A little something from the Brain Conference

I'm still trying to process everything that I learned at the Brain Conference. Here is just one reflective sample.

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend "The Learning and The Brain Conference" held in San Francisco. This conference is put on twice a year, bringing together teachers, administrators, and leading neuroscientists from all around the country. This year the conference focused on using brain research to enhance learning, attention, and memory.

One recurring theme that seemed to permeate throughout the conference was the impact of stress on brain function and learning. Many researchers spoke about the physiological responses to an over-activation of the fight or flight response. For some of our students, just the very act of being in school leads to a chronic activation of their stress response. The article "On the minds of middle schoolers" by Erika Daniels serves as yet another validation of the impact of stress on adolescents. In the article, Daniels (2005) points out the many students continually struggle with heavier workloads, societal pressures, family and academic responsibilities, and hormonal changes. In addition, Daniels suggests that teachers "can address the issue of stress by teaching students specific coping skills that they have learned through the years." While teaching coping skills, such as tackling an assignment, organization, and time management, is beneficial, most research would suggest that it is not enough. Students would benefit more from a combination of coping skills training and brain-based teaching.

Teaching students about their brain, specifically the fight and flight response, and the body (physiological response to flight or fight response) and how it works when under stress is empowering. First, students learn that they have the power to control their stress from a physiological perspective. Just by practicing breathing techniques, they can lower their heart rate, loosen their muscles, and empty their mind. By just being conscious of their breath, students can improve their attention and focus. Second, they can learn quick fixes for stress, such as listening to music, reading, relaxing, etc. Third, by identifying fears and threats that trigger stress, along with identifying relaxation techniques, students are better equipped at facing and challenging those fears, as they know how to manage them when they surface.
When I returned from the conference, I went back into the classroom and team-taught two brain-based lessons. One was about long-term memory/low and high plasticity learning and the second was about mindsets. I was truly amazed at how engaged the students were in learning about their mind and how it impacts learning. It was like we were letting them in on secrets. They were enthralled, and in those moments I realized that if we do not let students think and learn about their main thinking/learning organ we are doing them an incredible disservice.

Donate Rice...Rock The Vocabulary

Yesterday I came upon the blog Thriving in School and was really interested in many of their posts. Last night, I was intrigued by their post titled Do Good While Learning. In this post they referenced a website that presents vocabulary and donates rice for every word that is answered correctly. Below is how they described the site:

"FreeRice is a site that lets you do good while getting smarter! How cool is that? For every vocabulary word you get correct, it donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. Here's how it works:

FreeRice automatically adjusts to your level of vocabulary. It starts by giving you words at different levels of difficulty and then, based on how you do, assigns you an approximate starting level. You then determine a more exact level for yourself as you play. When you get a word wrong, you go to an easier level. When you get three words in a row right, you go to a harder level. This one-to-three ratio is best for keeping you at the “outer fringe” of your vocabulary, where learning can take place.

There are 50 levels in all, but it is rare for people to get above level 48.
In addition to boosting vocabulary skills in students with language delays, this site can be a nice break for some of our students with advanced verbal skills. Kids with aspergers and NLD need opportunities to build their strengths, something we forget to add to their day. This would be a great built in break for them!

The website cautions potential players - WARNING: This game may make you smarter. It may improve your speaking, writing, thinking, grades, job performance..."

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Santa, I have been a bad blogger

Yes, it is true my last post was October 3rd. The good news is I am back and ready to resume blogging. Where did I go? Why did I not post? Goodness, I do not know nor does it really matter at this point. But, I do know that I trained and finished the Honolulu Marathon, I completed my second term as a graduate student, and I made progress on some of my fellowship projects. I am glad to be reunited with my much neglected blog.

A couple of days ago, my husband attended a retreat for technology resource teachers. During the retreat, they completed an activity that led to each person creating a list of their top five strengths. One of my husband's strengths was input. I too have this strength; I love to learn and collect new bits of information, but I am challenged when it comes to the output. This blog is to help me with this particular weakness. Ironically, part of my job this year is to help students self-assess, advocate, and find ways to accommodate both their strengths and weakness. So, output here I come; it is time that I address my own weakness.

For two months, I spent hours in and out of classrooms, observing teaching and learning. It was great to sit in a desk and watch the class unfold from a different perspective. This new perspective made me reflect on my own practice. What do I want my students to feel like in my class? What do I value the most about learning? What type of opportunities do I provide for my students to demonstrate their learning? Most of all, what type of learning environment do I create? I found this checklist referenced on my husband's blog in a post titled Checklist Stoke: Creating a Caring Classroom. I like this list, but I can't help but feel its generic quality. Meaning, all of these aspects of teaching and learning look great on paper, but from my experience they look even better when you observe them. I think all teachers can make a list like this, but I am more interested in seeing the list come to life. All in all, I hope that these items extend beyond paper, becoming a reality in practice.

* I provide opportunities for success to each child in the classroom, encouraging growth from wherever they start.
* I assess student ability and adjust instruction to maintain an appropriate level of challenge for each.
* I offer students a variety of ways to demonstrate their knowledge, intelligence, and mastery.
* I attempt to build interpersonal skills, positive social behaviors, character skills, and resistance to failure.
* I attempt to accommodate a variety of interests, motivators, modality strengths, and learning preferences in my directions, instructions, and assignments.
* I attempt to accommodate tactile, kinesthetic, visual, verbal, and auditory learners.
* I make sure kids have ample opportunities to move around and help them learn to maintain an appropriate level of alertness without disturbing others.
* I avoid using humiliation, sarcasm, ridicule, anger, impatience, or manifestations of disappointment in dealing with students.
* I honor students' needs for respect, dignity, purpose, success, acceptance, attention, and motivation.
* I model standards of behavior, language, and tone of voice that I expect from my students.
* I work to eliminate prejudice toward students based on racial or cultural background; physical appearance; sexual orientation; academic, artistic, or athletic competence.
* I strive to stay aware of put-downs or slurs expressed by students or staff, responding immediately.
* I sometimes allow and encourage students to make decisions about their learning (what, where, with whom, how, or how much).
* I sometimes allow students to create, design, or renegotiate assignments to make them personally meaningful.
* I motivate through access to positive outcomes, rather than avoidance or fear of negative outcomes. I emphasize the positive consequences of cooperation.
* I consciously anticipate what students, teachers, and parents will need in various situations in order to prevent problems from occurring.
* I follow through immediately, avoiding warnings and threats.
* I make students and their parents aware of changes in behavior or performance that could affect grades or promotion.
* I utilize parents, administration, and support staff for feedback and support (not for punishing students).
* I attempt to meet students' needs for attention in positive, constructive, and proactive ways.
* I reinforce positive behavior with positive outcomes.
* I communicate with parents, regularly and frequently, about what their children are doing well.
* I respect students' affective needs and am committed to listening and supporting their feelings and problem-solving skills in positive ways.
* I respect confidentiality to the degree that doing so will not put anyone in danger.
* I immediately respond to incidents involving any form of bullying, harassment, or threat to safety.

Instructional Strategy - Stations

Wow, my last post was September 18th. Time flies when your working on different projects simultaneously. Lately, my fellowship work has been focused on observing different classrooms, sneaking a peek at different instructional strategies. Yesterday I observed a geometry class. This was an interesting experience for me as I proved to be a very unsuccessful student in my own high school Geometry class. (See previous post - A New Perspective) Oh, Ms. G still haunts me, but her purpose in my life is starting to make sense now. When I observe a math class, I am probably at the same level of our struggling students. I think this is a good perspective as it helps me to better understand where our struggling mathematicians are coming from. After observing the Geometry class, my first thought was how to better structure the use of class time by incorporating stations catered to different learning styles. Stations are a great differentiated instructional strategy. Carol Ann Tomlinson, the author of differentiated instruction, provides a sample of how a math teacher, Ms, Minor, uses stations. The following is an abridged version of what is in the text (please come see me if you want the full explanation for each station):
Station 1 - The Teaching Station - Students have direct instruction with teacher. Students work at the board with the teacher and record their work by summarizing the kind of computation they worked one.
Station 2 - Proof Place - Students use manipulatives or drawn representations to work with number computations and to explain and defend their work.
Station 3 - Practice Plaza - Students practice with the computation on which they need additional experience.

Other stations ideas based on my own observations:
Million dollar questions - Students are challenged with questions that are brain twisters.
Homework Corner - Very applicable to BCP where homework time is given in class.

More suggestions for station ideas? Or, how stations might apply to other content areas? Please send any ideas my way.

One more thing, I found this site with fun Geom activites.

Understanding difficult text in a Web 2.0 way

Clay Burell's blog Beyond School is a great resource for ideas, insight, and web talk. While perusing his blog today, I came across his Legacy Project. I like this project because it takes students beyond the traditional English assignment of translating difficult text. It allows for team collaboration, online publishing, and sharing of material with others for future benefit. Below are the details.

In one of the great ironies of my life, I'm probably the only HS teacher at KIS not to have a 1:1 classroom, since I teach only AP Lit for seniors - the only grade level not required to buy MacBooks for school this year. But yesterday, I jumped in anyway with a project that incorporates the constructivist and 21st century literacy / web 2.0 ideas of having students create a "legacy product" for their assessment, instead of turning in stale homework to teacher.

Here's the scoop: We're reading Shakespeare's greatest and most difficult tragedy, King Lear. The syntax and diction of the play are over the students' heads, with a couple exceptions, but they have to become proficient at reading 16th century English for the AP Exam. So that's the learning objective: give them practice at accurate comprehension of 16th c. English.

So here's the "Constructivism 2.0" project to work toward that goal:

1. I created a wiki on Wikispaces (free for teachers), entitled "King Lear Street Talk." We'll use this wiki to create a student-written modernized prose translation of Shakespeare's play. (Setting up the wiki took only ten minutes, max. An eight-year-old can do it.)

2. In teams of two, students have to write a translation of one page of the play into today's English. Accuracy counts, and so does the quality of the script they're re-writing. If any team has a disagreement about how to translate any section of their page, they have to cover their butts by explaining, in the wiki page "Discussions" page, what they disagree about. Pedagogically, we all know that to translate archaic language into modern language, we have to comprehend that archaic language. So this is practice and close reading and comprehension on a line-by-line, focused level.

3. We'll keep translating the play until we have the full 5-act play translated. We'll publish that as a free e-Book using Lulu.com, which anybody can download to read.

4. We're also going to record "radio performances" of our modern translation of the play on GarageBand podcasts, and upload them to Librivox.org, a literature podcast site that is a library of readings of copyright-free, public domain world literature. Senior citizens, blind people, and people who just like audio-books use this site to listen to 1,000's of different titles. This can also be used by future classes as an intro to the tragedy - ESL students, younger students, and others can benefit by listening to these podcasts before reading the original version. So the students are becoming teachers of future students with this product.

So this will give students practice in all the AP Lit and Language Arts skills on our Standards and Benchmarks - reading, writing, speaking, listening, critical thinking (which comes when they debate opposing interpretations with their teammate, as well as when they decide how to act out different lines when they record their radio play podcast).

But instead of doing that in the old, stale way - handing in their translations to teacher, and performing a giggly mess in front of the class - they're making a real product that they can share with the world, and - for the excellent performers - mention on their college applications as an example of their best work as part of their "digital portfolio."

The Landmark School

Today, I came across The Landmark School. I find their mission extraordinary. They seem to epitomize what it means to be a school-centered school. How can we do what Landmark is able to do with an Academy enrollment of 1200. Watch the video and let me know what you think.

Factoid Friday

Happy Friday everyone. Here are my two interesting research articles:
Reading Process Is Surprisingly Different Than Previous Thought
Back To School: Cramming Doesn't Work In The Long Term