Caine's Arcade
If you haven't watched the video Caine's Arcade yet, take about 10 minutes to watch. There is a pretty strong message here for all of us to take away as we continue to focus on the "experience" we create everyday for the students in our classrooms.
Caine's story speaks volumes for the innovation, creativity, and passion students bring to school. The question for us -- How do we support, strengthen, and celebrate this innovation, creativity, and passion?
To watch the video, click here:
Educating the Next Steve Jobs
On the heels of the ILC announcement, I wanted to highlight an article that challenges us as educators to foster the development of the next Steve Jobs. It is a call to action for us to develop the skills needed to become more innovative for our young people
The author, Tony Wagner, sums this challenge up in the following: “Learning in most conventional education settings is a passive experience: The students listen. But at the most innovative schools, classes are "hands-on," and students are creators, not mere consumers. They acquire skills and knowledge while solving a problem, creating a product or generating a new understanding.”
Ten Brain Based Learning Strategies
This post on the blog, Elementary Matters, caught my eye this week. Based on much of the recent brain research that has been released, the author, Sally DeCost, highlights 10 proven learning strategies that apply to all learners.
Share these with your teachers, and continue to encourage them to embed these strategies into their daily routine. Enjoy!
Putting Students on the Pathway to Learning-The Case for Fully Guided Instruction
This article hopes to put an end to the debate of whether students learn best when they have to discover/construct knowledge or when they are provided with direct, explicit instruction. As you will read, the direct, explicit approach to instruction is proven to be more effective, according to the research of authors Clark, Kirschner, and Sweller. Direct instruction takes many forms, though, including lectures, modeling, demonstrations, practice, feedback, videos, computer based presentations, small group and independent projects. Sounds a lot like the Fisher Gradual Release Model, doesn't it?
"Controlled experiments almost uniformly indicate that when dealing with novel information, students should be explicitly shown what to do, how to do it, and then have an opportunity to practice with corrective feedback. Curiously, if given a choice, lower performing students prefer discovery learning and higher performing students prefer explicit instruction- in both cases, they're picking the approach that does them the least good."
Constructivism is a theory of how students learn. It is not a prescription of how to teach students knowledge and skills. For everyone except those who have demonstrated mastery, partial guidance during instruction is significantly less effective than full guidance.
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