All Articles tagged high-school.

Teaching Students to Embrace Mistakes

June 13, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

By Hunter Maats and Katie O’Brien, authors of The Straight A Conspiracy
Original Source: Edutopia
Originally posted March 20, 2014

For the last ten years, we’ve worked one-on-one with students from elementary school through graduate school. No matter their age, no matter the material, when you ask what they’re struggling with, students almost universally name a subject: “math,” “English” or, in some instances, “school.” Doubting that all of school is the issue, we then ask to see their last test. After some grumbling, the student digs down, deep into the dark, dank recesses of his or her backpack, and pulls out a balled-up, lunch-stained paper that, once smoothed out, turns out to be their latest exam.

To a teacher, this should be incredibly frustrating. You spend a huge part of your life grading tests, commenting on essays, and providing thoughtful feedback on homework assignments, only to have them wadded up and ignored. (Yes, students look at their tests, but you shouldn’t harbor any illusion that they look at anything but the red letter grade.) Before writing students off for being ungrateful or lazy, you need to understand why what they’re doing makes perfect sense.

The Science Behind Mistakes

Telling students they need to take advantage of the feedback they get isn’t just good advice: it’s established science. In the last few decades, researchers have discovered a lot about how people become experts. The main idea, made popular by everyone from author Malcolm Gladwell to rapper Macklemore, is the 10,000-hour rule. Ten thousand is the number of hours it takes to become an expert in almost any field. While it’s wonderful that people are starting to understand how work leads to expertise, the most important part of that research is not how much practice someone needs to perform, but what kind of practice. This latter category is called deliberate practice and involves isolating what’s not working and mastering the difficult area before moving on.

Picture a classical violinist rehearsing. He or she would not play a new piece start-to-finish, fudging through tricky sections and trying to “be done.” That musician stops in trouble spots, figures them out, and then plays that measure over and over again, and only moves on when it’s perfect. The same principle applies to schoolwork.

Mistakes are the most important thing that happens in any classroom, because they tell you where to focus that deliberate practice.

So why don’t students view their mistakes as a valuable asset? Well, students don’t think about their mistakes rationally — they think about them emotionally. Mistakes make students feel stupid. “Stupid” is just that: a feeling. Specifically, it’s the feeling of shame, and our natural response is to avoid its source. If we say something embarrassing, we hide our face. If we get a bad grade, we hide the test away. Unsurprisingly, that’s the worst move to make if you ever want to get better. Academic success does not come from how smart or motivated students are. It comes from how they feel about their mistakes.

Changing your students’ perspective on mistakes is the greatest gift you can give yourself as a teacher. Imagine having a classroom of students who are engaged and constantly improving…it’s every teacher’s dream. Instead, teachers face too many students who are disengaged and really rather surly. That surliness is years in the making. By the time students walk into your classroom, they’ve likely already internalized their mistakes as evidence that they’re just not smart. Getting a bad grade feels like a personal attack. No wonder they’re giving the deliverer of those grades the stink eye.

A Fresh Take on Mistakes

To help your students rethink mistakes, help them be specific about their errors. Knowing that answer #3 is wrong doesn’t mean much. Knowing that they didn’t understand mitosis gives them a mandate for getting better. Often, when we go through tests with students, the mistakes they perceive as dire are either careless errors or a single concept applied incorrectly on several questions. Either way, the “fix” is usually smaller than how big the problem feels.

You can also help students view their mistakes as helpful. The red pen isn’t the enemy: when students understand how to deal with errors, red means go. One way to encourage that attitude is to take the most common mistakes that the class made on a test or quiz and analyze them together. The more open everyone is about the mistakes they’ve made and how they happened, the less significance any student will place on future errors.

Mistakes happen for concrete reasons. A student didn’t memorize all the requisite facts, didn’t execute the steps of a process, or perhaps just ignored the directions. The red “X” is just a simple assessment of the actions that student took — actions he or she can easily fix next time. Sharing that clarity and causality with your students is the best way to teach deliberate practice, instill motivation and help them develop a more constructive relationship with mistakes. In short, this creates the class you and your students have always wanted.

Why Spelling is (Still) Important

June 10, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Spelling is a basic skill that has become neglected, but here is why spelling is still important, perhaps more than ever!

In recent years, electronic devices have become equipped with powerful spell check systems that automatically correct our spelling mistakes. In addition, we often use Google as our dictionary. Many highly-educated, successful, intelligent people have this trouble. Some say spelling stifles creativity by blocking the writer’s flow of ideas, while others argue that there is a stigma against people who do it poorly. Unfortunately, a bad speller can easily be mistaken for a bad student.

It is not merely stigma though, for young students, spelling may be the key to becoming successful readers and writers.

Spelling Improves Writing

Some students find spelling to be incredibly easy, noticing immediately when something does not look right. For others, words are unpredictable and confusing. The English language can seem daunting and filled with strange rules and inconsistencies. Students who struggle with spelling often feel insecure about writing anything. They may say “I hate writing” or “I have no good ideas.”

Often, these same students are creative thinkers who express themselves well verbally. What holds so many students back is the fear of not being able to spell. For these students an explicit reading program like Preventing Academic Failure (PAF) is vital. Through programs like these, students learn the English language’s rules and patterns and begin to read and spell words with ease.

Spelling Improves Reading

Spelling and reading are inextricably linked: learning how to spell is learning to read. Learning the way spelling works helps with decoding, which improves overall comprehension. The more a student understands these building blocks of language, the more fluent their reading becomes.

A Place for Inventive Spelling

Inventive spelling is the process of making words phonetically, which leads to unconventional examples of writing the same words. While exact instruction is helpful for students in first grade and above, inventive spelling does have its place.

Students in Pre-K or Kindergarten who are just learning how to form letters and words should be taught inventive spelling to learn sound and symbol correspondence.

They should practice pulling sounds in words apart and blending them together. Only as students gain experience writing, should they begin to learn spelling rules. Even as students advance through the upper grades, students should always have a place to journal without worrying about spelling. Even adults misspell words and there is always value in learning to proofread, edit and rewrite.

By Joanna Brown, Reading Specialist

The Incredible Power of Mnemonics

June 3, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

If you took piano lessons, as I did, it was so much easier to remember the lines of the treble clef by intoning the mnemonic: “Every Good Burger Deserves Fries…E, G, B, D, F.” Who can ever forget the colors of the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) after coming in contact with the famous “Roy G. Biv”? And the ditty, “Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue in Fourteen Hundred Ninety-Two” will be forever ingrained in our collective consciousness.

Mnemonic devices have the power to dramatically increase the amount of information that students can remember, including learners with disabilities! The latter take the same tests as their non-disabled peers, and memory skills related to learning may be difficult for children with learning deficits. These students spend the majority of their day in general education classrooms (including content classes such as English, Science and Social Studies). “Chunking” is a simple way of breaking down large pieces of information into smaller organized chunks–mnemonics are a simple way to chunk information, and is a useful tool for all students. Cutting up larger quantities of information into smaller pieces helps our brains remember more information, more easily.

Chunking, and mnemonics can also help children encode (put the information into their memories) and make the data easier to retrieve. As memory-guru Ed Cooke wrote in The Guardian “You can trick your mind into remembering useful but dull facts by weaving the information into vivid mental shorthand.”

Mnemonic devices are very old; some, such as The Method of Loci, date back to the Ancient Greeks. This is how it works: imagine a place that is familiar to you, such as your kitchen. Then go through the list of vocabulary words you need to memorize, and associate each word with an object in that room. For instance, if the word is “cacophonous,” you can create the image of a blaring radio on the kitchen counter. If the word is “loquacious”, you can imagine the teakettle as talkative, and so on.

There is more than one method to use mnemonic devices. The most popularly used memory aid is the Expression or Word Mnemonic. If you are studying for the SAT, it’s simple to recall the seven coordinating conjunctions, once you’ve heard FANBOYS (for, and not, but, or, yet, and so). Rhyme Mnemonics helps put information in the form of a poem such as the “30 days hath September” ditty. Image Mnemonics are constructed in the form of pictures that promote recall.

The sillier and more outlandish the image, the easier it is to remember. If trying to remember the name of a character in a book, imagine a pirate with a woolen leg for “Peggy” or a hairy beast for “Harry.” You’ll always remember how to spell “geography” once you know that “George Edward’s Old Grandma Rode a Pig Home Yesterday” and that “potassium” has “one tea, and two sugars.”

Even though mnemonics are not a replacement for experiential learning or comprehension, they are an important tool to pull out of the box when test time rolls around.

What’s your favorite mnemonic device?

By Deborah H. Friedman, Private Tutor

STEAM Programs for Everyone

May 22, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

$STEAM Programs$ The media is always talking about STEM Programs–Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics–but why doesn’t anyone talk about STEAM Programs–Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics? In today’s world, where digital creativity and creative thought in general are intrinsic aspects of education and the learning process, it’s important to also focus on the Arts part of this acronym. Creativity helps kids think about what they’re learning in new ways, and can have positive effects on their later lives in the workplace and beyond. This helpful slideshow depicts how teachers and librarians can help focus kids and students on honing their creativity in topics that are not traditionally thought of as creative. This slideshow has suggestions for STEAM programs for students from preschool to high school, and highlights the importance of why creativity should be part of every lesson – not just lessons in the humanities.

STEAM in the Public Library: Programs & Services for Children from Amy Koester

Written by: Editorial Team, My Learning Springboard, Inc.

What is the Reggio Emilia Philosophy?

May 16, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

The Reggio Approach derives its name from its place of origin, the town of Reggio Emilia, located in northern Italy. Following World War II, Louis Malaguzzi, a teacher, along with a small group of parents, became interested in building a new school in Reggio Emilia where education would be viewed as a communal activity and sharing of culture would take place through joint exploration between children and adults. Malaguzzi’s approach focused on young children’s development in a setting where they would be encouraged to explore their environment and express themselves through multiple forms (movement, words, arts, dramatic play and music).

In the last several years, what is now known as the Reggio Approach, has become a popular model in the United States, particularly in early childhood education. Traditionally many preschools have employed pre-planned and theme-based curricula where the teachers choose the topics to teach and select activities to accompany them. In this model, the teacher presents only activities deemed age appropriate and plans monthly or weekly themes and lesson plans for an entire year before it even begins. The selection of themes is often based on the assumption that all children will benefit and be interested in the chosen subject. This traditional model lumps children into projects based on age rather than interests, capabilities and learning styles.

In contrast, a cornerstone of the Reggio philosophy is emergent curriculum. Emergent curriculum responds to children’s immediate interests rather than focusing on a narrow or calendar driven topic. As the name suggests, the study of a topic emerges from the interests and ideas of the children. The topics explored are gleaned from children’s discussions as well as interests demonstrated throughout different areas of the classroom. Once the topics of interest are identified, teachers act as co-collaborators, helping the children make decisions about the direction of inquiry and launch into in-depth studies of the concepts, ideas and interests that arise. The resulting investigations have no time limit and can span from several weeks to the whole school year.

The environment serves as a third teacher in the Reggio philosophy. The approach advocates that teachers play close attention to the myriad of ways that space can invite interaction. Small touches such as storing colorful objects in transparent containers can pique children’s curiosity and imagination. The design and use of space in a classroom encourages encounters, communication and relationships. Every corner of every space has an identity and purpose, rich in potential to engage. Spaces are valued and cared for by the children and teachers.

In the classroom, children should have the opportunity to explore and use many materials to discover and to communicate what they know, understand, wonder about, question, feel and imagine. In my classroom, there are an abundant variety of quality materials available to the children, beautifully organized and maintained by the adults and children together. In order to encourage young children to investigate their environments to the fullest, tools are placed carefully within the reach of the child so he or she explore, investigate, question and create. Through their ongoing explorations, children are then able to learn the qualities, possibilities and limitations of each material.