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When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges

When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges
Amidst the discussions about content standards, curriculum and teaching strategies, it’s easy to lose sight of the big goals behind education, like giving students tools to deepen their quantitative and qualitative understanding of the world. Teaching for understanding has always been a challenge, which is why Harvard’s Project Zero has been trying to figure out how great teachers do it. Some teachers discuss metacognition with students, but they often simplify the concept by describing only one of its parts — thinking about thinking. Teachers are trying to get students to slow down and take note of how and why they are thinking and to see thinking as an action they are taking. But two other core components of metacognition often get left out of these discussions — monitoring thinking and directing thinking. When a student is reading and stops to realize he’s not really understanding the meaning behind the words, that’s monitoring. Related:  School Libraries make a differencemsbb86

6 Online Collaborative Tools to Engage Students in Teamwork Nothing is more frustrating to a teacher than lack of attention from students. You have spent several weeks or even months working on some project that you thought would be a breakthrough, but nothing happens. Situations like this are very common in modern learning because a lack of interest to engage in teamwork is widespread. When I talk about online collaborative tools, I refer to web-based tools that enable teachers and students to perform a wide range of tasks, such as interactive discussions, online collaboration activities, sharing and accessing electronic learning resources, and many more others. Here is the collection of great online collaborative tools that I have gathered for you, enjoy! 1. The first tool on my list is a great one for sharing digital content and improving the engagement of the students. 2. This is a toolbox for teachers that takes classroom management to another level. 3. Virtualizing student content has never been easier! 4. 5. 6.

Grammar Auction: Turn grammar review into a game – tekhnologic This is not a new activity and you can find several descriptions of a grammar auction online. You may find these descriptions Grammar Auctions useful: Clare Lavery describes a Grammar Auction for teachingenglish.org.uk. Bjorn Norstrom describes a Grammar Auction for Dave’s ESL café’s idea cookbook. The other day, I was trying to find some inspiration because I was having a difficult time thinking of something to create for the website. Watch this video for an introduction to the template and instructions on how to edit it. After you have watched the video, continue reading to download the template and for a more detailed description about using it in the classroom. Watch the tutorial video to see how to edit and use the Grammar Auction template.Video run-time is 3 minutes and 26 seconds. Click on the image or the link below to download the template. Download the Grammar Auction template. The template consists of a title slide and one auction slide. Click on a ‘hammer’ button. Using Realia

L’importance du questionnement dans l’apprentissage À l’ère des technologies de l’information, il est facile de trouver les réponses aux questions factuelles. Vous voulez savoir qui a signé la Déclaration d’indépendance américaine : « Google it »! Si une simple recherche Internet donne sans trop d’efforts accès à la plupart des informations qui échappent à votre mémoire, l’ordinateur n’est toutefois pas aussi habile pour poser des questions. Shutterstock / LuckyImages Ce texte est une adaptation libre du texte « How to Bring ‘More Beautiful’ Questions Back to School » de Katrina Schwartz publié dans le blogue MindShift du média californien KQED. La curiosité fait inévitablement partie de l’expérience humaine. Une habileté naturelle Entre l’âge de 2 et 5 ans, les enfants posent en moyenne 40 000 questions (près de 300 questions par jour vers l’âge de 4 ans), explique Berger. Lorsque les enfants apprennent une chose à propos de laquelle ils étaient curieux, ils sont satisfaits et éprouvent du plaisir; leur cerveau produit de la dopamine.

8 Critical Skills For A Modern Education 8 Critical Skills For A Modern Education by TeachThought Staff Pearson sent us this report recently–Exploring the Learning Curve. The big idea here is the changing skill needs for students globally. “The Global Index of Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment compares the performance of 39 countries and one region (Hong Kong) on two categories of education: Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment. In short, it is formatted around 6 lessons and 8 skills. “Lesson 1 The OECD estimates that half of the economic growth in developed countries in the last decade came from improved skills. Lesson 2 In recent years it has become increasingly clear that basic reading, writing and arithmetic are not enough. Lesson 3 Making sure people are taught the right skills early in their childhood is much more effective than trying to improve skills in adulthood for people who were let down by their school system. Lesson 4 Lesson 5 Lesson 6 8 Skills For The Future Student 1. 2. 3. 4, Emotional Intelligence 5.

Library Lovers' Day The theme for Library Lovers' Day 2020 is ‘Uncover something new’. Library Lovers' Day is an opportunity for library and information professionals to show off their libraries and for people across Australia to show their love for libraries. Ideas for your communication channels Encourage your patrons to spread the #LibraryLoversDay by having a competition for the best social media post using #LibraryLoversDay. Change your library’s Facebook or Twitter avatar and/or banner to the avatars and banners available in the resources section below. Ideas for your library Check out all the free resources that you can use to celebrate Library Lovers’ Day further down on this page. Check out the, 2019 Library Lovers' Day page, 2018 Library Lovers' Day page, the 2017 Library Lovers' Day news release or the 2016 Library Lovers' Day wrap up. Promo banner.

ESL Warm Up Activities with Free PowerPoint Download | English Teaching 101 I use games and fun activities to warm up my class before the lesson begins, to break the ice or even as a time filler. Warmers bring energy to class and definitely fills the time with more learning when the lesson runs shorter than expected. Below are some of the games that I have been using in my ESL class. I decided to make them available for free again so I hope you would find them useful in your class. Disappearing Words In this simple activity, students are shown a word, phrase or sentence that disappears in 2 seconds! Game Type: Individual, Team Give Me 5! The teacher calls out a student to give 5 things on a given category in 30 seconds! Game Type: Individual Word Snake Each team makes a line near the board, then one student per team comes up to the white board and writes a word. Game Type: Team YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: No-prep ESL Vocabulary Games for Young Learners Hidden Pictures Hot Seat Game Type: Pair, Team Categories Guessing Game Game Type: Pair, Group Pelmanism Sleeping Pandas

How to Bring ‘More Beautiful’ Questions Back to School In the age of information, factual answers are easy to find. Want to know who signed the Declaration of Independence? Google it. Curious about the plot of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novel, “The Scarlet Letter”? Curiosity is baked into the human experience. “Kids are lighting up their pleasure zones and getting dopamine hits every time they learn something that solves something they were curious about,” Berger said. Luckily, kids are hard-wired for that kind of generative curiosity. There are a lot of understandable reasons why questioning drops off in school. But knowledge can also be the enemy of questioning. And of course there are social barriers to questioning. These barriers to questioning are real and challenging, but there are lots of ways parents and teachers can work to make questioning a normal part of school and life. “You don’t have to have the answers. “We want their questions to be large and expanded instead of being diminished and eventually going away,” Berger said.

What Is The Purpose Of School? What Is The Purpose Of School? by Terry Heick What is the purpose of school? The idea of “work” is present in most modern educational discussion almost entirely under the terms “career readiness.” And to many, this is head-slapping obvious, following the familiar pattern of going to school, getting a job, and paying the rent. But if we zoom in a bit, we can quickly see moving parts that hint that it’s not so simple. See also: The Characteristics Of A Good School School vs Learning By calling it “school” (rather than learning), and “a job” (rather than work), we’re unwittingly creating a tone of drudgery and compliance that centers the institutions and their processes (grades, academic success and performance), and de-centers the end result (skills–>understanding–>wisdom). This is a real problem for several reasons, and creates a convenient pathway from “doing good in school” to “getting a good job” rather than “seeking wisdom to improve self-knowledge and interdependence” to “do good work.”

Three strategies to help students navigate dodgy online content A recent Stanford University Report revealed that students’ abilities to distinguish between questionable and valid online content needed work. In one example cited in the report, researchers set high school and university students a task to evaluate the credibility of information found on the MinimumWage.com site. Only 9% of high school students and 6% of university students could identify the site was actually a front for a right-wing think-tank. The lack of critical judgement displayed by high school and university students in this example is, as the report’s authors identified, a challenge that’s bigger than fake news. It doesn’t just affect young people, either. Here are three strategies based on the findings of the Stanford Report to help navigate the online information minefield. 1. A traditional approach to educating about these challenges has been conducting “website evaluations” using a checklist. 2. 3. Adjectives describe how something feels, looks, sounds and acts.

Black Box Thinking for Teachers - Teaching and Learning Guru Black Box Thinking is a philosophy which allows learning to emerge from mistakes. The phrase was coined by Matthew Syed in his excellent book of the same title, where he examines performance and critical self-evaluation in sport, aviation, politics and many other fields. He took the term from the “black box” flight recorders fitted to aircraft, which contain vast amounts of data, to be used to inform future improvements, especially following the poor performance of human beings, the failure of systems and procedures, unexpected events and even complete disasters. How does black box thinking apply in education? In education, just as in aviation, we continually train ourselves and others, to help ensure consistently high performance. When teaching doesn’t work… A few years ago, Steve, a friend of mine working in another school called me on A Level Results Day. When the “data” doesn’t add up… Steve recalled some of the papers from the exam board to see what had gone wrong. Assess regularly.

Marzano Research | Coaching Classroom Instruction, Tips Coaching Classroom Instruction Trust among coaches and teachers greatly increases teachers’ willingness to make changes in their instructional habits or behaviors. Many teachers care deeply about their profession, their courses’ subject matter, and the students they teach, which can make them feel vulnerable in coaching situations. Coaches can address this vulnerability and build trust between themselves and teachers by showing consideration for teachers’ feelings and needs as well as by acting in ways that support teachers. When teachers trust their coaches, they are more likely to consider their coaches’ advice and take steps toward self-improvement. Another aspect of effective coaching relationships is descriptive feedback, which helps teachers make connections between their knowledge and skills in the classroom. Arguably the most important aspect of coaching is providing feedback. Coaching should emphasize growth and learning. Don't try to work on all three goals at the same time.

We’re Trying To Do “The Wrong Thing Right” in Schools | by Will Richardson | Modern Learning | Medium Whenever I think about the way most schools are structured today, I always come back to the same question: Do we do the things we do because they’re better for kids or because they are easier for us? For instance: separating kids by age in school. Is that something we do because kids learn better that way? Or do we do it because it’s just an easier way organizing our work? I think all of us know the answer to that. Do kids learn better when we separate out the content into different subjects, or is it just easier for us? To be sure, these are not new questions, nor are they unique to my thinking. So why bring it up yet again? A couple of weeks ago, thanks to some serendipitous surfing online, I came across this 10-minute snip of an interview with Ackoff, a pioneer in the field of systems thinking who was a professor at the Wharton School prior to his death in 2009. “Peter Drucker said ‘There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing.’ Here’s the video:

What is information literacy? - CILIP: the library and information association What is information literacy? CILIP's Information Literacy Group has released CILIP Definition of Information Literacy 2018 at the LILAC Conference and reinforces the relevance of information literacy in the current age: “Information literacy is the ability to think critically and make balanced judgements about any information we find and use. It empowers us as citizens to develop informed views and to engage fully with society.” A lot has changed since 2004 when the first CILIP definition of information literacy was devised. There is a greater recognition of the value of information professionals as teachers in either formal or informal settings and across the sectors. • Everyday – when people find information online • Citizenship – helping people to understand the world around us • Education – developing critical thinking skills at all stages of education, from school to higher education • The workplace - Contributing to employability

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