Monthly Archives: May 2012

Building a Bridge to Summer with Projects

May 23, 2012 | 8:17 AM | By

Marin Country Day

As part of the school's Maker Lab, Marin Country Day students spend the last few weeks of school building projects.

By Matt Levinson

The month of May can be a tough time for schools. The end of the year brings mixed emotions for students, teachers and parents, as they prepare for transition into the summer months. Keeping the same routines can be reassuring for some, but recasting school in terms of time and space can galvanize students and teachers and launch them into the summer full of energy and inspiration.

One school in the Bay Area is rethinking how to finish the year. Instead of proceeding with classes as usual, Marin Country Day School organizes a variety of projects for 7th and 8th grade students that provide opportunities to dig deep, build, learn and perform together.

“It feels like the first day of school all over again, with the same excitement and energy of a new schedule and new beginnings,” says Ted Saltveit, Upper School English Teacher and 8th Grade Class Dean.”Projects come at just the right time, when motivation is waning and students need a kick start and re-ignition.”

That’s not a bad feeling this time of year, as the school builds a bridge to the summer months in order to continue to cultivate a love of learning.

The projects inspire risk-taking and hands-on learning by breaking down the traditional classroom walls and build trust between teachers and students.

“It feels like the first day of school all over again.”

The experiences are different for each grade. Eighth-grade students work in their area of choice — anything from producing a play, to marine science projects, to making food. Some examples:

  • Students produce an entire play, and do everything that entails: write, perform, build sets/costumes, sing, dance and be a part of an original production of their own design.
  • Students explore water dynamics in boats on the ocean, understand steering, traction and locomotion in cars on land, and explore aerodynamics in the air.  To do this, they go kayaking, ride in boats, get into racecars and wind tunnels, then apply what they know. They work as part of a team of designers pitted against other designers to travel quickly and efficiently.
  • Marine science students learn how oysters are farmed, why elephant seals are so loud and how El Nino is affecting mole crab populations at nearby Rodeo Beach. Students spend two Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, project-based-learning, summer

Can TED Talks Really Work in a Classroom?

May 22, 2012 | 7:00 AM | By

TED-Ed

By Katrina Schwartz

There’s been a lot of excitement around TED’s foray into education, bringing its inspirational video model to the classroom. TED-Ed launched the YouTube Channel with produced and animated videos about two months ago and now includes a free service that lets teachers upload any YouTube video to its polished platform. Teachers can also make any of the videos — TED or any other — more relevant to their classes by adding customized questions and quizzes.

But it’s a work in progress at the moment, until educators can figure out the best ways to use the videos. The standard TED talk typically features a speaker, usually an expert in a subject, talking about innovations and inspirations. Most speakers cover topics in big, broad strokes, unlike, for example, Khan Academy videos, which parse and explain specific lessons in different subjects.

Under the math topic, for example, TED-Ed includes videos like How Folding Paper Can Get You to the Moon or Peter Donnelly Shows How Stats Fool Juries. For the curious, there are videos like Questions No One Knows the Answers To and The Power of Simple Words.

“It’s by no means a comprehensive understanding. It’s a good introduction.”

And it’s this curiosity that most teachers expect TED-Ed videos will feed. “I see them as a valuable inspirational tool,” said Aaron Sams, a high school chemistry teach in Woodland Park, Colorado who uses video lectures to supplement in-class learning. “It’s by no means a comprehensive understanding. It’s a good introduction.”

For example, Sams showed his class Just How Small is an Atom and incorporated the pre-made questions that accompanied it to give them a sense of awe about chemistry.

TED-Ed videos aren’t meant to be a substitute for what happens in the classroom, said Logan Smalley, TED-Ed’s director. “The videos, and the new TED-Ed platform, are resources that teachers Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, TED, TED-Ed

Schools and Students Clash Over Use of Technology

May 21, 2012 | 10:52 AM | By
By Katrina Schwartz

When it comes to using technology in school, the tension between what students and parents want and what schools allow is becoming more apparent — and more divisive.

Students want more control over how they use technology in school, but many classrooms are still making it difficult. That’s according to the most recent Speak Up 2011 report, “Mapping a Personalized Learning Journey,” which reflects the views of more than 416,000 K-12 students, parents, and educators nationwide surveyed on how technology can enhance the learning environment. They survey is produced by Project Tomorrow, an educational non-profit focused on raising student voices in education policy discussions. The theme for this survey focused on individualized learning paths.

Students aren’t just posting personal pictures and stories on Facebook — it’s just as much a part of their social lives as it is a place where they connect with each other for school work, too. According to the survey, 46 percent of students have used Facebook to collaborate on school projects, and one in 10 high school students have tweeted about an academic subject. Meanwhile, in formal classroom settings, the practice of using these online tools as an acceptable means of learning has been slow: half of all middle and high school students say they can’t access social media sites at school. Educational policy makers need to connect the dots between what motivates and encourages students to learn and what’s actually happening in the classroom, the report states.

65 percent of school principals said it was unlikely they would allow personal devices in the coming school year.

That connection might be found in students’ own mobile devices. A whopping 45 percent of middle-schoolers and 55 percent of high-schoolers say that they mainly access the Internet through mobile devices. And access to tablets doubled between 2010 and 2011 – up to 26 percent for middle-schoolers and 21percent of high-schoolers. These are increasingly important ways that students can interact with the world, follow their own interests and supplement their school-based learning.

More than half of students – 56 percent of middle-schoolers and 59 percent of high-schoolers Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, Teaching With Tech, Facebook, online learning, project tomorrow, Social Media, Speak up 2011, Technology in Schools

What Schools Can Learn from Summer Camps

May 18, 2012 | 10:34 AM | By

As warm weather approaches and parents sign up their kids for summer enrichment programs, many may wonder how long the effects of these programs last. Do their benefits persist into the school year, or do they disappear come September?

A study led by Stanford University psychologist Paul O’Keefe, released online this month by the journal Motivation and Emotion, offers some heartening news: Students’ improvements in attitude and motivation stick around well after summer turns to fall.

Over the course of nine months, O’Keefe and his coauthors assessed a group of eighth-, ninth-, and tenth-graders three times: once before the end of the school year, once during their summer enrichment program, and a final time six months after the end of the program.

Reward intellectual risk-taking, and avoid punishing students for failed experiments.

The researchers were looking at the teenagers’ “goal orientations”—were they interested in learning for learning’s sake, or in showing off their smarts? The first type of attitude, called a “mastery orientation,” has been linked to high levels of motivation and engagement, while the second, known as a “performance orientation,” has been tied to greater anxiety and less resilience in the face of failure.

During the summer enrichment program, the students became more apt to favor a mastery approach, endorsing statements such as “It’s important to me that I learn a lot of new concepts in science,” and discounting statements like, “One of my goals is to show others that I’m good at science,” which indicate a performance orientation.

The surprise was that the teenagers’ embrace of mastery remained strong even after they returned to school—which, with its tests and rankings, often places more emphasis on performance than on learning for its own sake.

As cheering as this finding may be, it in turn raises another question: How can we carry the mastery orientation cultivated in summer enrichment programs into the rest of the year? For the Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, learning styles, mastery

Flip This: Bloom’s Taxonomy Should Start with Creating

May 17, 2012 | 2:57 PM | By

Chris Davis, Powerful Learning Practice LLC

By Shelley Wright

I think the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy is wrong.

I know this statement sounds heretical in the realms of education, but I think this is something we should rethink, especially since it is so widely taught to pre-service teachers. I agree that the taxonomy accurately classifies various types of cognitive thinking skills. It certainly identifies the different levels of complexity. But its organizing framework is dead wrong. Here’s why.

Conceived in 1956 by a group of educators chaired by Benjamin Bloom, the taxonomy classifies skills from least to most complex. The presentation of the Taxonomy (in boththe original and revised versions) as a pyramid suggests that one cannot effectively begin to address higher levels of thinking until those below them have been thoroughly addressed. Consequently (at least in the view of many teachers who learned the taxonomy as part of their college training) Blooms becomes a “step pyramid” that one must arduously try to climb with your learners. Only the most academically adept are likely to reach the pinnacle. That’s the way I was taught it.

Many teachers in many classrooms spend the majority of their time in the basement of the taxonomy, never really addressing or developing the higher order thinking skills that kids need to develop. We end up with rote and boring classrooms. Rote and boring curriculum. Much of today’s standardized testing rigorously tests the basement, further anchoring the focus of learning at the bottom steps, which is not beneficial for our students.

Rather than starting with knowledge, we start with creating, and eventually discern the knowledge that we need from it.

The pyramid creates the impression that there is a scarcity of creativity — only those who can traverse the bottom levels and reach the summit can be creative. And while this may be how it plays out in many schools, it’s not due to any shortage of creative potential on the part of our students.

I think the narrowing pyramid also posits that our students need a lot more focus on factual knowledge than creativity, or analyzing, or evaluating and applying what they’ve learned. And in a Google-world, it’s just not true.

I think the narrowing pyramid also posits that our students need a lot more focus on factual knowledge than creativity, or analyzing, or evaluating and applying what they’ve learned. And in a Google-world, it’s just not true.

Here’s what I propose: we flip Bloom’s taxonomy. Rather than starting with knowledge, we start with creating, and eventually discern the knowledge that we need from it.

Creating at the Forefront

In media studies we often look at the creation of print and digital advertisements. Traditionally, students learn many of the foundational principles for creating a layout through a lecture or text Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Bloom's Taxonomy, Flipped classroom