Blogger Ben Johnson shares strategies for developing students' academic vocabulary that help decrease the achievement gap.
At a small school district, I faced the challenge as an administrator of diminishing the achievement gap in the student scores, especially in math and science. For example, we noticed that in science there was a 40-point gap between Hispanic students passing the test versus the number of white students passing. Having been in the classrooms and having observed teachers teaching, I knew that they were not treating Hispanic students any differently than the white students. So why was there an achievement gap?
Sheltered Language Techniques
We decided to increase the level of vocabulary development, primarily using many sheltered language techniques.
The results were astounding. Because of this and an intense college readiness focus, in two years, our schools went from the status of unacceptable to recognized and then the next year, exemplary.
Focus
The focus was on helping the students to better understand and speak academic language.
"comprehensible input."
What this means is that when the teacher is speaking to the students, the teacher should use multiple contextual clues that provide meaning along with the spoken words. A teacher would use the words verbally, but at the same time, point to the objects being described, and also show the words in written format. Gestures, pantomime, movement, actions, sounds, pictures, graphics, and video all are additional methods that teachers have at their disposal to increase the likelihood that their students will understand the message.
Scaffolding
Before a student can grasp the concepts being taught, the student needs a mental scaffold in which to place them.
1. Experience, first-hand or virtual, is the number one scaffold-building tool.
2. Reading is second best
3. the next best tool is intense vocabulary development prior to instruction. (Marzano)
Teachers Role: Teach the language of their content area.
"The students will leave the class being fluent in the language and culture of science or they will be able to converse in the language of math. This requires that the teacher needs to initially realize that students may not understand completely what reduce, simplify, analyze, compute, illustrate, or group means."
Guided by research, educators at Cochrane Collegiate have homed in on ten top teaching methods, and teachers receive weekly PD to help them implement the practices.
"Teen intelligence is not “fixed” and that they can increase their IQ.
Intelligence is more malleable than previously thought.
“An important aspect of the results is that cognitive abilities can increase or decrease,” said Oklahoma State University psychometrician Robert Sternberg, a past president of the American Psychological Association who wasn’t part of the study. “Those who are mentally active will likely benefit. The couch potatoes among us who do not exercise themselves intellectually will pay a price.”
Although a large number of obese children have the desire to lose weight, they often end up engaging in behaviors counterproductive to that goal, according to a new study being presented today at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.
The study, led by Temple University public-health doctoral candidate Clare Lenhart, examines data from nearly 44,000 adolescents who took the Philadelphia Youth Risk Behavioral Survey. Of those students, 13.6 percent, or 5,944 of them, were considered obese.
Lenhart and her colleagues discovered that roughly 75 percent of the obese youths surveyed reported trying to lose weight—undoubtedly a good sign.
The not-so-good sign: Those same youths were often more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors, such as cigarette smoking, daily soda consumption, and physical inactivity.
In this Q&A, two science teachers, Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann, talk about how they’ve used an innovative method to improve student engagement and achievement. Lectures are homework, and homework becomes classwork.
You've likely heard that body language accounts for up to 55% of how we communicate, but reading non-verbal cues isn't just about broad strokes. The same gesture can indicate a number of different things depending on context.
What about the body language of a teacher in a classroom? When you observe classes, do you pay attention to body language of the teacher as well as the students?
"One of the more unfortunate buzzwords to appear in online education circles and the press is “flipping the classroom”. This means that instead of lecturing students in lessons in school, the teacher records the lecture as a video and uploads it to YouTube – or recommends other people’s videos to the students. The students watch the videos for homework, freeing up the lesson for interactivity, project work and so on."
"I not impressed with this brilliant 'new' idea. Why not?"
"The average teacher asks 350 questions a day. The kinds of questions asked fall into two categories: directed (also called "low-level") questions and open-ended (also called "high-level") questions. Of these 350 questions, most are directed.
By analyzing our own questioning techniques (e.g., how we ask questions, why we ask questions), we can find the balance between directed and open-ended questions that will most effectively encourage the development of higher-level thinking skills in our students.
Let's look more closely at the differences between directed and open-ended questions."
There was a time when most students in K-12 could expect to be taught by veteran teachers. But this is no longer the case, as the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future points out ("Classroom 'crisis': Many teachers have little or no experience," msnbc.com, Sept. 26). In the 1987-88 school year, for example, 14 years was the most common level of experience. But by 2007-08, it was one or two years.
The trend is expected to continue as more Baby Boomers retire, better paying jobs open up in the private sector, and pressure to boost test scores mounts. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public schools will need at least 1.6 million additional teachers in the next few years. The demand will be greatest in the inner cities and rural areas of the country, and it will be primarily in specific subject fields.
Where these new teachers will come from and what their presence in the classroom will mean are questions that warrant a closer look.
According to the National Center for Education Information, four out of 10 new public school teachers hired since 2005 have come from alternative teacher-preparation programs. I expect to see even more teachers entering the classroom via this route. I'm not talking only about Teach for America. I'm also referring to standalone colleges such as the Relay Graduate School of Education, which is the first such school to open in New York State in nearly a century ("Ed Schools' Pedagogical Puzzle," The New York Times, Jul. 21, 2011).
Nevertheless, it's important to remember that new teachers from any certification route, no matter how promising, are untested. The crucible of the classroom will determine if they have what it takes to be successful. But since nearly half of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years, the emphasis must be as much on retention as it is on recruitment. Unfortunately, it's the former that has been given short shrift. The churn rate is financially costly for school districts because it takes much time and effort to replace teachers who quit. It is psychologically costly for students because the deep bonds they form with their teachers are severed when their teachers depart.
The teaching profession is going through a metamorphosis. No one knows what the eventual outcome will be. But I don't think it will be recognizable in the next two decades. I say that primarily because the fun has been taken out of teaching by endless rules and regulations that have effectively tied the hands of classroom teachers. Teachers in the past never chose the profession for power, fame or money. They did so because they loved their subjects, enjoyed young people and felt appreciated. It will take unusually dedicated college graduates to pass up opportunities outside of education, as immediately measurable outcomes become the only thing that matters.
Do we ignore mistakes, brushing them aside for the sake of our self-confidence? Or do we investigate the errors, seeking to learn from the snafus? The latter approach, suggests a series of studies, could make you learn faster.
Jonah Lehrer writes:
One of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again."
"Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure."
"A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this important concept. The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes? After all, everybody screws up. The important part is what happens next. Do we ignore the mistake, brushing it aside for the sake of our self-confidence? Or do we investigate the error, seeking to learn from the snafu?"
Growth Mindset
"It turned out that those subjects with a growth mindset were significantly better at learning from their mistakes. Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right."
"Fear of failure (fixed mindset) can actually inhibit learning."
Praise: How Matters
Students praised for their intelligence almost always chose to bolster their self-esteem by comparing themselves with students who had performed worse on the test.
In contrast, kids praised for their hard work were more interested in the higher-scoring exams. They wanted to understand their mistakes, to learn from their errors, to figure out how to do better.
The experience of failure had been so discouraging for the “smart” kids that they actually regressed.
The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence — the “smart” compliment — is that it misrepresents the psychological reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is when we learn from our mistakes.
Foresaking Self-Improvement for the Sake of Self-Confidence
Unless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong the mind will never revise its models.
We’ll keep on making the same mistakes, forsaking self-improvement for the sake of self-confidence. Samuel Beckett had the right attitude: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
"A teenager's IQ can rise or fall as many as 20 points in just a few years, a brain-scanning team found in a study published Wednesday that suggests the intelligence measure isn't as fixed as once thought.
A teenager's IQ can rise or fall as many as 20 points in just a few years, a brain-scanning team found in a study published Wednesday that suggests a young person's intelligence measure isn't as fixed as once thought.
The researchers also found that shifts in IQ scores corresponded to small physical changes in brain areas related to intellectual skills, though they weren't able to show a clear cause and effect.
"If the finding is true, it could signal environmental factors that are changing the brain and intelligence over a relatively short period," said psychologist Robert Plomin at Kings College in London, who studies the genetics of intelligence and wasn't involved in the research. "That is quite astounding."
Researchers at University College London, reported online in Nature, suggest that IQ, often used to predict school performance and job prospects, may be more malleable than previously believed—and more susceptible to outside influences, such as tutoring or neglect.
A 20 Point Rise: A Big Deal
"A change in 20 points is a huge difference," said the team's senior researcher, Cathy Price, at the university's Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging. Indeed, it can mean the difference between being rated average and being labeled gifted—or, conversely, being categorized as substandard.
A teenager's IQ can rise or fall up to 20 points in just a few years, in a finding that pinpoints unexpected variations in a measure of intelligence often used to predict school performance and job prospects. Robert Lee Hotz explains on The News Hub.
Recent Research Concludes: Experience can readily alter the brain
In recent years, scientists have determined that experience can readily alter the brain, as networks of neural synapses bloom in response to activity or wither with disuse. Expert musicians, circus jugglers and London cab drivers studying maps—even Colombian guerillas learning to read—have all shown brain changes linked to practice, several brain imaging studies have reported.
But until now, researchers had considered general intelligence too basic to be affected by such relatively small neural adjustments. Dr. Price and her colleagues don't know what caused the changes in both the brain and the scores they documented, but speculated they could be a result of learning experiences.
Other experts were confident the IQ variations were evidence of the neural impact of experience, for better or worse.
Cognitive Abilities Can Increase
"An important aspect of the results is that cognitive abilities can increase or decrease," said Oklahoma State University psychometrician Robert Sternberg, a past president of the American Psychological Association who wasn't part of the study.
Mental Activity
"Those who are mentally active will likely benefit. The couch potatoes among us who do not exercise themselves intellectually will pay a price."
- actionable (pointing students in the direction of more information)
- useful
- Students are given opportunities to re-learn and practice the skill again right away.
- "feed forward." That is, teachers should ask themselves: How will I use what I learned in the feedback process to inform my instruction? Feed forward helps teachers anticipate misconceptions and decide what needs to be re-taught and to whom.
To inform instruction: Too many teachers fail to both a) track their feedback, and b) use the data to alter their upcoming lesson plans.
Doug Fisher on 'gradual release'
"Fisher described the formative-assessment process used at his school. "We're not editors marking every error to fix" on an assignment, he said. Rather, teachers correct an error the first time they see it. The second time they see the same error, they put the student's initials on an error-coding sheet. Then they can easily see which students are struggling with the same skills, and pull them for small-group instruction. Students bring their assignment to the small group, re-learn the skill, and correct their own errors."
The noted neurologist turned educator talks about the science of boredom, how to get students' attention, and the most important lessons for 21st-century learner.
Most classroom instruction creates stress.
- Students experience stress from boredom (lecture and worksheets).
Boredom induces the brain into a stress response.
- Amiglada receive information and acts as a switching station. When stressed goes to lymbic system. Boredom puts brain in hyperactive state.
The brain learns in a low-threat classroom.
- Need to keep brain in state of "relaxed alertness."
- Relaxed alertness is created when the brain perceives something as new or interesting. It captures curiosity and increases attention. Curiosity get students into a state that they want to learn.
Questions create curiosity.
Students respond poorly to commands, but positively to "cues" such behaviors and gestures as well as to colors. Don't say "Pay attention." Rather, use a signal or a colored object. This cues the student to engage.
"Only the person who thinks learns."
- Learners learn when their brains "actively participate." Active participate puts the brain in the "active mode" so that they "answer every question that is asked."
Fear is the Obstacle to Learning.
Biggest fear is making a mistake in front of others. We must, therefore, remove the fear of failing in front of others as a barrier. If not brain goes into "reactive mode" and stops learning.
- Teachers use small white boards to allow students to respond without fear of exposure.
Knowing is good.
- Application is better. Students need facts + tools to apply them.
- Application is controlled by the pre-frontal cortex, which is the last part of the brain to mature.
- In the 21st Century students will need to use the Executive Function (analyze, evaluate, create).
- Must have opportunities to exercise those functions.
Video Games: A Model for the 21st Century Classroom
- Video games require mastery of each level before moving on. If you had to stay at Level 1 for two hours, you would experience stress (boredom). Students need to function at an "achieveable challenge level."
- Games continually test you and place you at Your "achievable challenge level."
- Games give you corrective feedback. There is no failure.
Growth Mindset: No Failure, Only Feedback
Gamers have an underlying belief that the game can be solved, beaten.
The Prize for Success = Harder Work
- What is the prize, harder work. That should be the classroom model.
Differentiation
Each child needs to be at "achieveable challenge" level. What is the appropriate "achieveable challenge level" for each student? The only way to determine that level is through constant "checks for understanding," "practice retrieval," and formative assessments.
Sam Wang is an associate professor, Department of Molecular Biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.
In this video, Dr. Wang addresses a variety of topics related to neuroscience and brain function including a variety of topics of specific interest to educators including:
School Leaders Note: Some researchers estimate that non-verbal cues account for up to 55% of total communications. Therefore, a teacher's facial expressions can be an important component of the effect of a lesson. Likewise, whether you smile or not could be a contributor to the overall climate and culture of your school. If you love your job, make sure your face knows it.
From Wikipedia: Smile
The Duchenne Smile
Guillaume Duchenne (pictured) discoverer of the Duchenne smile.
Although many different types of smiles have been identified and studied, researchers (e.g. Freitas-Magalhães) have devoted particular attention to an anatomical distinction first recognized by French physician Guillaume Duchenne. While conducting research on the physiology of facial expressions in the mid-19th century, Duchenne identified two distinct types of smiles. A Duchenne smile involves contraction of both the zygomatic major muscle (which raises the corners of the mouth) and the orbicularis oculi muscle (which raises the cheeks and forms crow's feet around the eyes).
A non-Duchenne smile involves only the zygomatic major muscle. “Research with adults initially indicated that joy was indexed by generic smiling, any smiling involving the raising of the lip corners by the zygomatic major…. More recent research suggests that smiling in which the muscle around the eye contracts, raising the cheeks high (Duchenne smiling), is uniquely associated with positive emotion.”[14]
Pan-Am Smile
The Pan-Am smile, also known as the "Botox smile", is the name given to a "fake smile", in which only the zygomatic major muscle is voluntarily contracted to show politeness. It is named after the airline Pan American World Airways, whose flight attendants would always flash every jet-setter the same, perfunctory smile.[15] [edit]
Thirteen former and current Kansas City, Kan., high school students can now officially claim they've determined a DNA sequence.
Last year, 13 students in McFarlane's Biotechnology Two course at J.C. Harmon High School sequenced the GAPC, or glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehyrogenase, gene from a sunflower. The data underwent a peer review and was officially published this month.
The data was published on GeoBank, a genetic database hosted by the National Library of Medicine through the National Institutes of Health.
The GAPC gene, found in many organisms, has been sequenced in other plants before but never in a sunflower, McFarlane said.
The students were limited to working with a plant because of the process they were going to use, so they started by looking for a plant where that gene hadn't been sequenced.
"The sunflower is the state flower of Kansas," he said. "It was the tipping point at the end."
The sequencing took about eight weeks of laboratory work, followed by a couple weeks of analysis.
Last year was the first time the class was offered and the second year for the biotechnology program at Harmon.
This year's class of 19 is working on creating biodiesel fuel using leftover vegetable oil, but McFarlane says he is working to get some funds to do a project similar to last year's.
Think our attitudes predict our behaviours? Think we only use 10% of our brains? Think blind people's other senses are more acute? Think again. Seriously, Would You Admit to Only Using 10% of Your Brain?
"Supported by a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation, University of Florida math education researcher Tim Jacobbe is leading a multi-center effort to create high-quality testing instruments in statistics, which will help teachers keep middle and high school students on track for meeting rigorous, new national math standards."
Others Participating in the Study
Current statistical instruction and assessment are grade level-specific, but Jacobbe said his research team is following a model identifying the three levels of understanding of key statistical concepts, regardless of a student’s grade level.
About 2,850 students in grades 6-12 will participate in the UF-led study.
Here's how to kill motivation. Tell your students or your children that you weren't good at math, or anything else.
For example, here is an exerpt from a recent post in the Democratizing Knowledge Blog titled "Math is Dead":
"I’ve had a difficult relationship with the academic subject area called “Math”. I did well in it until high school, when math work became a fairly complicated process of memorizing and calculating. I wasn’t really very good at committing formulas to memory or at seeing how they had application to anything real. So I became a Math Dropout as an upperclassman in high school, surrendering to the complexity of Trigonometry and Pre-Calculus. I subsequently doubled up on History, Social Science, and English classes and joined that group we call “Humanities kids”, or the ones who aren’t “good at math.” And from what I can tell, my experience in math class isn’t unique. I hear many students say that math is hard – they get long lists of problems to solve using complex computation, none of which they see as relevant to their lives, and by the time they’re in 10th grade many start self-identifying as “dumb” when it comes to math."
I have been asked many times, "how do we increase the number of STEM students?" My answer is simple. Stop telling your children or your students that you weren't good at math. Not only is it not helpful, but it is killing their motivation.
This kind of thinking is what author Carol Dweck refers to as a "fixed mindset"--a belief that performance is the result of innate ability. One either has it or one doesn't have it. If you do well, it's because you are good at it. If you do poorly, it's because you are not good at it.
In reality, whether you believe you are good at something or not, you are right. Your beliefs will drive your behavior. The problem is that research doesn't support the "fixed mindset."
In fact, researchers have proven again and again that performance is the result of practice, repetition, and plain old work. Dweck refers to this type of thinking as a "growth mindset,"--the belief that performance is the result of work and effort (See Mindset by Carol Dweck).
Making math, and every other subject for that matter, meaningful and relevant to students is critically important. However, all the efforts of even the best teachers to make math fun and relevant are undermined by those promoting a "fixed mindset." Why? Because math takes work and effort. It takes practice and repetition.
Instead, we need to send the message that success is the result of work and effort not innate ability. The more we practice, the better we get.
Rather than telling your children or your students that you were not good at a particular subject, tell them that their performance is the result of their work and effort, not your's. The fact is that their current performance has nothing to do with your past performance. Your past does not equal their future!
Can popular social technology be used to engage students in reading? In a recent article for Education Week, "Virtual Book Clubs: Connecting Adolescen...
Can popular social technology be used to engage students in reading? In a recent article for Education Week, "Virtual Book Clubs: Connecting Adolescent Readers," sixth-grade reading and language arts teacher Ryan Kinser shares how instead of fighting his students' "need for virtual connectivity," he embraced it as a way to add excitement to his curriculum. Kinser implemented a virtual book club (VBC) in his classroom, a forum in which students could share their ideas about texts, converse with their peers, and experience a more interactive side to reading.
Though a VBC involves some initial planning—including shaping a VBC around your curriculum, setting up a Wiki to host your VBC, and communicating with students and parents the guidelines and expectations for using the VBC—it can serve as a constructive and fun complement to traditional class discussions by sparking interesting discussions among students and encouraging active reading. By experiencing reading as both an independent and social experience, students may begin to see reading in a new way and may even find themselves excited and engaged by it.
Here are a couple more ideas on how popular social technology can be used to engage young readers:
Create a classroom book blog. A blog is great vehicle for discussion and collaboration among students, as well as a fun way to practice writing skills. Encourage students not only to regularly submit reviews of books they've read or reflections on texts, but also to read each other's posts and respond by writing comments. Companies like Edublogs and Kidblog.org are geared especially toward teachers and students, making running a classroom blog simple, free, and safe. Check out some examples of class blogs here.
Encourage students to track what they read online. Websites like Goodreads and LibraryThing let users keep track of what they've read, what they are currently reading, and what they want to read. Users can also write and read book reviews, as well as see what their friends are reading. Like a blog or a VBC, these websites shape reading into a social experience where readers are constantly being exposed to new books and authors. Students might benefit from seeing a whole world of readers reading for pure enjoyment outside the classroom.
What do you think about using VBCs and other social technology to encourage students to read?
Would it help students become more engaged readers, or would it just be a distraction in the classroom? Tell us your thoughts below!
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