14 things that are obsolete in 21st century schools

I highly recommend checking out this post on 14 things that are obsolete in 21st century schools.

Things like computer rooms, no wi-fi, banning personal devices, junk food, 'one-size fits all pro d' and isolated classrooms make the list.



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But, I hate math....

I hear it all the time... students who don't like math.. the correlation between what they like and what they do well in doesn't require extensive research, it is clear... so what impacts students' attitudes towards Math? I found a great article on that...

Factors Influencing Students' Attitudes Towards Math.... This is some great research and an excellent read. My daughter struggles with math in part because she doesn't enjoy it. I am seeking ways to help change that, but this research really helps put the attitudes of "math haters" in perspective.

You need not look far to sense that our current education system is in a state of upheaval. Proponents of Common Core Standards, Alberta’s Curriculum Redesign and the new BC Ed Plan have all placed mathematics in the limelight of educational reform. Addressing the development of negatives attitudes and confidence in mathematics is likely one of the biggest concerns in education today and there is certainly good reason for such concern. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) revealed a decrease in the percentage of students who indicated they like math from 1992 to 2000. Likewise, a survey by Olson (1998) revealed that one-third of students reported that they did not enjoy mathematics. With a rising resentment towards the subject, economists fear the work force will be impacted after research revealed that negative attitudes can decrease the tendency of individuals to consider careers in mathematics-related fields (Haladyna, Shaughnessy, & Shaughnessy, 1983; Maple & Stage, 1991; Trusty, 2002). In fact, further studies have shown that students’ attitudes toward mathematics were the strongest predictor of their participation in advanced mathematics courses (Ercikan, Mccreith, & Lapointe, 2005). In the field of mathematics education, this is nothing new. Educators as early as the 1960’s have held the belief that attitude plays a fundamental role in learning and achievement in mathematics (Neal, 1969) and while recent programs in BC and Alberta have identified the steps needed to generate a shift in attitude there is limited literature that summarizes the research about the causes of negative attitudes.

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Benefits of Art Integration in Education

One of our middle schools will be a school of fine arts in the Fall  and I am very interested in the concept. In a time where arts is often first on the chopping block, the focus on fine arts, rather than the cutting of it, is a welcomed idea.

I came across this article on research-based approaches to art integration in middle school through a program called 'artful thinking'

I wanted to share some of the article here as it shows some clear evidence on the benefits of art integration in education in some obvious and less obvious areas of learning and development.

Arts integration has been shown by several rigorous studies to increase student engagement and achievement among youth from both low and high socioeconomic backgrounds (Catterall, Dumais, & Hampden-Thompson, 2012; Upitis & Smithrim, 2003, cited in Upitis 2011; Walker, McFadden, Tabone, & Finkelstein, 2011). Arts integration was introduced at Wiley H. Bates Middle School, in Annapolis, Maryland, as part of their school improvement plan in 2008 after the district applied for and was awarded a four-year grant under the Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination (AEMDD) Grant Program.

Since arts integration was first implemented at Bates, the percentage of students achieving or surpassing standards for reading has grown from 73 percent in 2009 to 81 percent in 2012, and from 62 percent to 77 percent for math during the same period, while disciplinary problems decreased 23 percent from 2009 to 2011.

Artful Thinking

Artful Thinking is a program developed by Harvard's Project Zero in collaboration with the Traverse City Area Public Schools in Michigan. It is an approach to teaching creative thinking that uses six routines to explore artistic works and subjects across the curriculum. These routines contain strategies to deepen art experiences.

1. Reasoning: Asking, "What makes you say that?" to prompt students to cite evidence to support claims
2. Perspective-taking: Asking, "What does the character (or author) perceive, know, or care about?" to understand diverse perspectives and ways of approaching problems
3. Questioning and investigating: Brainstorming questions and using prompts to spark observations and inquiry (e.g., How? What? When? Why? What if? and "I see," "I think," "I wonder")
4. Observing and describing: Describing and elaborating upon what you see and/or hear (e.g., imagining the artwork as the beginning, middle, or ending of a story, and/or describing formal qualities of a work of art)
5. Comparing and connecting new ideas to prior knowledge: Asking questions to prompt core ideas and connecting, extending, and/or challenging core ideas
6. Finding complexity: In order to uncover multiple dimensions and layers, asking questions such as, "How is it complicated?" "What are the different layers and pieces?" "What are its parts and purposes?" "What insights do you have about the topic?"

These routines are fundamental to critical thinking. In a meta-analysis of studies investigating methods of teaching critical thinking, Abrami et al. (2008) cite a broad definition of critical thinking as "purposeful, self-regulatory judgment, which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based." The meta-analysis found that the most effective way to teach critical thinking was by teaching a separate thread of general critical-thinking principles, and then involving students in subject-specific application of these critical-thinking principles. In accordance with this research(Abrami et al., 2008), Artful Thinking explicitly defines several habits of thought that are fundamental to critical thinking and then engages students in applying those habits within specific subject areas.

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Making Room for Wonder in Children's Lives

Yes, focusing is important, but so is daydreaming, wondering, reflecting. Here's why. http://owl.li/uTMZ1

In her new book Thrive, Arianna Huffington writes of the importance of "making room" for wonder -- a change in how we measure success that would have an especially great impact on the lives of our children.

Right now, parents and teachers expend a lot of energy getting kids to pay attention, concentrate, and focus on the task in front of them. What we adults don't do, according to University of Southern California education professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, is teach children the value of the more diffuse mental activity that characterizes our inner lives: wondering, remembering, reflecting.

Yet this kind of introspection is crucial to our mental health, to our relationships, and to our emotional and moral development. And it promotes the skill parents and teachers care so much about: the capacity to focus on the world outside our heads.

...

Ironically, a lack of time to daydream may even hamper kids' capacity to pay attention when they need to. The ability to become absorbed in our own thoughts is linked to our ability to focus intently on the world outside, research indicates. In one recent neuro-imaging study, for example, participants alternated periods of mental rest with periods of looking at images and listening to sounds. The more effectively the neural regions associated with "looking in" were activated during rest and deactivated while attending to the visual and auditory stimuli, the more engaged were the brain's sensory cortices in response to sights and sounds. 

Read the whole article here.

Article: Exhaustion of the American Teacher

Exhaustion of the American Teacher, this is a pretty good read.

http://theeducatorsroom.com/2012/09/the-exhaustion-of-the-american-teacher/

Questioning in the classroom, Bringing Class Discussions to life

This article  looks at questioning and and how to make classrooms engaging through questioning.

 Middle E-Connections - Bring Class Discussions to Life

January 2013
Rick Wormeli

"Beuller? Beuller?"

Look in on class discussions today and what you'll see (I hope) is a far cry from the classroom of gaping-mouthed, drooling, blank-faced students in the John Hughes 1986 film Ferris Beuller's Day Off.

One great way to get students to think critically and move information into long-term memory is through dynamic class discussions. However, ensuring these discussions are effective requires clear principles and strategies.

Whoever asks the questions does the learning. If I ask a student about a topic and listen to his answer, especially if I'm interested in the topic and the student, I'm learning a lot, but the rest of the class is sitting passively. Do you see something wrong with this picture? I am the teacher; I already know the material. My goal is for students to learn it. Students, therefore, need to be asking the questions.

Students learn the most when they ask the questions themselves. To make this happen, teachers have to make question-asking compelling and habitual. As often as possible, ask students to brainstorm questions, queries, and investigate starting points for as many topics as time allows to get them in the habit.

• Create 10 questions to which "colloquialism" is a good answer.
• What are all the possible things we'd want to know about cuneiform writing?
• What do you wonder about your future?
• What questions might a visitor from another planet ask after observing our election process?
• Pretend you're a radicand (the number under the radical sign in a square root). What would concern you as this math algorithm progresses?
• Create all the "Why … ?" questions you can about light and the way it behaves.
• Skim the whole chapter and list at least eight questions the chapter seems to answer.

Making question-asking compelling is another issue, however. Here, we're trying to make students so curious that they form their own questions: "Why does it do that?" "What will the effect be?" "What are the exceptions to this rule?" "Why do you believe that?" "How is this false?" "Where's my mistake?" and "What would happen if … ?"
We can create curiosity by presenting students with puzzling phenomena, surprising facts, challenges to accepted opinions, appeals to imagination, playful situations with manipulatives, connections among seemingly disparate concepts, moral dilemmas, and personal dramas when facing struggle.

Another way to involve more students in active question-asking is to get your students to ask the follow-up questions. If one student answers the initial question you pose, ask a second student to offer evidence to support or refute the first student's response; then ask a third student to critique the second student's evidence. Go back to the first student who provided the initial response and ask her to respond to what the other two students said. This creates positive anxiety in the classroom. We want students so concerned that they will be called upon to say something intelligent that they remain on their toes mentally. To be effective, we have to make a habit of this redirection so that students know it's going to happen. This keeps the entire class thinking of answers and questions to ask.

Another tip for keeping the whole class engaged is to always pose questions to the entire class before calling on a specific student to respond. This invites percolation, which builds those neural pathways. Wait time is important as well. Research shows that waiting 10 seconds or more before calling on a student to respond leads to more depth, thinking, and investment in the conversation. It takes practice, but it's worth promoting this expectant silence so that students know you're counting on them to come up with a quality response.

This article was excerpted from the new AMLE release The Collected Writings (so far) of Rick Wormeli: Crazy Good Stuff I've Learned about Teaching Along the Way. For more great teaching advice from this beloved speaker and author, pick up the book in the AMLE Store.

Engaging Activities for Better Learning - Jane Faber

Teacher educator and AMLE author Jane Feber shares several clever teaching techniques that engaged students when she subbed in English and science classes.   

Engaging Activities for Better Learning

Jane Feber

As a teacher, no matter what lesson I had to teach in the classroom, I knew I had to hook the students and engage them if learning was to take place. When students are engaged in the learning process, they take ownership of their learning. Being engaged allows students to work at the application level, which, in turn, enables them to transfer what they learn to other contexts.

Having retired from full-time teaching four years ago, I am now able to work with students in a substitute capacity. I teach a reading competency class to current teachers, and many of the teachers in my class ask me to substitute for them. Quite often, they leave lesson plans that say, for instance, “Jane, we’re reading Canterbury Tales, do your thing” or “Jane, we’re studying the water cycle on page 142 in our book; do something to help them understand the water cycle.”

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Freedom to Teach

Do Canadian Teachers Truly Have the Freedom to Teach? 

While the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not specifically protect a freedom to teach, many understand freedom of expression to be a two-ended right. In other words, it is impossible to censor the expression of only one person. If I do not hear what you want to tell me, I have no opportunity to form an opinion about your expression. I can neither agree nor disagree. I cannot celebrate your brilliance, nor can I stand outside your door to protest the nasty things you say.
Recently, I have learned about two teachers who, in different circumstances, have been restricted from teaching material they would like to teach. I do not think these two teachers are the same in their approaches. I do not think their students have had similar experiences. I understand that the outcomes are very different, but I feel uncomfortable about both.
Both teachers have taught high school-aged students for many years. Both teachers are committed to and well-liked by their students. Both teachers believe they have the best interests of their students at heart.

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I have always said to my American teacher friends how much I love that in B.C. I have a lot of freedom as to how I teach curriculum. Yes, there are Prescribed Learning Outcomes and often specific units/topics covered but the method in which those are taught is up to the teacher. I enjoy trying new approaches to teaching, and as a new teacher who has had a variety of grade levels and subjects - I'd like to know that I can explore different teaching strategies.

Still, this article is an interesting read. I wonder how often these situations occur? I can think of at least three teachers I know or have heard of, who have had similar situations for what I would consider far less "controversial" reasons named in the article.