, Author at My Learning Springboard

Amy Gross

November 18, 2014

Amy Gross, the founder of Little Hearts CPR, has held American Heart Association teacher certification since 1996 and Child Passenger Safety Technician certification (carseats) since 2005. A New York mom, she is passionate about child safety, and she devotes her professional life to advocating and teaching on the subject. Visit the Testimonials section of Little Hearts CPR for reviews from parents and physicians–including some who are both!

So that she is certain that everyone who attends a Little Hearts CPR class receives consistent, committed, heartfelt, and experienced instruction, Amy Gross teaches each and every session herself.

Little Hearts CPR office is centrally located at 7th Avenue and 33rd St., a quick zip from anywhere. The 1/2/3 trains are in the building. Amy is right across from Penn Station, and the A/C/E/B/D/F/N/Q/R and PATH trains, as well as the now-fast M34 crosstown bus.

Amy Gross also teaches monthly at the Mt. Sinai Brooklyn Heights Pediatric Practice at 300 Cadman Plaza West, which is 2 blocks from Borough Hall.

Bloom’s Taxonomy Saves the Day

November 18, 2014 Brad Hoffman

“Read this chapter for tomorrow, and be prepared to discuss it.”

Students hear sentences like this one over and over in school, but what does it mean to be prepared to discuss a text? Often it means to be ready to answer the teacher’s questions, but how do teachers come up with these questions? Additionally, as students enter the higher grades, they should be generating their own questions to contribute to the discussion, but how can they formulate such questions?

Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Skills offers an answer. First published by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom in 1953 and later revised by some of his former students, Bloom’s Taxonomy organizes learning into a progression of cognitive levels: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. The idea is that students need to start at the lower levels of cognition with a new concept, then progress into higher levels. Teachers can use the action words associated with each level in planning class activities, and they can use the question stems associated with each level in planning discussion, test, and essay questions.

Let’s look at Bloom’s Taxonomy and those question stems through the lens of teaching Shakespeare’s Macbeth, one of my favorite texts. Here’s how I might move through the levels:

1. Remembering: I need to check that students recall their reading. I might ask questions such as what sort of event Macbeth and Banquo are returning from when they meet the witches, or what predictions the witches make.

2. Understanding: I want to make sure students comprehend the text. I might highlight some key passages and ask students to paraphrase what the characters are saying — not an easy feat for modern readers dealing with Elizabethan English.

3. Applying: This level is where the more in-depth discussion questions start. I might ask students to find examples of Lady Macbeth attempting to manipulate her husband in Act I, or I might identify a theme of the play and ask students to find evidence for it.

4. Analyzing: This level has even more potential for discussion. I could ask students to predict the action in the next act based on what has already happened in the play, to make inferences about King Duncan’s character based on the textual evidence, to identify a key theme. (Note that in Applying, I would give students the theme, whereas in Analyzing, I’m asking them to find the theme themselves.)

5. Evaluating: This level also has great potential for discussion, because this is the level of drawing comparisons and setting forth arguments. I might ask students how much responsibility Lady Macbeth bears for the action, what role the witches actually play, or to compare and contrast Macbeth and another character.

6. Creating: This level isn’t used as much in discussion, but it has wonderful potential for demonstrating learning. I could ask students to research and present a report on some aspect of eleventh-century Scotland or Shakespeare’s London, or I could place students in groups, assign each group a key scene from the play, and have them rewrite it for a different setting, rehearse it, and perform it for classmates.

How can students use Bloom’s to improve their reading skills? They can ask themselves the same sorts of questions that a teacher would, using the question stems to write them. Readers not sure if they’re fully comprehending the text can start with Remembering and Understanding questions; readers more confident in the text can concentrate on Applying, Analyzing, and Evaluating question stems. Like any new skill, writing the questions takes practice at first, but it gets easier and easier.

A student who makes a habit of asking herself these questions the night before class won’t just become a stronger reader, she also will become more confident in class discussions because she already will have considered the sorts of questions that might come up. A student who takes the process a step further, bringing her own questions to ask the class, might find herself acting as a sort of class leader — and more importantly, she’ll be ready down the road as discussions in high school and college are increasingly driven by student inquiry.

By Elizabeth Walters, Private Tutor

Curing Essay Writing Ills Instantly

November 13, 2014 Brad Hoffman

It’s 7:00 PM, you just got home from work, you’re trying to juggle serving dinner, and your child asks you to help him write a paper on rocks. Rocks? Who knows anything about rocks? As the parent, your mind is spinning from all the things that need to be taken care of in the house and you do not know where to begin on how to help your child write an essay on rocks. Help!

Writing a paper is no simple task. In fact, writing requires the highest level of cognitive and intellectual achievement. Writing a paper is especially daunting for students with weak organizational skills because it is difficult to distinguish essential information from nonessential information when reading an article or a book. In addition, a child with weak comprehension skills may find it difficult to write a paper because summarizing and paraphrasing texts are key components to include factual information.

Very often it is the case that your child will bring home an essay assignment without having been taught proper writing strategies. You as the parent have to be prepared for these instances, so that you can help him or her even write a paper on rocks, an esoteric topic. The solution to this problem is the Quick Outline. This will help your child to get his or her ideas onto the paper in an organized fashion without having to worry about grammar, punctuation, and syntax right away.

How do you create a Quick Outline? The first thing to discuss with your child is the purpose for writing the essay and who the audience will be. When this is established, your child is ready to brainstorm supporting details for the topic. Obviously if your child is writing a paper on an article, such as rocks, he or she would extract these details from the article (and not just make them up). Remember when brainstorming, it is important to select the most important details to support the paper.

After brainstorming, your child should jot down these details and put them into about three or four different categories. For instance when brainstorming rocks, some categories could be names, appearance, origin, etc. These categories represent the paragraphs in the paper. The reason I use the word “jot” is to indicate not to write complete sentences. Remember you don’t want your child to be overwhelmed by writing the paper right now because you just want him or her to get the ideas onto the paper.

Now your child is ready to write topic sentences for each category of details. It may help to brainstorm a few possible topic sentences for each category before selecting one good one. One tip you can give your child when writing a topic sentence is using an appositive. Appositives are nouns and pronouns placed next to a comma to explain or identify it, which can often make a topic sentence better. The topic sentence should be a complete sentence on the outline. Your child may also find it helpful to first select the topic sentences and then generate the supporting details. Last but not least, ask your child to generate a concluding sentence for the paper based on the topic sentence and supporting details.

Now that your child has the skeleton, or the Quick Outline, for his or her paper, you can send them off to do the assignment independently while you get dinner on the table!

(Information comes from the Teaching Basic Writing Skills Program (by Judith C. Hochman)

By Brittany Cogan, Learning Specialist

Math Needs Reading and Writing

November 12, 2014 Brad Hoffman

$Math Needs Reading and Wriitng$ I clearly remember those high school days as a student in a classroom with at least thirty-five classmates. As an introverted person, I also remember thinking to myself: “If I do not understand something, I will wait to go home and read the textbook; that should be enough.”

To my surprise, reading the textbook was far from enough to clarify most of the questions derived from a math class; perhaps the textbook was too complicated or I did not have the proficiency required as a reader to decipher the math text myself. To make things more complicated, completing a project was usually a difficult task since I was used to short meaningless answers such as “True,” “False,” “A,” or “x=10.” The lack of structure in reading and writing and how it was negatively affecting my performance in mathematics was evident. Why was I not able to understand the book and communicate my findings to my teacher?

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics states: “The development of a student’s power to use mathematics involves learning the signs, symbols and terms of mathematics. This is best accomplished in problem situations in which students have an opportunity to read, write, and discuss ideas in which the use of the language of mathematics becomes natural. As students communicate their ideas, they learn to clarify, refine, and consolidate their thinking” (NCTM, 1989). It is reasonable to infer that whether or not students are proficient in reading, they need to be trained in reading mathematical content in order to build independence in the future and understand the unique reading skills of the discipline when teachers are not around to assist them. Moreover, if we think of a topic, such as algebra, as a unique language that allows one to translate verbal expressions into algebraic expressions and equations to solve real life problems, the reading of mathematical contents should become more natural and meaningful, allowing students to become more comfortable and confident while studying math.

On the other hand, writing offers students and teachers valuable information about the processing and understanding of math concepts and provides an opportunity to organize ideas and improve the communication of findings. Furthermore, the teaching of math as an isolated subject is a thing of the past; nowadays we have the chance to incorporate interdisciplinary lessons in our teaching that can help students in the process of integrating not only reading and writing in mathematics, but also other disciplines, allowing students to make connections between math and other subjects. Generally speaking, it is extremely important for teachers to guide their students, regardless of the discipline being taught, in the process of becoming effective communicators in a very demanding global society where communicating and learning on one’s own are becoming required skills to improve one’s chances of success.

By Jose Parra, Private Tutor

Addicted to Numbers?

October 31, 2014 Brad Hoffman

$physics tutoring$ If I were allowed to instantaneously eradicate one bad habit among physics students, I would choose their addiction to numbers. That is, the propensity of many students to plug numbers into an equation at the first opportunity. I think that this addiction stems from several factors: fear of algebra, the comforting familiarity of arithmetical operations and teachers who didn’t sufficiently emphasize abstract reasoning. Since it prevents students from gaining a deeper understanding of physics, I try hard to help students break this addiction.

It isn’t easy. The allure of numbers is powerful: a two is always a two, and three is greater than two and five times four is twenty—what’s d minus h? Or v squared divided by g? But if v is 5 and g is 10 then…For some students, numbers call like sirens and it takes a great effort to resist their call. “But I got the right answer,” is a common reply when I exhort students to leave the numbers until the end of the problem. As I’ve written elsewhere, solving physics problems isn’t just about getting the right answer. So I continue to confront students who reach for numbers like candies in the hope that the benefits of fewer numbers and more algebra become clear.

What are the benefits of going number-free? As I tell students, there are three immediate ones:

1. Checking your work becomes easier. If you didn’t get the right answer, it’s hard to figure out where you went astray if all you have in front of you are numbers. But with equations it’s much easier to see where you dropped a minus sign or forgot to square a factor.

2. Variations on a theme are no big deal. Say you’ve been asked to find out how fast a car can go around a rough banked circular track without skidding off course. You’ve gone through the calculations, plugging in numbers all the way, and you get an answer. You checked in the back of the book (or online) and it’s right. Now you turn to the second part of the question, which asks you to explain what happens when the angle of banking is changed. With only numbers on the page (or the screen)—oops! But if you have an equation for the speed in terms of the angle and other variables, there is much less work to do.

3. Physical meaning is more readily seen. To derive that the braking distance of a car is proportional to the square of the speed is not just about getting a numerical answer. The relationship between the two quantities describes a physical process—the energy due to the motion of the car (kinetic energy) is converted by braking (through friction) into heat.

And then there is a long-term benefit. If the student and teacher persevere, eventually the addiction is broken. The student starts to see things intuitively and has a feel for what it means to do physics. In the words of the Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, “We have to learn…how to apply the mathematics to the physics in order to understand the world.”

By Neer Asherie, Private Tutor

Amy Gross

Bloom’s Taxonomy Saves the Day

Curing Essay Writing Ills Instantly

Math Needs Reading and Writing

Addicted to Numbers?

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