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Students are test-driving new Common Core exams. You can too | Hechinger Report
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You can try out sample tests that the test makers released to the public online and see for yourself if they boost your critical thinking skills. Here is a link to practice tests from PARCC, and from Smarter Balanced.
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Category Archives: Blogroll
Recently found … 04/01/2014
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Give Your Students More Voice and Choice
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The age-old role of teacher as orator, director, sage has been handed down for centuries and most of us grew up as students looking to teachers in this way. It’s hard to shake.
Co-constructing knowledge means giving up the myself and them role of teacher and students and fully embracing the wonder and journey of us.
The first step we have to take is becoming familiar and comfortable with saying “I don’t know” out loud to our students.
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Celebrate National Poetry Month!
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Check out Poetry Out Loud, it’s not only a national recitation contest held by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, but the organization’s site includes resources for teaching poetry.
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If you’re in the mood for a multimedia approach to poetry, look no further than Poet-to-Poet, an educational project that asks elementary, middle, and high school students to write poems in response to those shared by some of the award-winning poets who serve on the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors. The Academy has even put together lesson plans for teachers and educators in order to encourage robust participation.
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The NEA’s Bringing Poetry to the Classroom site is a good place to get additional ideas about incorporating poetry in the classroom.
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On Thursday, April 24 take part in Poem in Your Pocket day. People across the country select a poem and carry it with them, and share it with others throughout the day.
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Recently found … 03/26/2014
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What’s the ‘Sweet Spot’ of Difficulty For Learning? | MindShift
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Should we be making learning easier for kids—or harder?
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The answer, according to research in cognitive science and psychology, is both.
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the way in which we should make learning easier is to reduce cognitive load, especially when we are introducing new or complicated materials.
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once the learner has attained some degree of mastery, ratcheting up the difficulty will help her stay in her “sweet spot” of engagement, where the task is not too hard as to be frustrating and not so easy as to be boring. This is also the place where learners can practice encountering adversity and challenge and overcoming them, a key experience in the development of grit.
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The second reason to make learning harder is that it makes learning work better.
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Does The Fight For A Cursive Comeback Miss The Point? : NPR
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The question mark at the end of the title says it all. The premise of the gathering, according to the video: “Handwriting instruction is in danger of becoming increasingly marginalized.”
If the claim is to be believed, that’s a bad thing. And lots of reading specialists and academics believe it. It turns out, the real fear among those who study kids and handwriting is not that our schools will stop teaching cursive; it’s what Steve Graham of ASU has noticed in recent years: “We don’t see much writing going on at all across the school day,” Graham says.
What are kids doing instead?
“Filling in blanks on worksheets,” Graham says. “One-sentence responses to questions, maybe in a short response summarizing information.”
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The question mark at the end of the title says it all. The premise of the gathering, according to the video: “Handwriting instruction is in danger of becoming increasingly marginalized.”
If the claim is to be believed, that’s a bad thing. And lots of reading specialists and academics believe it. It turns out, the real fear among those who study kids and handwriting is not that our schools will stop teaching cursive; it’s what Steve Graham of ASU has noticed in recent years: “We don’t see much writing going on at all across the school day,” Graham says.
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“In the 21st century, you teach kids to be multilingual by hand,” Berninger says.
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“If we expect kids to develop mastery in anything and develop fluency in anything, they have to be doing it on a regular basis,” says Scott Beers, who teaches education at Seattle Pacific University.
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Recently found … 03/20/2014
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How to Teach the Standards Without Becoming Standardized | MindShift
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s it possible for teachers to meet standards without teaching in a standardized way?
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STRATEGIES FOR TEACHING STANDARDS IN AUTHENTIC WAYS
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1. Make the standards fit into student interests.
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2. Teach students to question.
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3. Focus on the skills and language of learning.
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4. Be open to many answers.
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5. Have authentic conversations about motivations.
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6. Emulate effective risk taking.
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7. Use professional learning communities.
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8. Share the many success stories.
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Q&A: A Crash Course On Common Core : NPR
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handy FAQ about Common Core
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Recently found … 03/16/2014
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Just-in-Time Teaching: An Interactive Engagement Pedagogy | Edutopia
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main features
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- Students are presented with a slightly provocative and memorable statement that is open to a considerable amount of interpretation.
- Students rephrase the question in their own words. The responses tell the instructor how students interpreted the assignment.
- Students must take a stand and justify their position. They must examine prior knowledge, consult the course resources, and perhaps discuss the issue with classmates.
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To be actively involved, students must engage in such higher-order thinking tasks as analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Within this context, it is proposed that strategies promoting active learning be defined as instructional activities involving students in doing things and thinking about what they are doing
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Save Us From the SAT – NYTimes.com
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the College Board announced this week that it was rolling out a complete do-over of the SAT
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All in all, the changes are intended to make SAT scores more accurately mirror the grades a student gets in school.
The thing is, though, there already is something that accurately mirrors the grades a student gets in school. Namely: the grades a student gets in school. A better way of revising the SAT, from what I can see, would be to do away with it once and for all.
The SAT is a mind-numbing, stress-inducing ritual of torture. The College Board can change the test all it likes, but no single exam, given on a single day, should determine anyone’s fate. The fact that we have been using this test to perform exactly this function for generations now is a national scandal.
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I sympathize with college-admissions deans who want a simple, accurate measurement of student potential. But no such measurement exists
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The only way to measure students’ potential is to look at the complex portrait of their lives: what their schools are like; how they’ve done in their courses; what they’ve chosen to study; what progress they’ve made over time; how they’ve reacted to adversity
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Recently found … 03/11/2014
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5 Ideas for Teaching With Comics and 5 Free Online Tools for Creating Them
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1. Character Analysis
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2. Re-telling of historical events
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3. Create alternative book reports
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4. Create digital citizenship lessons
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5. Express feelings
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Comic Master
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Make Beliefs
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Storyboard That
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Marvel Kids
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Witty Comics
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Recently found … 03/06/2014
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7 Steps for Putting Ideas Into Action | Inc.com
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Brainstorming is only a first step to innovation. What matters more are execution and implementation.
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A 7-Step Idea Generation Gameplan
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1. Define the problem and solution space.
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2. Break the problem down.
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3. Make the problem personal.
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4. Seek the perspectives of outsiders.
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5. Diverge before you converge.
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6. Create “idea resumes.”
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7. Create a plan to learn.
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Recently found … 03/01/2014
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74,476 Reasons You Should Always Get The Bigger Pizza : Planet Money : NPR
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The math of why bigger pizzas are such a good deal is simple: A pizza is a circle, and the area of a circle increases with the square of the radius.
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So, for example, a 16-inch pizza is actually four times as big as an 8-inch pizza.
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And when you look at thousands of pizza prices from around the U.S., you see that you almost always get a much, much better deal when you buy a bigger pizza.
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Recently found … 02/24/2014
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You think you know what teachers do. Right? Wrong.
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The problem with teaching as a profession is that every single adult citizen of this country thinks that they know what teachers do. And they don’t. So they prescribe solutions, and they develop public policy, and they editorialize, and they politicize. And they don’t listen to those who do know. Those who could teach. The teachers.
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Recently found … 02/22/2014
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Promoting a Culture of Learning | Edutopia
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a culture of learning is a collection of thinking habits, beliefs about self, and collaborative workflows that result in sustained critical learning.
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