gold-star” reward paradigm. Fully implemented, the idea is that little successes bring little rewards, and as the desired behavior becomes established, the bar is raised for further reward, or positive reinforcement as the psychologists call it. The reward in jazz-band, and that includes orchestra band class, is the immediate gratification a student gets when playing a few new notes or chords, for example. learning occurs in small successive steps with each step the student DOES something feedback is immediate
Supporting Project Team Formation for Self-directed Learners | CELSTEC Printer-friendly versionPDF versionTitle: Supporting Project Team Formation for Self-directed Learners Authors: Spoelstra, Howard; Van Rosmalen, Peter; Sloep, Peter Abstract: The outcomes of project-based learning can be optimized if team formation experts assemble the project teams. Description: Spoelstra, H., Van Rosmalen, P., & Sloep, P.