•  the Weekly | 11.30

     

  • For Your Hands: Written Discussions

    Taken from Best Practice: Today's Standards for Teaching & Learning in America's Schools, by Steve Zemelman, Harvey Daniels and Arthur Hyde

    This after-reading strategy, which focuses on Reading as Thinking, could be useful in any subject area and in a variety of learning contexts. Though written for in-person, paper-based behaviors, it could easily be adapted for a virtual or blended experience. It can help with generating and increasing participation and engagement, and with building connections between students. You can likely see how a strategy like this may be more effective than attempting whole-class discussions.

    1. Students are paired.
    2. As the class works through a reading (or other form of input - documentary, lecture, etc), pairs of students quietly write simultaneous notes (on their own documents) to one another about the reading.
    3. Every few minutes, the teacher pauses the reading and students swap their notes with their partner. They respond to their partner's notes with their own thoughts, ideas or questions. The teacher may set a timer for responses, expecting students to write for the whole time before returning the documents.
    4. The same structure could be used at the end of a reading instead of during. In this case, teachers would indicate time allotments for the initial notes and then for the responses. Partners may trade back and forth 2-4 times, creating a substantive record of their discussion. 
    5. The teacher could indicate a variety of prompts, topics or focus-areas for the notes, and may use these written discussions to jump-start verbal class discussions.

     

  • For Your Heart: 2020 TOYs Share Best Advice

  • For Your Head: 7 Structures of Best Practice Teaching
    Taken from Best Practice: Today's Standards for Teaching & Learning in America's Schools, by Steve Zemelman, Harvey Daniels and Arthur Hyde

    According to the authors, the principles of best practices in teaching are drawn from 'authoritative and reliable sources', 'scientific research of rigorous design', and the expertise of 'some of the country's most accomplished teachers'. They span subject matter and grade level. There are 13 principles that characterize these practices: student-centered, experiential, holistic, authentic, challenging, cognitive, developmental, constructivist, expressive, reflective, social, collaborative, and democratic.

    These 13 principles inform the 7 structures that embody Best Practice Teaching.

    1. Small-Group Activities: less teacher presentation, more active student learning; shifting, decentralized groupings; less constant teacher supervision; pairing collaborative structures with elevated curriculum to push towards higher-order thinking.
    2. Reading as Thinking: methods focused on developing students' abilities to comprehend a variety of texts, to use their minds more effectively, and to engage with, understand and apply what they read. 
    3. Representing to Learn: using written and artistic expression as a means for students to process, act on, and respond to learning opportunities, in a less formal, more in-the-moment, spontaneous format.
    4. Classroom Workshop: a long, regularly scheduled, recurrent chunk of time during which the main activity is to DO a subject; student-choice is an important characteristic; norms are established and followed; students may be working independently, collaborating with other students, participating in mini-lessons, or conferencing with a teacher.
    5. Authentic Experiences: a condition of powerful, transformative learning experiences where students are working on something that feels 'real'; involving students in tangible, authentic, real-world materials and experiences; bringing bits of the world into the classroom and / or bringing students out into the world. Click HERE for a list of possibilities.
    6. Reflective Assessment: utilizing tools like observation, interviews, questionnaires, collecting & interpreting artifacts, and performances to measure students' learning; less focus on tasks that measure recall of individual facts or use of subskills, more on performance of authentic, complete, higher-order activities; view main goal of assessment to be helping students set goals, monitor their own work, and evaluate their efforts; many of these forms of assessment are integral to the learning and so overlap with instruction.
    7. Integrative Units: identify a few big subjects of interest and importance and build extended units around those topics; thematically coherent activities allow for addressing much, if not all, of the mandated curriculum but do so in a way that provides more student choice, continuity, and engagement; usually incorporate multipe disciplines of study; ideally designed around real concerns students have about themselves and their world; even working in isolation, teachers can transform their content by reorganizing material into more meaningful, coherent chunks.

  • packlogo