Campaign for Kindness

 This is a challenging year.  We have our professional struggles with how to handle the learning options, the social distancing, the mask breaks, the wiping down of desks, etc.  But then we go home at night and we have personal struggles as well - balancing family needs and others (grad school for me).

That's why I'm choosing to start a campaign for kindness.  Kindness never goes out of style and you can never have too much of it, so I might as well spread it thick like nutella!  Will you join me in my campaign for kindness and be an ambassador?

I was inspired by the pink sticky notes on desks, doors, computers that someone put around after school at the middle school.  I heard and saw the positivity that this created both when people talked to each other or mentioned how it brightened their day on social media.  One small act.

With this in mind, I'm going to let people know what they mean to Warrior Run.  I have "You Matter" cards that need to be spread around.  I have some ready to go - if you want a set to share with others, sign up for a pack here.  When you see a student, teacher, paraprofessional, administrator, parent struggling, slip them a card.  Let them know they matter.  Keep it a secret or do it directly - that's up to you.

For the month of November, I plan to express my gratitude for the myriad of blessings in my life.  I will be writing thank you cards weekly to those that need recognition the most - everyone!  If you would like 4 thank you cards to join me, please sign up for a pack here.

Spread the word by emailing this blog post to another WR employee.  Let's create a campaign of kindness.  

Reflection in learning

Thank you to everyone that sent me your words for 2020. I really enjoyed reading them and hearing your thoughts. I've decided to choose the word "Focus" because I find that I let myself get distracted by competing priorities and I'm working to strike that proper balance between family, work, and my grad classes.

The reason for choosing a word for your year is to reflect. Reflection and metacognition are powerful ways to make learning stick. So this post will explore techniques for incorporating reflection into your classroom.

According to Bransford et al. (2000), "Metacognitive approaches to instruction have been shown to increase the degree to which students will transfer to new situations without the need for explicit prompting."  The strongest learning happens when the new knowledge can be applied in a different situation, as we know from models like Bloom's Taxonomy and Webb's Depth of Knowledge.  

Some of our instructional practices already contain the opportunity for students to reflect on their learning, such as Everyday Math, which prompts teachers to ask students about how secure they feel on particular skills or topics.  If you've ever used an exit ticket, you're using reflection.

Here are some effective ways to incorporate reflection in your instruction:

• White boards with reflection question - How do you feel about ______?  
• I can do it!
• I still need practice
• I need help!
• Exit tickets with a question prompt
• Think-Pair-Share
• Journaling
• Flipgrid
• Sentence stems, such as, "I used to think...but now I think...."
• Interactive notebooks

Add these to your teacher toolkit.  Now here is a reflection question for you:

What does it mean to have usable knowledge?

I'd love to hear your responses!

Resolutions

It's 2020 and I spent some time over the holiday break reflecting on 2019.  There were many things worth celebrating, but I was disappointed to find that I had let the blog slip away to some degree, and I am starting recommitted to writing it more regularly.  With new beginnings comes the opportunity for recreation.  While the blog had focused on edtech integration in my time as a librarian, I would like it to have a wider focus since I have a new role.

With that idea came a post from my friend Lauren, a special educator in New Orleans, LA.  She posted about her word for 2020 and what she would strive for as an educator.  Being a member of a professional organization allows me to feel empowered by like-minded educators, which is why I felt so inspired by her word: catalyst.  She seeks to be the catalyst for positive change in education.  What a goal!

While I would love to steal her word, when I look up the definition of catalyst, it mentions that it "speeds up the rate of change without being changed itself", which just doesn't fit for me.  I recognize that there is no change that I could be asking or leading for others that would not impact me in some way.  So I need to find my own word.

So I will spend some time reflecting over the next week on my word.  I'm going to pour over some websites related to creating goals:

• Word of the Year
• What's your guiding word for 2020?
• One Word 365

What will your word be?  Share it on the padlet below.  You may choose to share your name as well or leave it off.

ASCD Takeaways

I wanted to share a few resources with you this afternoon. I'm trying to make sure I include something for everyone below.

Math and/or Science - Open Middle

What’s Open Middle?

The name “Open Middle” might sound like a strange name for a website about math problems. However, it references a very specific type of problem we try to encourage here. Most of the problems on this site have:
a “closed beginning” meaning that they all start with the same initial problem.
a “closed end” meaning that they all end with the same answer.
an “open middle” meaning that there are multiple ways to approach and ultimately solve the problem.

Open middle problems generally require a higher Depth of Knowledge than most problems that assess procedural and conceptual understanding. They support the Common Core State Standards and provide students with opportunities for discussing their thinking.

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The Hand Model of the Brain -

When we are in learning brain, we use our prefrontal cortex. When we are in survival brain, we are using our amygdala which controls our emotions. This model shows how we "flip our lid" when we go into survival brain.




ELA and Social Studies - StoryCorps
This website collects stories through interviews of people you might meet walking down the street. The interview and the humanity behind the story are the focus. Right now they are having a Veteran's Day theme.

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GRASP model -
This is a framework for designing project-based learning. By using this, you are designing a task template for students to show their understanding of a concept.


There are five parts to the G.R.A.S.P. model:

Goal – The Goal provides the student with the outcome of the learning experience and the contextual purpose of the experience and product creation.
Role – The Role is meant to provide the student with the position or individual persona that they will become to accomplish the goal of the performance task. The majority of roles found within the tasks provide opportunities for students to complete real-world applications of standards-based content.
Audience – The Audience is the individual(s) who are interested in the findings and products that have been created. These people will make a decision based upon the products and presentations created by the individual(s) assuming the role within the performance task.
Situation – The Situation provides the participants with a contextual background for the task. Students will learn about the real-world application for the performance task
Product – The Products within each task are designed using the multiple intelligences. The products provide various opportunities for students to demonstrate understanding. Based upon each individual learner and/or individual class, the educator can make appropriate instructional decisions for product development.

These five parts come together to form an authentic assessment that includes a(n) essential question to share with students.

Digital Assessment Resources

As I spend a lot of time looking at resources for teachers and practices related to assessment, I have uncovered a few quality resources that not everyone may be using.  This post will discuss digital assessment resources which can be incorporated into your class.

Project-Based Assessment Resources -

• PDE SAS Portal
• Assessing in a PBL Unit
• PBLWorks Gold Standard Project Design (formerly Buck Institute for Education)

Continuous Diagnostic / Check-Ins Based on Standards - 

• IXL
• Edulastic
• Formative

Questioning and Discussion Resources - 

• Cult of Pedagogy's Discussion Techniques
• Teacher.org's Discussion Techniques
• NSRF's Protocols

These resources all are either free or have at least enough free access to make them useful.  Check them out and let me know what you think!

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!