Friday 4 -The Craft of Teaching

For those of you who missed last week’s Friday 4, fret not. The craziness of Parents Weekend and what seemed like an endless stream of meetings and visitors prevented me from crafting an end-of-week missive last Friday, so you did not really miss anything! The frenetic pace that coincides with the impending end of the term has set in to be certain, but I was determined to publish the Friday 4 this week since it appears from most accounts that people do enjoy the posts. I appreciate the feedback I have received about the Friday 4 and continue to encourage you to send along any thoughts, ideas or comments.

I was encouraged by a valued and trusted colleague to be more deliberate about a theme for each week’s Friday 4. In the past, I have tried to connect the items in each Friday 4 but have not always found four related items in any given week so the thread connecting the items has been tenuous at best at times. So, in response to the suggestion, this week’s Friday 4 will focus on the craft of teaching.

Enjoy and as always, please send along any ideas or suggestions you may have.

Friday Four 1/20

 

 Friday Four, Jan 20, 2012

For those of you who may have missed last week’s Friday Four, I apologize. I was in the middle of a 12 day bout with a fever and was off the grid for a few days. I contemplated posting a mid-week Friday Four, but decided that I would would wait until Friday to get back on the horse. So, here are a few items I have run across that you might find interesting/intriguing. Enjoy!

  1. This week, Apple announced its release of iBooks 2 and a textbooks section of the store where you can purchase entire digital textbooks for $14.99. They already have a few of the major publishers on board and are looking to add others. I downloaded the biology book and have started playing with it; it is pretty cool. Who knows whether this will take off or not and be a game changer, but I would love to see the ability to have all of my textbooks on my iPad for a FRACTION of the cost of traditional textbooks. Here is an article about the release from the Washington Post. A quick search will pull up plenty of commentary on the announcement.
  2. Continuing the Apple/iPad theme, here is a blog post from one of the techie types I follow with his recommendation for the very first app you should download if you are a new iPad owner/user.
  3. Here is a great series of programs that appeared on American Radio Works that addressed the issue of lectures and how incredibly inefficient and pedagogically bad they are. While the addresses deal with the college level, the issues are certainly germane to the high school level. Worth a listen.
  4. Here is a link to part 1 of a series of blog posts by Grant Wiggins on the concept of “transfer” and how we can do a better job of helping students be able to transfer knowledge and skills better. This has been a part of many of the conversations we have been having recently about homework so I though it might be of interest to a few of you.
Bonus: Jan 30 is World Flipped Class Open House day. A colleague and I will be opening up our classroom for visitors and welcome anybody who would like to come by and see what we are doing.

 

 

Friday Four 12/15

Friday Four 12/15

The theme for this week’s Final Four is a tad different as a result of a conversation I had with a fellow colleague. Our Dean of Faculty, Ned Parsons,(@nedparsons) spends a good deal of time in the Winter term visiting and observing classes. He likes to have something in general he is “looking for” in each round of his visits that he will then report back on to the faculty. This past week, he focused on seeing the various ways that teachers and students check for understanding during a class. We thought it might be interesting if my Friday Four was related to his focus for the week. So, here are four interesting articles, blog posts, etc. that I ran across related to the topic of how students and teachers check for understanding in the classroom. Please feel free to leave comments or suggestions.

  1. Edutopia is a great website that has a wealth of information for educators at every grade level. Here is a post “Do You Check for Understanding Often Enough with Students?” that will get you started.
  2. If you are looking for a more philosophical look at teaching for understanding, Grant Wiggins is a great resource. Here is a link to a post on his blog “On Not Teaching for Understanding” that will definitely get you thinking.
  3. Here is a link to an article from the ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) journal Educational Leadership that explores the student’s role in assessment of understanding.
  4. ASCD has an entire section of their website dedicated to the Understanding by Design concept attributed to Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins. This section of the site has links to articles, videos and much more if you are looking for a general starting point to explore the topic.

Friday Four 10/14

Friday Four – 10/17

Here is this week’s interesting blog posts/articles that I have run across that you might find interesting. Enjoy!

The Craft of Teaching

  1. Three Brain-based Teaching Strategies to Build Executive Function in Students. “For young brains to retain information, they need to apply it. Information learned by rote memorization will not enter the sturdy long-term neural networks in the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) unless students have the opportunity to actively recognize relationships to their prior knowledge and/or apply new learning to new situations.”  Piece by Dr. Judy Willis, an authority on brain research.
  2. Learning about Learning from Soccer. A blog post by former LC faculty member, Grant Wiggins. “Purposeful and effective performance thus requires three things: knowing what the bottom-line long-term purpose is, knowing ways of achieving the purpose, and knowing how to self-assess and self-adjust to achieve a purpose.”
  3. Five lessons on teaching from Angry Birds that have nothing whatsoever to do with parabolas. Blog post from one of my favorite Math geeks out there, Dan Meyer. Good analysis of how computer game design can be transfered to teaching.
  4. Blog post by David Wees on the use of constructivist teaching. Includes link to some research on discovery learning.

New teacher PD

In a couple of weeks, I will be working with the new teachers at my school during their orientation. Most of them are novice teachers or have been only teaching for a year or two. I have about 3.5 hours total time with them broken up into two different sessions. I have some ideas for what I would like to do with them based on what I did last year that was well received and some new ideas to try as well. Here are some of my thoughts…

  • Establishing a personal learning network (PLN). I would like to encourage all of the new faculty to see/use Twitter as a wonderful opportunity for professional development (PD). The Educator’s PLN and Classroom 2.0 will also be on my list of suggested resources.
  • Formative assessment (FA) techniques. I am a big fan and user of “clickers” (Student Response Systems) in my classroom and want new teachers to think about a variety of ways that they can assess where their students are as they come to master new concepts. One of my favorite descriptions of FA is: “Assessment FOR learning not OF learning.” I do not remember where I picked this up, but I like it. Of course, one key piece in FA is what the teacher DOES with the information he/she learns. Knowing that the students are struggling with an abstract concept and knowing what to do next are not one and the same.
  • Backwards Design approach to lesson planning. I have run a typical lesson with the new faculty as the students and then deconstructed the lesson from the perspective of the teacher, explaining how I planned the lesson, activities and assessments along the way. This has been well received in the past by the new faculty and generated a great deal of discussion about lesson planning. On a side note, Grant Wiggins, one of the “inventors” of backwards design happens to be a fellow alum of Loomis Chaffee and former faculty member. I was lucky enough to moderate a panel with him and a few other fellow educators at Reunion weekend this past June.

What do you think are the most important topics to include during orientation for new teachers? Please share your ideas and thoughts. Thanks!