New guide offers tips to use UDL for personalized learning New guide explains benefits of UDL as a framework for creating learning-driven environments and how districts can put theory into practice The new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) for K-12 education specifically endorses Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a set of principles that require teachers and students to shift roles as they collaborate around student-driven learning paths. It’s a significant departure from the traditional classroom approach, and transforming a learning environment doesn’t happen overnight. To help schools navigate the sea of change to more personalized learning, itslearning, developer of the itslearning learning management system, has published a new guide titled “How To Make Personalized Learning a Reality in Your District.” The 18-page PDF explains the stages and steps to creating a learner-driven environment powered by the UDL approach, how technology can support the integration, and questions to ask when considering which learning platform to choose.
Rethinking the Classroom – Research Educators, researchers, and students are discovering the benefits and advantages of cooperative, active, and engaged learning. Classroom spaces that support such a shift in teaching and learning have lagged behind. A significant opportunity exists for maximizing learning opportunities and creating meaningful experiences by rethinking the classroom experience. “Learning is not a spectator sport…[Students] must talk about what they are learning, write about it, relate it to past experiences, apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves.” —Chickering and Gamson Getting and keeping students engaged is perhaps the most important step in creating a successful learning outcome. An article on cooperative learning in higher education in Change magazine offers compelling evidence on the benefits of collaborative learning and teaching methods. What We Know Classroom design influences levels of interaction and engagement. Therefore Challenge Solution 1. 2. 3.
12 Ways to Support ESL Students in the Mainstream Classroom You have a new student, and he speaks no English. His family has just moved to your town from Japan, and though he receives English as a Second Language (ESL) support, he will also be sitting in your room every day to give him more exposure to his new language. How can you be a good teacher to someone who barely understands you? According to the National Center for Education Statistics, an average of 9 percent of students in U.S. public schools are English Language Learners (ELLs); that number is closer to 14 percent in cities. How prepared are you to teach these students? Below, three ESL teachers tell us what they know about the things regular classroom teachers can do to improve instruction for ELL students. “Avoid giving instructions in the air,” says Melissa Eddington, an Ohio-based ESL teacher. Mary Yurkosky, a former ESL teacher in Massachusetts, credits much of her students’ success to the strong relationship she had with the regular classroom teachers. References:
Meet 4 Teachers Who Took Classroom Design to the Next Level - A.J. JULIANI Wow, what can we say! This past summer we decided to start a learning space design challenge on ClassroomCribs.com to highlight all of the amazing “cribs” that you have designed for students. Instead of just “aesthetics” we focused this challenge on brain-friendly learning spaces that promoted deep learning and engagement through design. And we were blown away by the response! Over 4,000 educators have joined our Classroom Cribs learning community and many of you sent in videos of your learning space as part of the challenge. Together, Erin Klein, Ben Gilpin, Tom Murray, and myself watched all of the challenge entries with a focus on brain-friendly design and non-traditional learning environments. This month we will be featuring 30 of the learning spaces during our “30 Days of Design” on the ClassroomCribs.com blog. Announcing Our Grand Finalists Each of our finalists have gone above and beyond in designing their learning spaces. Here are the finalists! Mary Wever, 3rd Grade Teacher Awesome!
3 Tips to Make Any Lesson More Culturally Responsive (And it’s not what you think!) Last month, I reviewed Zaretta Hammond’s fantastic book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. Now I’m proud to have Zaretta here as a guest writer to share some specific strategies with us. Culturally responsive teaching. Everybody is talking about it. The big question is: How do you actually make lessons culturally responsive? That comes up regularly when I am working with groups of teachers to improve outcomes for diverse students who are struggling. I suggested that we explore making lessons more culturally relevant in order to accelerate student learning. I couldn’t blame her. One of the biggest misconceptions about culturally responsive teaching is thinking you have to tie the lesson’s content to African American or Latino students’ racial background. In reality, culturally responsive teaching is less about using racial pride as a motivator and more about mimicking students’ cultural learning styles and tools. Stick around.Join my mailing list and never miss another post.
Non-Traditional Classroom Design by Rachel Blackwell on Prezi If You Teach At-Risk Kids, You Need This Book (Hint: It's not Ruby Payne) Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta Hammond, 192 pages, Corwin, November 2014Buy Now [The links in this article are Amazon Affiliate links. If you click these and make a purchase from Amazon, I will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. For eight years, I taught at-risk students. I think about Dion, one of my seventh graders, who sat listlessly through most of my classes, whose assignments were always half-finished, who always scored low on tests, who used his cute, slow smile as a cover any time I tried to push him to get his work done. The discussion often went like this: “What do you think is the problem here?” Dion shrugged. From another teacher: “And what do you need to do differently?” Another shrug. Nothing changed. If we had read Zaretta Hammond’s book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain Awareness. .
Memorizing Music: The Two Most (and the Two Least) Efficient Strategies 3 2Share Synopsis Not all memorization strategies are created equal. Making the bed in the morning is one of those activities in life that seems like a questionable use of time. Then again, as a fundamentally lazy person, I’m always looking for ways to be more efficient. Not that all shortcuts are better, of course. Which takes us to memorization, which is probably everyone’s least favorite thing to do ever, but also one of the biggest sources of worry and anxiety for musicians. Usually, when we ask questions about memorization, it’s oriented around the issue of effectiveness. Obviously, we’d prefer a strategy that is both efficient and effective, but an effective strategy that takes forever isn’t much good to us either. In one study of pianists working on the Bach D minor Prelude and Fugue, for instance, it took an average of ~14 hours to memorize the piece – but some pianists memorized the piece in less than 10 hours, while others needed almost 20 hours. That’s a pretty big difference.
Remixing Special Ed: Reaching Marginalized Students Through Music Technology – Soundfly In many American cities, public school music education is facing extinction. In the 2014-2015 New York City public school year, only 23% of high school students had music programs on-site. For someone like me, a conservatory grad with a passion for music technology, improvisation, and education, it’s nearly impossible to find traditional classroom work. And that’s how I found myself working with a non-traditional group of music students — a demographic that’s typically excluded from artistic (and professional) fields due to decades-old prejudices that many learning organizations have trouble seeing past. The special needs community, at all academic levels, has been left out of the music education conversation almost entirely. With public funds for arts education being as low as they are, art curricula for those with developmental disabilities are harder to develop, harder to teach, and thus harder to come by in general. Using Technology to Overcome Physical Disability “I made that?!
Five Research-Driven Education Trends At Work in Classrooms There are plenty more examples of brain-based research on learning making its way into classroom practices. Games have long been used to engage students. But as game-based learning becomes more prevalent in schools, researchers are interested in how game structure mirrors the learning process. In many games, students explore ideas and try out solutions. Universities like Harvard, MIT and the University of Wisconsin's Game and Learning Society are studying how game-playing helps student engagement and achievement, and well-known researchers in the field like James Paul Gee and University of Wisconsin professor Kurt Squire show are using their own studies to show that games help students learn. Once the terrain of experimental classrooms, digital games are now becoming more common in classrooms. Paul Tough’s book, How Children Succeed, popularized the ideas of grit and perseverance. Some research has shown that too much homework has “little to no impact” on student test scores.
May 1 Newsletter: Jackhammers and Hummingbirds - educationcloset May 1 Newsletter: Jackhammers and Hummingbirds Nancy Ryder about 2 hours ago11:30 AM What would a lesson for both Jackhammers and Hummingbirds look like? Reply Your comment Children’s brains develop faster with music training Music instruction appears to accelerate brain development in young children, particularly in the areas of the brain responsible for processing sound, language development, speech perception and reading skills, according to initial results of a five-year study by USC neuroscientists. The Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI) at USC began the five-year study in 2012 in partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and the Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA) to examine the impact of music instruction on children’s social, emotional and cognitive development. These initial study results, published recently in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, provide evidence of the benefits of music education at a time when many schools around the nation have either eliminated or reduced music and arts programs. These results reflect that children with music training … were more accurate in processing sound.Assal Habibi Learning the violin Ear to brain
The Universal Design for Learning…Has a nice ring, doesn’t it? | soul strikers *cover image by Giulia Forsythe- click here to visit her Visual Practice art notes Education is guilty of tossing handfuls of buzz words and acronyms like candy off a fire truck during a parade. They change with the times and are thrown around so much to the point that one may want to throw them all UP. Differentiate. Engage. And my favorite- rigor, which always makes me imagine a morgue or kids squirming and pounding on a table for some reason. So often these words become a vague replacement for really talking about what to actually DO in the classroom. You can completely talk in acronyms and buzz-speak if you so desire. *created by jkarabinas using Skitch by Evernote Ha. Here arrives our not-so-new word that has not been worn out yet, I am happy to say, though I feel like I should come across it more: The UDL. UDL calls for us to present information in multiple ways, allow learners to express learning in multiple ways, and for teachers to motivate and engage learners in multiple ways.