Teacher Profile: Maria Rosa Reifler Inspires Students toward Meaningful Lives by Marilyn Price-Mitchell PhD Character Ability to draw on positive internal strengths when taking action in the world. Courage Integrity Respect Meet Maria Rosa Reifler, a fifth grade teacher at Wilcox Elementary School in East Los Angeles who gives her students more than core curriculum. She teaches them about the value of living a life that matters. Maria Rosa Reifler instills important ideas, including how money and achieving goals is secondary to the kind of human being you become. But Mrs. Learn from a teacher who understands and models how to educate the “whole child.” Watch Maria Rosa Reifler in this inspiring video. Tags: positive youth development, teachers, Underserved Youth About the Author
Science Shows Making Lessons Relevant Really Matters Good news for good teachers: It turns out, the old drill-and-kill method is not only boring, but -- neurologically speaking -- pretty useless. Relevant, meaningful activities that both engage students emotionally and connect with what they already know are what help build neural connections and long-term memory storage (not to mention compelling classrooms). "Long lists of vocabulary words that don't have personal relevance or don't resonate with a topic about which the student has been engaged are likely to be blocked by the brain's affective (or emotional) filters," writes neurologist and former classroom teacher Judy Willis. Plus, says Willis, it's necessary for learners to attach a new piece of information to an old one, or it just won't stick. Give It Context, and Make It Count Studies published in the journals Nature; Science; and Mind, Brain, and Education support this idea, and a solid amount of research also links personal relevance and emotional engagement to memory storage.
Before We Flip Classrooms, Let's Rethink What We're Flipping To Integrated into their regular math classes, Globaloria students access online video tutorials and receive expert advice on how to build original educational video games about math topics. Photo credit: World Wide Workshop We're hearing a lot of talk about education in these back-to-school days, but a few conversations rise above the din. One such is the chatter about "flipped classrooms,"1 in which students listen to lectures at home and do homework at school. No doubt about it, online learning at every level for every purpose is the flavor of the moment, and everyone is scrambling to offer a feast. Before we pick up too much speed to stop, we need to consider the educational future we are aiming for in higher education, technical education, and especially in the early years of K-12 education, when it really counts. Instructionism vs. But think about it: they are using rather traditional instructional methods. There was transformation, but it was mainly around the edges. Notes
11 Ways Schools Can Be Relevant, Compelling and Effective in the Coming Transformational Years Technology and innovation are accelerating rapidly outside education, but not rapidly enough inside education. To quote NAIS President Pat Basset, Schools which are not schools of the future will not be schools in the future. Like others, I am fascinated by pieces forecasting the coming changes in schooling, and I am inspired by their example to offer my own. Two that have been particularly intellectually intriguing and influential to me are Tom Vander Ark’s Ed Reformer post, The Pivot to Digital Learning: 40 Predictions, and Shelly Blake-Pollock’s post, 21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020. I should add too that my thinking is greatly informed by the Christensen and Horn’s Disrupting Class, US DOE’s Karen Cator’s NETP: National Education Technology Plan, the writings of Michael B. Horn, and the Digital Learning Now initiatives. How should we continue to be relevant and effective in the changing environment? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. As Vander Ark writes, 9. 10. 11.
Schools in the Cloud – What could they be? Let’s look back at some past work: 1. Groups of children can learn to use a computer and the Internet by themselves, under certain conditions described a little later. This is a finding from a set of experiments between 1999 – 2004, often called the ‘hole in the wall’ experiments. 2. There are places all over the planet where it is difficult or impossible to build schools. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Is it possible to put all this together into a learning system for children in need? If you give children, below the age of 13, access to a computer connected to the Internet, they learn how to use it. 1. 2. 3. 4. If you then ensure the computer is in working order, children begin to tire of games in a month or so and look for other activity. If they can read sufficiently well in English or some other language that is adequately represented on the Internet, such as Spanish, Italian, Chinese etc., children begin to search for answers to questions. Can the SOLE and the Granny Cloud come together? 1. 2. 3.
How Teaching Is Changing: 15 Examples How Teaching Is Changing: 15 New Realities Every Educator Faces by Terry Heick It’s tempting to say that no matter how much technology pushes on education, every teacher will always need to know iconic teacher practices like assessment, curriculum design, classroom management, and cognitive coaching. This may end up being true–how education changes in the next 20 years is a choice rather than the inevitable tidal wave of social and technological change it’s easy to sit back and wait for. But it’s probably going to be a bit different than that. We’ve written before about the kinds of “things” modern teachers must be able to do. (Hint: It’s no longer about classroom management, testing, and content delivery.) 1. The Old: Administer assessment, evaluate performance, report performance, then–maybe–make crude adjustments the best you can The New: Identifying, prioritizing, and evaluating data for each student individually–in real time The Difference: Precision 2. Summary Incredible, no? 3. 4. 5.
Nudges We Create & Watch Breathe New Life Posted by Shelly Terrell on Wednesday, July 10th 2013 “We get to make things. Things that make the world nudge a little bit in what we hope is the right direction.” Wilson Miner, Webstock 2012 I’ve been thinking a lot about our ability to create and the impact of what we leave behind when we no longer exist. Recently, the 30 Goals Challenge for Educators began and now I’m surrounded daily with inspiration and already I have seen the positive change it has made in my life. What do we do when our creation is in danger of dying? It’s funny how we don’t think about the impact of our creations. Allowing our PLN to revive us…. We need people and we need to allow their creativity and inspiration to breathe new life into our creations. This reflection was inspired by Wilson Miner’s When We Build Talk, which was shared by @ILOTimo. Webstock ’12: Wilson Miner – When we build from Webstock on Vimeo.
Teachers’ Most Powerful Role? Adding Context Lenny Gonzalez Part 3 in the series Learning In the New Economy of Information. By Shawn McCusker During a recent unit on World War II, Courtney Wilhelm’s U.S. In classes where students connect ideas from the abstract to real-life events, the role of the teacher — as Wilhelm illustrates — moves from being a distributor of information to one of nurturing students as they collect, evaluate, and process information into unique learning products. For some, these changing roles might signal the end of an era where the teacher serves as a content expert. It’s here, in these seemingly disjointed moments, that the expertise of the teacher is crucial to uniting the class’s learning. In reality, however, the converse is true. And it’s here, in these seemingly disjointed moments, that the expertise of the teacher is crucial to uniting the class’s learning. Teacher as Conductor in the Classroom Orchestra This is also true of the classroom teacher in the new economy of information. Related
Charlotte’s Project L.I.F.T. Creates New Teaching Roles for More Pay In late 2011, Denise Watts, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg zone superintendent, approached Public Impact for help meeting the goals she had as executive director for the new Project L.I.F.T., a $55 million public-private partnership to improve academics at historically low-performing, high-need schools in western Charlotte, N.C. “If we didn’t try something truly different to change education, many of my students were not going to graduate,” Watts says. Public Impact’s latest Opportunity Culture case study, Charlotte, N.C.’s Project L.I.F.T.: New Teaching Roles Create Culture of Excellence in High-Need Schools, explains the “truly different” things that L.I.F.T. did to redesign four schools using Opportunity Culture models and principles. The study details the steps these schools took and the challenges they faced as they prepared to kick off their Opportunity Culture schools at the beginning of the 2013–14 school year. —Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C.