Reflect, Refresh, Recharge:Take Time for Yourself—and for Learning I'm no longer in the classroom, yet I still have to remember to take my time eating lunch. Too often, I race through it, thinking I have to pick up students from the cafeteria, return parent phone calls, review test data, and quickly cue up three interactive whiteboard activities for this afternoon's lesson on oxidation. As I concentrate today on having a more leisurely lunch, I slowly chew my food and think relaxed thoughts. As we move into summer vacation this year, let's pause for a moment and imagine the possibilities for recharging our personal and professional batteries. Many of us have family duties each summer: We must find suitable summer activities for our children, paint the house, pull out the tree stump in the front yard, move older children into college dorms, serve as head timer at summer swim meets, or attend to aging parents. In the midst of all that, however, might there be opportunities to reinvigorate our personal and teacher selves? The best teachers remain dynamic.
How Can Teachers Foster Curiosity? By Erik Shonstrom Education Week Published Online: June 3, 2014 Published in Print: June 4, 2014, as How Can We Foster Curiosity in the Classroom? Commentary By Erik Shonstrom Fostering curiosity is the key to learning, yet it's difficult to achieve in the classroom. Because all students can learn, much of educational reform has been dedicated to bolstering numbers in the "meets expectations" category of student assessment. Students who do well in school are often curious or ambitious. What is curiosity? —iStockphoto.com Curiosity is a seeking and an exploration. Research supports this view. Loewenstein noted that curiosity has three attributes: intensity, transience, and associations with impulsivity. Curiosity is inherently dynamic and propulsive, not sedentary and passive. "The only rational answer to the conundrum of curiosity is to disengage our educational system from standardized testing." Teachers have turned to technology to satisfy this insatiable urge to explore. The ones who want to learn are easy.
Reflect, Refresh, Recharge:Architects of Summer Although I don't recall school being particularly stressful when I was a child (no high-stakes anything back then), I can readily call up the delicious feeling of summer. It was a spacious time—an opportunity to do nearly anything. As kids, we reinvented ourselves daily. I remember fireflies and kites and sandwiches on the beach and books and pick-up sticks and popsicles from the corner store. We got shoe boxes from our parents and made a string-drawn trolley-like thing from them. After supper, we gathered on the corner, readied our shoe-box trollies for a parade, and walked around the block several times with the seriousness and dignity our work suggested. I can summon the sounds, sights, and smells of those evening parades in a way that evokes a kind of joy and unencumbered tranquility that we should wish for all kids. I like to go back to that summer place in my mind for many reasons. Adulthood is a different season of life, one anchored in and fashioned by responsibility.
Downloadable Materials About the six strategies for effective learning resources: These resources were created based on research from cognitive psychology from the past few decades. To learn more about how we created the materials, see this blog. Fair use of the materials: Please use our materials and pass them along to others for educational purposes!
Seven Bridges of Königsberg Map of Königsberg in Euler's time showing the actual layout of the seven bridges, highlighting the river Pregel and the bridges The Seven Bridges of Königsberg is a historically notable problem in mathematics. Its negative resolution by Leonhard Euler in 1735 laid the foundations of graph theory and prefigured the idea of topology. The city of Königsberg in Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) was set on both sides of the Pregel River, and included two large islands which were connected to each other and the mainland by seven bridges. The problem was to find a walk through the city that would cross each bridge once and only once. The islands could not be reached by any route other than the bridges, and every bridge must have been crossed completely every time; one could not walk halfway onto the bridge and then turn around and later cross the other half from the other side. Euler's analysis[edit] Euler's work was presented to the St. Significance in the history of mathematics[edit]
Why Do I Teach? The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. As I wind up another semester of teaching at Notre Dame, I’ve been thinking about what I’m actually accomplishing in the classroom. The standard view is that teaching imparts knowledge, either knowing how (skills) or knowing that (information). Knowledge, when it comes, flares up, when the time is right, from the sparks good teachers have implanted in their students’ souls. Overall, college education seems a matter of mastering a complex body of knowledge for a very short time only to rather soon forget everything except a few disjointed elements. The same is true of the much more sophisticated knowledge of our adulthood. I’ve concluded that the goal of most college courses should not be knowledge but engaging in certain intellectual exercises. What’s the value of such encounters? But what do they need to do their jobs?
Love2Learn » Blog Archive » The Vitruvian Man – a context for learning Finding a quantity given a percentage (or fraction) is a useful skill yet considered to be an extension topic for year 8. I thought I could give it a go but set the scene, so-to-speak, without the oft-used context of shopping and sales. Enter the Vitruvian Man. Lesson Activity My ‘hook’ question to the class was “How do forensic scientists figure out the height of victims given minimal data?” I showed and explained the Vitruvian Man. Divide the class into pairs (or small groups).For each pair, give a card which showed one of the proportions (e.g. 1/4 of height = shoulder width) as well as a measuring tapeThey take the fractional measurement of their partner, i.e. the item to the right of the equation, e.g. shoulder widthDemonstrate how to calculate the height given a known percentage (or fraction); in my example, multiply each side of the equation by 4Finally, measure the actual height and compare to the calculated height Discussion points How do the actual and calculated height compare?
Exit Ticket Math Thinking | Sharing thinking about math from students Imagine you numbered each note of a scale, and then played the mathematical sequences on the notes like they were music. What would 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,… sound like? What would it sound like if you automatically jumped back down an octave every time you passed a multiple of 7? You may find this tool useful for actually listening to the sequence of numbered notes you generate. What would the sequence of square numbers sound like? What would π sound like? Chris Hunter writes on his blog about a student explaining how they would express 0.500 using ten-frames: One student expressed this as 500/1000 and 0.500. Showing 500/1000 or 0.500 using ten-frames Have you seen examples where students come up with innovative ways of representing numbers? Screen-shot from one of the puzzles included in the block game. I wrote this puzzle/game last year with the hope it could be used to help generate some thinking about area, multiplication, and addition. Some specific things which students might model:
Teaching in a Digital Age: Guidelines for Teaching and Learning Tony Bates, a Contact North I Contact Nord Research Associate, has released his latest book on technology and learning as an online, open textbook. Teaching in higher education in 2015, and beyond, requires a new approach because of changes in the economy and changes in technology. Faculty and instructors are continually facing questions such as how do I effectively teach an increasingly diverse student population, how do I engage and support my students as class sizes increase, how do I use multi-media and other resources to build a high-quality course, and a host of other questions. Drawing on his 40+ years of experience in higher education in Canada and around the world, Tony Bates has authored a comprehensive, easy-to-read guide that answers these questions and many, many more all in a single location. How do I decide whether my courses should be campus-based, blended or fully online? Download Teaching in a Digital Age Source:
Math Thinking | Sharing thinking about math from students The 10 Biggest Breakthroughs in the Science of Learning Greater understanding of our brain’s functioning, abilities, and limitations allows us to constantly improve our teaching skills and the productivity of our Brainscape study sessions and working hours (and after-work hours, for that matter). We’ve already given you tips on how to keep your brain in shape and how to boost your brain’s abilities through exercise. This article, originally published by OnlinePHDPrograms.com, shares the 10 most significant breakthroughs that recent research has made on the science of learning, providing valuable insights on how to make the best use of your brain without wasting energy. When it comes to human organs, none is quite so mysterious as the brain. For centuries, humans have had numerous misconceptions and misunderstandings about how the organ works, grows, and shapes our ability to learn. 1. This term has become a major talking point in criticisms of multi-tasking, especially given the modern information-saturated world we live in. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Susan Ann Darley: 12 Mind-blowing Benefits of Play -- Including at Work What do most Nobel Laureates, innovative entrepreneurs, artists and performers, well-adjusted children, happy couples and families, and the most successfully adapted mammals have in common? They play enthusiastically throughout their lives," says Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play. Just watch children stomping their feet in a muddy puddle of water or laughing uncontrollably, often where signs are posted to "Be Quiet." When's the last time you laughed so hard that tears ran down your face or your stomach muscles ached for hours? Unfortunately, somewhere along the way to "growing up" we often exchange play for work and seriousness can become a chronic habit. Research explains how play shapes our brains, creates competence and stabilizes our emotions. How about playing at work? Play is natural for humans and animals both domesticated and wild. In the parent-child relationship, recognizing a signal of an invitation to play is critical. Now what are you waiting for?
Are lectures the best way to teach students? | Higher Education Network ‘It is sad that so few modern students will ever experience a real lecture’ Bruce Charlton, reader in evolutionary psychiatry, Newcastle University, says: Real lectures are always greatly appreciated by students who want to learn. But what are called “lectures” nowadays are a travesty. Vast, stuffy venues that seat hundreds; students sitting in the dark and unable to see the speaker; a disembodied voice droning into a microphone; the lecturer reading out endless powerpoint slides which have already been posted online; the scanty audience passive instead of actively making their own notes – distracted by themselves and others intermittently browsing the internet and social networks; and the whole thing being recorded as if to emphasise to students that they don’t really need to be there nor pay attention. These atrocities are what people currently call lectures, and they are indefensible. Good lectures are possible and achievable – I experienced many of them at my medical school.