10 ways to encourage students to take responsibility for their learning

1. Don’t make all the decisions Allow choice. 2. Ask open-ended questions, with plenty of possible answers which lead to further questions. 3. Minimise standing out front and talking at them. 4. Talk about your own learning. 5. Get your students to write down what they learned, whether they enjoyed a particular learning experience, what helped their learning, what hindered their learning and what might help them next time. 6. Record student thinking and track development over time. 7. Help students to define goals for their learning. 8. If you know exactly where the lesson is leading and what you want the kids to think, then you‘re controlling the learning. 9. Make sure you and your students know the reason for every learning experience. 10. Rather than reporting to parents about their children’s learning, have student led 3-way conferences, with teacher and parents. I know there are lots more ways. Like this: Like Loading...

Teaching Creativity Through Projects Today I would like to focus my blog post on what I believe is the best what to teach 21st Century Skills and school technology to our students — projects. The school I taught at before coming to my current school was a PBL or Project-Based Learning school. This meant that most of the concepts and skills that were being taught to students were part of a larger projects — students love to learn this way. Although most schools really do work this way, this school had made it part of it’s formal identity. Just to be clear, my current school teaches a lot through projects as well. Here is a rough idea at how project-based learning works… Step One: Define — give your students a real-world problem or process and ask them to make things better, easier, faster, cheaper, more effective or more enjoyable. Step Three: Do — using different techniques students then do the project, in the case of the Renaissance question, I will ask my students to produce a podcast.

Project-Based Learning Tops Traditional Instruction In today's world, teachers have a long wish-list for their students: They want them to be globally competent, problem solvers, critical thinkers, technology literate and collaborative, to name just a few. But those characteristics cannot be taught through traditional instruction. Project-based learning (PBL), slowly displacing traditional forms of teaching, has evolved as a way for teachers to help their students become what the world will one day demand of them. "In order to build those characteristics you need to have a different kind of instruction, and PBL is one of the best ways to that," said John Larmer, director of programs at the Buck Institute for Education. What Is PBL, Anyway? Project-based learning is an increasingly popular approach to teaching that allows students to explore real-world problems and challenges through working and collaborating with other students in small groups. Challenges In Implementing PBL "That may be true to an extent," Larmer admitted. 1. 2. 3.

Four Online Tools for Collaboration Collaboration is an important skill our student’s must learn in order to be successful in today’s world. This post takes a look at 4 online tools that can be used to facilitate collaboration with your students, both within the walls of your own school as well as globally as you collaborate with other classrooms. 1. Google Docs - For those of you who haven’t yet discovered Google Docs, it is definitely a great tool for collaboration. 2. 3. 4. These are just a few of the many collaboration tools available for free online to help your students develop essential 21st century skills. Web 2.0 – Cool Tools for Schools: Collaboration Tools 15 Tools for Education Top 25 Web 2.0 Sites for Education Like this: Like Loading...

Teaching Rigorous and Reflective Thinking By Derek D. Turner, Connecticut College Before we can enlist faculty across the disciplines to teach critical thinking, we must decide exactly what we mean by the term. The first characteristic of an ideal critical thinker, we might say, is that he or she has excellent pattern recognition skills. The second characteristic that distinguishes the critical thinker is vocabulary. Third, and most important of all, becoming a rigorous and reflective thinker means adopting a certain ethical stance: habitual skepticism with respect to one's own views, a charitable attitude toward the views of others, and a recognition that getting to the bottom of things together always matters more than winning a dispute. Although the standard informal logic course is an important part of any college curriculum, all three of these elements of critical thinking—pattern recognition, vocabulary, and the ethical stance—can be taught outside of 100-level philosophy courses. From peer editing to joint inquiry