•  the Weekly | 1.24.22

     

  • Agent of Change: Julia de Burgos

    "Julia Constanza Burgos García was born in 1914 in Carolina, Puerto Rico. A successful published poet in her native Puerto Rico, de Burgos struggled to get the recognition she deserved after moving to the U.S. in the 1930s. Her poems spoke of the beauty of her native country, and celebrated her identity as an immigrant black Latina — all things that were outside of the mainstream in early 20th-century poetry circles. Way ahead of their time, de Burgos’ scintillating poems center on themes of feminism and social justice, setting the stage for many Latino writers to come" (from Google Arts & Culture: 10 Inspiring Latinas Who've Made History).

  • Wellness: How Music Soothes Us

    Below you will find a brief excerpt from a podcast on Greater Good Magazine. The link for the podcast is included below and in the resources section of this edition of the Weekly.

    "When we hum, we breathe out, activating our vagus nerve, helping our heart rate slow down. When we hear slow and gentle melodies, the same can happen. I’m Dacher Keltner, and welcome to The Science of Happiness. Today, we’re revisiting one of my favorite and also most popular episodes of The Science of Happiness: how lullabies and other soothing music affect our bodies and minds.

    "We’re joined by pianist and composer Rosey Chan to look at how music can support our emotional health, helping us feel more relaxed, calm, and content. Later in the show, we’ll look at the science of lullabies, and how they have similar effects across cultures."

    Listen to the podcast .

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  • Spotlight On...Feedback

    The information included here comes from "7 Key Characteristics of Better Learning Feedback", by Grant Wiggins for TeachThought.

    Helpful feedback is...Goal-referenced, transparent, actionable, user-friendly, timely, ongoing, and consistent. Not all feedback is effective. Keeping these characteristics at the forefront will yield greater results. In this week's article, I'll address the last 3 characteristics.

    Quality learning feedback is timely: Feedback is most useful when it is provided within a short timeframe. Immediate feedback isn't always appropriate (i.e. during a presentation or performance), but we should do what we can to "ensure that students get more timely feedback and opportunities to use it in class while the attempt and effects are still fresh in their minds."

    Quality learning feedback is ongoing: Multiple opportunities to practice and get (timely) feedback will result in greater capacity for improvement and achievement. Ongoing formative work - formative assessment - should be used to provide students the opportunity to make adjustments so that they can better achieve the goal. In essence, by focusing on offering more feedback to students, teachers can actually teach less and still see greater learning occur. 

    Quality learning feedback is consistent: "For feedback to be useful it has to be consistent. Clearly, I can only monitor and adjust successfully if the information fed back to me is stable, unvarying in its accuracy, and trustworthy. In education this has a clear consequence: teachers have to be on the same page about what is quality work and what to say when the work is and is not up to standard. That can only come from teachers constantly looking at student work together, becoming more consistent (i.e. achieving inter-rater reliability) over time, and formalizing their judgments in highly-descriptive rubrics supported by anchor products and performances. By extension, if we want student-to-student feedback to be more helpful, students have to be trained the same way we train teachers to be consistent, using the same exemplars and rubrics."

  • FAQ | Standards-Based Grading

    Question: What about homework?

    Response: In his book, Grading from the Inside Out, Tom Schimmer addresses the importance of repurposing homework so that "teachers can create an environment where mistakes are instructional (rather than judgemental) and early stumbles no longer compromise the integrity of what teachers ultimately report about student proficiency" (p 78). I'll address this topic in my next few editions of the Weekly. This is Part 1.

    While the chapter on homework does share research on the debate about homework, we won't get into that here. Instead we'll focus on how a teacher who chooses to give homework could make it a more effective tool. Striving for balance here is critical - "juxtapose research and experience by closely monitoring student responses" and find the best middle ground between "an aggressive approach to homework and no homework at all" (p 78). Schimmer provides the following 6 questions and annotations as a 'universal litmus test' for you to use to gauge the worth of a potential homework task.

    1. Is it learning centered? At minimum, the work we ask students to complete at home should cover the essential learning or standards. 香港六合彩资料work should never be busy work.

    2. Is it necessary? We should ask ourselves if it is necessary for students to take time out of their home lives to complete an assignment.

    3. Is it reasonable? Can we reasonably expect students to complete the assignment within the time available, and is it a reasonable amount of work given the age of the students?

    4. Is it high quality? We should not ask students to complete tasks like word searches and crossword puzzles in lieu of other activities or family time.

    5. Are the students ready? Students need to be ready to work independently in order for homework to be a productive experience; otherwise, frustration and discouragement will result. This leads to the need to differentiate homework depending on the typical clusters within a classroom.

    6. Were students involved? 香港六合彩资料work is typically more productive when students have input on the purpose of the homework, what it entails, and how much is necessary to complete. Wherever possible, we should give students a choice in what we expect beyond the instructional minutes.