You say you want a revolution...
POSTED AT 05:16 PM

rocky

This last week at Thacher was a great experience and I still haven't digested everything I learned. Finding sources for downloading video clips to insert into presentations and discovering net radio were the best things I learned about. Getting to spend time with the Harrison staff members who attended, and coming up with tech ideas to move our school forward was awesome! I'll have to blog about that later.

For now I leave you with the #1 most most awesome thing I learned at Thacher--a 1 minute video destined to start a revolution!!! click here

Habits of Mind - thinking about thinking
POSTED AT 10:12 AM

rocky

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." Aristotle

"These Habits of Mind transcend all subject matters commonly taught in school. They are characteristic of peak performers whether they be in homes, schools, athletic fields, organizations, the military, governments, churches or corporations. They are what make marriages successful, learning continual, workplaces productive and democracies enduring." Educator's website

Our new academic year is in full swing and we are passed the initial learning about "Effort Based Learning" and have plunged into developing our knowledge about strategies that create an atmosphere of effort, based upon metacognition.

To that end, we are currently studying Habits of Mind (HoM). In particular, we're looking at what HoM labels "Input-Processing-Output," which are comparable to Bloom's Taxonomy, and how to move classroom discussions toward higher level thinking by examining and altering the questions we pose in the classroom. Coupled with questioning and discussion, we're digging more deeply into Thinking Maps to further our understanding of which Thinking Map goes with which thinking skill as defined by HoM and Bloom's Taxonomy.

Here's a helpful way to visualize our thinking about HoM and infusing our lessons with high level thinking skills from University of Georgia, College of Education, Habits of Mind. Notice that HoM/Bloom's Taxonomy serve as the top and bottom of the cube--patterns of thinking and reasoning about content that we wish to become well established in our students.

Using our skills in Backward Mapping, our goal then is to examine questions we already use with our students to develop content, alter the questions so that they lead to high level thinking, and use appropriate Thinking Maps to help students internalize the specific thinking process involved (metacognition.)

The Capacity Cube from University of Georgia, College of Education, Learning Framework is an excellent way to approach our study because its focus is that learning is not linear--rather, they are about: "Building relationships and associations and applying fundamental ways of thinking and doing are key to constructing meaningful knowledge."

More from Using the Capacity Cube Model:
"When applied to the implementation of the Learning Framework in school mathematics, the Capacity Cube model can ensure that students and teachers focus on higher-level reasoning, problem solving, and critical thinking - as well as content objectives. Learning activities should not attempt to isolate one cell or one dimension of the Capacity Cube, but should emphasize the relationships and interactions of the dimensions. While a lesson may be designed to emphasize reasoning in geometry using rubber band models, that same lesson will likely include communicating, patterns, measurement and scale, and perhaps, elements of trigonometry. This integrated approach will ensure that students are engaged in activities that are more than rote drill and practice, more than presentation of facts or rules.
• The Habits of Mind of problem solving, communicating, reasoning, and making connections are ways of thinking about problems and real world situations that may be geometric, algebraic, arithmetic, or probabilistic.
• The Vehicles for Understanding and Doing are meaningful ways to approach problems.
• The Mathematical Big Ideas, are the culmination and refinement of mathematical thinking, and are ideas that will help students make sense of and operate in their current and future lives."
--------
Here's another very good resource for approaching science and math content with HoM skills.
Habits of Mind Benchmarks in Science and Math

Three great Open Court Reading sites!
POSTED AT 07:52 AM

rocky

I've been getting a lot of hits from two places so I decided to investigate them. What I found is that they are great OCR resource sites, filled with High Frequency Word lists and printable flash cards, lesson plans for integrated projects, and links that support OCR units. They are:

First Grade OCR Resources
Ceres USD: OCR Resources

Our new district, District 5, has created a website to support OCR implementation. It is District5 Elementary Literacy and it also has say great links.