Thursday, April 27, 2017

Constructivism and Prior Knowledge

This week’s article summary is Text Prep.

I subscribe to the progressive tenet of constructivism—the belief that we learn best when we’re empowered to figure out ‘stuff' on our own. 

To me, true learning includes giving our brains ample freedom and time to discern the meaning and importance of a piece of knowledge, to appropriate categorize and store it, and to be able to recall, use, and apply it in multiple ways and contexts.

The conundrum for a constructivist, however, is that learning new material/content is greatly aided by our brain’s prior knowledge—and our classrooms are filled with students who have vastly different amounts of background knowledge.

The article below contains some suggestions/hints for how teachers can support ‘front loading’ background knowledge while still giving kids the time to construct understanding of new content in their own unique manner.

Joe

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Background knowledge is a make-or-break variable in students’ reading comprehension, or to quote literacy expert David Pearson “Knowledge begets comprehension begets knowledge.”

The problem is that in any given classroom, there’s wide variation in students’ prior knowledge.

That’s why frontloading is an important teacher strategy with complex texts. Frontloading provides much-needed scaffolding for students who come to our classrooms lacking access to academic knowledge in their out-of-school lives.

Frontloading should not be a foretelling of what the text says before students read; that’s the reader’s job to figure out. Instead, it builds a bridge between students’ existing knowledge and what’s required to make meaning of the text.

Below are three approaches:

Author references: Nonfiction writers often include quick references connecting new material with prior knowledge, assuming the reader will understand them. When students don’t, it’s tempting for them to glide over such references without thoughtful pauses to integrate the new with the known. Teachers need to draw attention to these references, but if they do so in an all-class discussion in which only a few knowledgeable students participate, the majority of students won’t make the connections. Far better to get have students turn and talk with a classmate to discuss what they understand before diving into a difficult text. The teacher might have students do a quick-write (A science word I connect to volcanoes is ___ because ___, or A common mistake when balancing equations is ___, so it’s important to ___) and then discuss them with partners or post them on sticky notes. Or students might construct knowledge maps, generating terms associated with a central concept in the text, for example, in a unit on the French Revolution, the word aristocracy could be linked to elites, ancient Greeks, inherited wealth.

Pooling students’ knowledge: The teacher can get small groups of students sharing what they know by posing a thought-provoking statement or question, for example, in a culinary arts class, asking students to create a T-chart on whether organic foods are healthier than non-organic foods. A variation on that activity is presenting 4-6 arguable statements on the topic (for example, If you eat too much, your stomach could burst) and asking students to gather evidence pro and con and debating the merits.


Predicting through vocabulary knowledge: Before students read a text, the teacher presents several challenging words they’ll encounter and asks teams of students to examine and speculate about them. Rather than merely telling students definitions of difficult vocabulary, this process engages students in exploring the possible relationships among the words, sharing current knowledge about known terms, and predicting possible meanings. Students can also be asked to divide the words into new, domain-specific, and known words, or pair words that are closely associated with one another. The teacher might also give students a list of challenging words in the order in which they appear in the text and have students write a predictive paragraph using all the words in sequence. 

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Failure or Mistake?

This week’s article summary from the Washington Post is Why Have So Many Accepted the Idea That kids Need to Fail More.

The article focuses  on the difference between using the word failure versus mistake in the classroom. 

As I read the article I found myself in the camp that prefers the word mistake to failure as kids might interpret failure as a hopeless negative, rather than as an incremental step toward accomplishment and success.

Regardless of which word you prefer to use in your classroom, we all want progress and learning for and from our students. 

When it’s all said and done, it is less about the words we use and more about the classroom climate we create that encourages and supports students to see failure or mistakes as opportunities and inevitable parts of the learning process.

Joe
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Is it important to allow students to fail in class — or not to fail? How much should teachers allow kids to struggle before helping them solve a problem or understand a concept? These may seem like simple questions, but the answers are complex.

A Texas high school teacher wrote in her blog that she has a large quote on the wall above the whiteboard that says, “In this class, failure is not an option. It’s a requirement.” As she blogged,  "As my students started to learn that first day, I have this quote hanging in my classroom, not because I have a desire to see any of my students fail the class, but as a constant reminder of the powerful learning that occurs when people have to (or are given the opportunity to) struggle through challenging material and fail a few times along the way."


A California teacher has a different take, writing that there is a big difference between failing and making mistakes and that it is important for teachers to help students understand the difference. He wrote: "Failure for a student, I would suggest, is the experience of not making progress towards their key hopes and dreams. One of the many jobs we teachers have, then, is to help them see that challenges they might face are just mistakes, which the dictionary defines as 'an error in action, calculation, opinion, or judgment caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, insufficient knowledge, etc.' Mistakes are things that students can fix — with support — in a reasonable amount of time and without an unreasonable amount of effort."

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Measuring Student Social Emotional Growth

This week’s article summary from NPR is To Measure What Tests Can't, Some Schools Turn to Surveys and it is a follow-up to the a summary a few weeks ago about the importance of fostering emotional intelligence in students. 

The article below is how some schools—particularly large public school districts—are efforting to assess student social-emotional development.

While built into the DNA of independent-private schools is a deep commitment to developing students cognitively and social-emotionally, most never tried to formalize exactly what Emotional Intelligence (EI) is or what specific skills and habits are most important for student success and happiness. 

Certainly the recent work and research of Carol Dweck, Paul Tough, and Angela Duckworth on growth mindset, grit, and perseverance have brought social-emotional skills and habits to the forefront of schools, and even independent-private ones are now looking at howe to measure and assess them. 

There are myriad challenges to assessing social-emotional skills and habits, yet clearly as more schools emphasize social-emotional growth, EI will become more and more prevalent in progress reports and other assessments, like personal reflection/self-evaluation.

Joe

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A growing number of schools have begun using surveys to measure important social and emotional goals for schools and students — qualities like grit, growth mindset, and student engagement.

A group of districts in California is getting ready to incorporate this kind of survey data into their accountability systems this spring. 

These districts drew up a School Quality Improvement System that relied 60% on traditional academics, and 40% on "social-emotional and culture-climate" factors.

Researchers are becoming increasingly convinced that students' attitudes about learning, their ability to control themselves, and persevere and their proficiency in working well with others account for more than half the picture of their long-term success.

They created a framework with four attributes:
  • Growth mindset: the belief that working hard and persisting will help you improve at anything, and that abilities are not fixed at birth
  • Self-efficacy: sense of confidence that you are capable of achieving what you set out to do
  • Self-management: productive habits such as organization and delaying gratification.
  • Social awareness: ability to work in a diverse group, to recognize sources of support, and to have empathy for others
Recent research shows that the student surveys, combined with teacher reports, can meaningfully predict outcomes such as GPA, test scores, attendance and suspensions.

Other schools believe these non-academic qualities are important, and they are looking for ways to track their progress.

Friday, April 7, 2017

Letting Boys Be Physically Active Benefits Their Reading Development

This week’s article summary is Boys Who Sit Still Have a Harder Time Learning to Read.

Last week’s article summary focused on things we can do in the classroom to support girls—this week’s focus is on boys.

Most of us believe—as parents and/or as teachers—that boys and girls by and large learn and behave in class differently.

The study in the article below found a positive correlation between boys’ reading progress in first grade and ample opportunities to be physically active in school. Conversely, when boys had a lot of sedentary work in the classroom, they showed less progress in reading.

Sedentary activities for girls, however, did not negatively affect their reading progress.

This is disturbing as so many elementary schools in trying to be more academically rigorous and score well on high-stakes standardized tests demand more and more seat work from their students.

One of our many advantages at Trinity is that our success is not measured by high-stakes testing. Yes, our students take standardized tests, yet that is one of many ways we assess our students and ourselves. Thus, we don’t feel the pressure to teach to the test and to move away from classroom pedagogies we know foster student learning—like cooperative learning and frequent recess.

As a school that strives to develop the whole child, being physical, having recess, and getting to move around in the classroom a lot are all important ways in which we strengthen academic and cognitive development—and, as the article attests, better reading in boys!

Joe

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Anybody who has watched little boys for even five seconds knows that they are exhausting. At school, they tear around the playground, bolt through corridors and ricochet off classroom walls.

According to a new Finnish study, this is all helping them to be better at reading.

The study found that the more time kids in Grade 1 spent sitting and the less time they spent being physically active, the fewer gains they made in reading in the two following years. In first grade, a lot of sedentary time and no running around also had a negative impact on their ability to do math.

Among girls, sitting for a long time without moving much didn’t seem to have any effect on their ability to learn.

The study found that lower levels of moderate to vigorous physical activity, higher levels of sedentary time, and particularly their combination, were related to poorer reading skills in boys.

While the test group was small, the study offers some evidence for what parents have been thinking for a long time: we may not be educating boys the right way.

As pressure increases on schools to show evidence of learning, many education systems have tried to provide a more academically rich environment. But sometimes this has come at the cost of physical education and/or recess.

The connection between exercise and learning is not new, but the Finnish study provides stronger objective evidence that the increased emphasis on sedentary academic activity among the youngest learners may be fruitless if it comes at the cost of physical activity. Boys whose days were more sedentary when they were in first grade (a crucial year for learning to read) made fewer gains in reading in second and third grade. They also did worse at math for that year.


The authors aren’t sure why the difference between boys and girls is so stark. Not as many girls participated in the study, so that may have influenced results. Moreover, it may have less to do with the difference between the male and female brain; for girls, academic achievement may be more influenced by factors such as parental educational support, peer acceptance, teachers’ positive attitude and their own motivation.