12.4.12 Class Notes

We began with a Placemat Activity: For the first step in this strategy, we watched a portion of the youtube video of Michio Kaku discussing string theory & the way physics have improved our daily lives.  We were broken into groups of 4 and given a large sheet of paper.  Each of us wrote a reflection in a corner of the sheet.  We then each read our groups responses and came up with a synthesis that we wrote on the center of the sheet.  We all agreed this was a useful tool.

We then discussed intervention services for students with difficulty reading/ writing.  The success and failures of reading intervention in the middle grades was presented.  Most intervention done in early education has greater success.  Allington talked about high quality instruction all day & quality of teachers as key factors to reading competency.  He believed that reading time correlates with reading success. Also stated that students need books they can read and are interested in as decoding instruction not useful for older, struggling readers.

Finally we talked about Study Skills: Strategies, modeling, think alouds, etc. 

Teachers make false assumptions about students ability to study.  Subject specific organizers & guides good tools for students to try.   Forced memory has been replaced by the cognitive view.  What tools do we have to not only help students remember, but process info?  Active learners have more success remembering information.  Multi-tasking not effective & there is no one right strategy for all students.  Goal is to support students through the whole process of studying...integrate info, select right info, remember, retrieve and rehearse (highlight, note take, outline), write, respond, summarize, transform, organize (relate to what you know). 

 

Class Meeting November 13th

Class Meeting November 13^th

Jon McCall

Our lesson today focused on teaching writing strategies. We learned about and practiced several different techniques for getting our students to write in fun, engaging, and valuable ways.

1. We began the lesson with a warm-up activity called “Tea Party.” This activity is designed to introduce students to the characters of a book prior to reading it. In this activity each student is assigned a character and does a brief reading about their whoever they have been assigned. After this, students circulate the room interviewing each other and recording information about each character. By doing this the hope is that students will be more familiar with the characters of a story before they begin reading. This way children can better understand readings and focus their thoughts on the plot of the story and higher-level ideas in the text.

2. After this we reviewed the answers to the online quiz that all of us took on our week off, clarifying answers that students struggled on.

3. We also talked about the two upcoming assignments due the next week

I-Search Paper

·      2-3 pages

·      Personal narrative describing your research process

·      Research a topic that you are teaching in your class or something else

·      Format

o   Identify topic

o   Come up with questions

o   How you addressed questions

o   What you learned

FAQ Paper

·      Construct a series of Frequently Asked Questions and their answers on a topic you are covering in your class

·      Format

o   Title

o   Intro paragraph

o   5 higher level questions about the topic

o   Use hyperlinks to essays answering each question

·      The hardest part about this is that you have to create hyperlinks that link the question to the answer.

How do you create hyperlinks? Watch this video!

 

4. Teaching writing

We discussed the idea that although it has been used in teaching for generations, data suggests that grammar instruction does not actually improve students’ writing.

5. Slideshow: a meta-analysis of educational research found writing instruction techniques that had statistical evidence of success included

·      Teaching students to summarize

·      Collaborative writing

·      Specific product goals

·      Word processing

·      Sentence combining – model putting two short sentences together

·      Pre-writing

·      Inquiry activities – engaging students in analyzing data

·      Process writing

·      Using models (mentor texts)

6. We viewed a lesson by two students on literal and inferential reading of poetry that used group reading strategies and collages to think about a poem. The lesson focused on the poem "I know why the caged bird sings" by Maya Angelou:

7. Slideshow: We saw another slideshow describing why it is that teaching grammar does not work.

·      Teaching grammar DOES NOT WORK!

·      Errors happen for a reason

·      We should see these errors as teachable moments and talk about them

8. RAFT activity – we used a writing technique called RAFT, in which students decide how they will write by first determining the Role, Audience, Form, and Topic of their writing piece. This technique could be used to have students a) engage in writing, and b) write from multiple perspectives about an issue.

Class Meeting 11/27/12

Warm Up Activity:

It was a small class.  The count came to a grand total of 4 students and one teacher. We began with an exercise in writing found poetry.  We watched a dramatic video about female ants hunting for prey and read an article critiquing the video.  Using only words from the article, we split into groups and rearranged paragraphs into stanzas in order to create poetry.  The masterpiece created by me and Lital follows:

A raiding column of female ants is on the hunt

For prey

            prey

                        pray .

Ants stream across the screen

Trouble is on many

                        many

many feet. 

These are predatory ants

                        predatory ants.

            One thousand termites are dead,

                        They promise same day service. 

This warm up activity illustrated the importance of flexibility in literacy education.   In any classroom, it is important to remember that are multiple ways to represent and interpret a given piece of information.  So often we assume that there are “right” and “wrong” answers, but with this activity, we see that there can be many different “rights”.  Just as the sentiment of the ants’ hunt could be accurately portrayed through video, prose, or poetry, so learning can be explored through multiple avenues.

Strategy 1: Breaking up the Lecture:

We watched the following video about spacing in a science curriculum and were given the instructions to record a question after the first minute and a half and then another question after the second minute and a half.

While we had a lively discussion about the pros and cons of spacing information in terms of reaching deeper levels of understanding and making learning accessible for the greatest number of students, we could all agree on the importance of breaking up a lecture and giving students goals or tasks during long periods of listening.  With this activity, we were asked to record questions at various points in order to ensure that we were paying attention and engaging with the video.  In our own classrooms, we must have students create or respond to questions, do practice problems, engage in discussion, or any other activity throughout the lecture to ensure that our students are engaging in active listening strategies for maximum retention of material.  

Strategy 2: Question, answer, relationships

For this activity, we were instructed to watch the following video with a mind that we would be creating various levels of questions afterwards.  The questions were to follow the format: right there, think and search, author and me, and on my own.  Each level of question required an increasing amount of thought and individual thought.

Lital’s and my questions follow:

Right there: Why is it problematic to assume that all swans are white if you observe 100 white swans in a row?

Think and search: How does observation play into scientific theory in various philosophies?

Author and me: From the video, what are three different ways to handle a theory that is disproven.  Which do you think makes the most sense and why?

On my own: Do you believe in supernatural events? How might your beliefs be challenged based on these theories seen in this video and how would you react to these challenges?

By identifying the depth of a question, students will have to engage in a more reflective practice of learning.  Instead of simply answering questions, students will have to think about where the source of information comes from to answer those questions.  They will have to think about the difference between opinion and fact and discern which would be most appropriate in a given situation.  This relates directly to the common core goal of identifying and defending a claim; students must think about why they think the way that they think and how they can articulate that to the world.  By making students into metacognitive and deliberate learners, we can teach them skills that will have relevance long after they leave our classrooms. 

Journey to the Center of the Web

For our online course meeting the first activity we participated in was a Voice Thread discussion surrounding a video we were required to watch featuring Commissioner John King speaking about the introduction of the Common Core Learning Standards. The video specifically discussed ways to implement literacy instruction across content areas.

SHIFT 2: Building Knowledge in the Disciplines from EngageNY on Vimeo.

The Voice Thread medium of response allows considerably more choice on the part of the user in terms of how they choose to interact in the discussion versus a standard message board. Responses could be posted as text, audio, or video. This choice allows students to contribute meaningfully even if they lack strong writing skills.

The second activity was to respond to a video by Anne Marie Palincsar about the use of higher order questioning techniques.  Using higher order questioning helps teach students to think critically.

In this instance we responded using a standard message board. The advantage of using a more limiting technology like a message board is that it allows you to direct the medium of response, such that you can focus on practicing certain skills, such as writing.

The next activity was to watch another video featuring Commissioner King on the introduction of the Common Core, this time with the focus being on writing in the disciplines.

SHIFT 5: Writing from Sources from EngageNY on Vimeo.

We once again responded to this video using a discussion board, an apropos choice considering that particular medium requires us to respond in writing. Here we reflected on how we use writing in our own classrooms and whether what we were doing was in line with the common core.

The fourth assignment was to watch a video of a science lesson and then a video of experts critiquing that science lesson. In this instance we used a Voicethread to respond with anything we learned during the lesson or our own critiques of the lesson. I personally found her lesson a very creative way to bring a piece of literature into a science classroom as well as a engaging way to create a hands on experience that fostered a deeper understanding of multiple topics.

The final activity was to watch a video about the teaching of Boyle’s law and to contribute two things we took away from the lesson on a discussion board. For me the aspects of the video that struck me most were the effectiveness of demonstrations and the importance of using multiple representations to give all students the best chance of understanding the material.

October 23 Class Meeting

Reading Comprehension

by Rebecca Sullivan

This week’s class meeting focused on research about reading comprehension and different strategies we can used in fostering reading comprehension in our students.  Two of the strategies we focused on and practiced in class were story boarding and blocking.

Story Boarding:

One of the first teaching strategies we investigated was story boarding.  David L. Bruce argues that story boarding is a useful tool to enhance reading comprehension and student engagement in reading.    Research has suggested that the more students are able to manipulated one idea, the deeper their learning will become.  A story board highlights this theory by incorporating multiple learning modalities in its construction.  As a class, we created a story board to represent a clip from A Beautiful Mind.  All participants were engaged in the story board activity, and we discussed how it could be used to describe lab reports, processes, and the main ideas in a unit (as a review before an assessment).

Blank Story Board Template:

Clip from A Beautiful Mind:

Blocking of Reading

Another comprehension strategy we implemented in class was the blocking of reading assignments.  After each block of text, the students pause to reflect upon the reading by jotting in key ideas and/or questions.  We enjoyed this strategy and liked that it forced us to pause and reflect on the reading before moving on.  This also helps students to build the skill of metacognition in pausing to think about what they understand from the text.  At the end of several paragraphs, we discussed with others in a small group.  This could be useful in class because stronger readers could model this skill to the group.

Vocabulary Education 10/16/12

Vocabulary Education

October 16, 2012

The topic of this week’s class was vocabulary education.  The class participated in teaching strategies for vocabulary education as well as discussion about research on the effectiveness of vocabulary education and frontloading activities. 

Research on Vocabulary Teaching

            Throughout this class, there were multiple evidences for the importance of vocabulary education presented.  Research suggests that vocabulary knowledge can act as a predictor of comprehension, is widely associated with intelligence, and used to make judgments about how others use vocabulary.  Students can learn vocabulary in many ways such as reading and direct instruction, and the best method to learn vocabulary is a mixture of both.  Vocabulary includes words ranging from basic words such as “when” and “these” to specialized subject area language such as “mitosis” and “chloroplast”.  It is important to help children learn as many words as possible. 

            Vocabulary has become even more important as writing has gained prevalence in our society.  According to Yancy, reading has previously played a more important role in our society, however with the increase in technology, especially the personal computer everyone is now required to compose a great deal.  These new literacies have changed the way we write.  The author suggests that because of these changes to writing we should change our current modes of composing and modes of instruction for writing in schools.   

Teaching Strategies  

          To begin the lesson on vocabulary we did an activity called "I have... Who has?"  In this exercise, each student is given a slip of paper.  This paper has a word that the student must match and a phrase to read for the next student to match to.  This is a quick way to review vocabulary that the students need to practice and work with. 

           Another great strategy for learning vocabulary is frontloading activities.  Frontloading activities are any type of activity that motivates, prepares, and supports students in learning new concepts, especially vocabulary.  Some examples of frontloading activities include Anticipation guides, Frayer Model, List-Group-Label, Prediction Charts.  

           The final vocabulary teaching strategy demonstrated was verbal pantomime.  In this strategy, small groups of students are given a vocabulary word.  Each student then writes a story to try to have the other students in their class guess the word.  This is a great review activity for end of unit review.  

Academic Vocabulary

          The following video features Elizabeth Coelho of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education discussing the use and instruction of academic language.