Mindfulness

Yesterday I had a wonderful collaborative meeting after school with our secondary English department.  During that time, we discussed the impacts of technology on how students write, including their planning and execution.  They were in agreement that technology has not been the best influence when it comes to getting students to have an attention to detail in their writing.  This is probably why mindfulness has become such a popular topic in schools.  With that in mind, I'd like to share some resources K-12 related to Mindfulness.

Giulia Forsythe via Flickr

According to UC Berkeley, Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment, through a gentle, nurturing lens.  You can watch the expert Jon Kabat-Zinn discuss it further here.

At the elementary level, we see students get overstimulated and then begin to act out.  At the middle school level, the students are changing physically and emotionally and cannot always tell you what they are feeling.  At the high school level, we have seen students get so stressed and overwhelmed that they shut down.  Mindfulness can assist them in managing their emotions and their stress.  Here are some resources to incorporate it into your daily classroom instruction:

• Mind Yeti - A cute program for elementary with videos and animations
• Calm - shared previously by teachers from Opening Days
• Mindful Schools - perfect for educating yourself more on the topic, including videos and techniques
• PBS Mindfulness Teacher's Guide
• MindUP Resources - an SEL curriculum program that also shares small teacher resources on teaching Mindfulness (from Goldie Hawn's Foundation - who knew?!)
• Still Quiet Place - from Amy Saltzman, practice breathing videos

ISTE highlights

Welcome back!!  The school year is fully under way now and we are all settling back into a routine.  The air is turning crisp and we are redecorating with pumpkins and mums.

Photo by Carrie A. - https://www.flickr.com/photos/27353377@N04/15383799350/

During the summer, Greg, Andrea and I attended the ISTE Conference in Philadelphia, PA.  For our first blog post of the year, I want to highlight a few takeaways that I hope will be useful to you.

LEGENDS OF LEARNING - This website has a free version which will be very useful to science and math teachers.  It is game-based instruction tied to standards.  For science, it uses the Next Generation Science Standards.  At ISTE, we launched cows into the air and measured their distance.

The teacher can customize a playlist of assignments/games for the students according to their need.  More information on the program and how it works can be found here.

E-HALLPASS - Well, you know all about this one, middle and high school teachers.  This system allows us to keep a digital sign out system for students.  For the purpose of keeping tabs on students, it also allows us to limit which students are in the hallway at the same time, place a limit on how many bathroom visits a student can have in a day, and send a pass to a student that needs to see a certain teacher.  In the past, every teacher had a different system and a different amount of consistency.  Now we have one system and we don't have to interrupt your class to figure out where a student might be.

STORY SPEAKER - Google has a lot of lesser-known tools and this is definitely one of them.  With your Google home, you can make a choose your own adventure story.  I do not personally own one of these, but my dad does any my children love to say, "OK GOOGLE PLAY SMOKE ON THE WATER!" and then giggle when I look annoyed.  THAT is why I don't own one.  Anyway, this tool works with a template that your students can edit, and then you can play it back.  This would be very useful for a creative writing class!

LIFE TAGS - Life magazine has used the power of AI to look back on history through its many years of publications.  You can search for a term and see all the photographs with that item in them, from coral reef to hat.  This is a great way to look back on history and could serve as a discussion prompt or resource for research projects.

There are many other subject-specific items to learn about.  I hope if I shared them with you that you have taken a look!  The internet provides us with an endless amount of ideas and resources, but sometimes it can be hard to keep up!

Instructional Strategies

Right now I am reading Understanding by Design Meets Neuroscience by Jay McTighe and Judy Willis.  While it's not a light read, it has a lot of thought-provoking research behind it and ideas and resources and SO MANY ACRONYMS.  Education does not need more acronyms, but these might actually be helpful.  Here's some great takeaways.

Instructional Strategies website - this website has instructional strategies listed by topic and content area.  There's also a big long list, but it's overwhelming.

For The Teachers - this website has instructional strategies categorized by the goals of the task - monitor progress, compare and contrast, adapt content, share opinions.  It also has a great page on Differentiation.

WHERETO - This acronym gets to the heart of a lesson. 
W stands for question words - why, where, what and questions to ask include How will I help students know where we are headed in this lesson?
H stands for hook, or how will you capture the students' attention.  Ask yourself, How can I tap into the brain's natural curiosity to hook learners around this new topic?
E stands for equip, or what learning experiences will equip students to meet performance goals.  Ask yourself, How will I equip students to be able to transfer their learning in performance tasks?
R stands for rethink or revise, such as using formative feedback to garner the mastery and the gaps in their understandings.  Ask yourself, How will I provide helpful feedback to help students improve their products and performances through revision?
E also stands for evaluate.  Ask yourself, How can I encourage students' metacognition by monitoring and self-evaluating their performance?
T stands for tailor, as in how will you personalize the experience for students.  Ask yourself, What connections can we make to what matters to them?
O stands for organize, sequencing the lesson to create maximum efficiency and effectiveness.  Ask yourself, How can I make the lesson flow in a brain-friendly manner?

These are just a few of my takeaways from this book.  There are others, including AMT (acquisition, meaning making, transfer), memory scaffolds, and tips for designing effective rubrics so if you are interested in reading it, please reach out and you can borrow my copy!