Tag: Rigor

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Talking About Rigor, Relevance and Reflection

I’ve been doing follow-up workshops with teachers who attended my Rigor and Relevance training. Our goal is to discuss their implementation of the learning strategies I shared in our first training session. Everyone agrees that rigor, relevance, and student-centered learning are good in theory, but how do we get past the challenges? – lack of time, students who can’t (or won’t) do independent work, overcrowded curriculum, state tests, etc. I’ve developed this "Quick Guide to Rigor, Relevance and Reflection" to assist teachers in evaluating instruction in their classrooms.  Download Quickguide-rigor-relevance-reflection (267 KB pdf)

Our goal is connect students with their learning. To enable them to answer questions like:

  • What am I learning today?
  • Why am I learning it?
  • How can I use this knowledge and these skills to make a difference in my life?
  • How can I work with teachers and other students to improve my learning?

Throughout their lives our students will need to be adaptable, self-directed learners. They will need to be able to reflect and:

  • Judge if this information and these skills are appropriate to their goals.
  • Appraise the merits of different strategies and problem solving approaches.
  • Evaluate their progress as a learner.
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Teaching Innovation in Routine Schools? Part II

On March 7, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates testified before Congress on changes needed in the nation’s schools and immigration laws. When your foundation gives away more than $3 billion, you earn the right to an opinion. He said, “the U.S. cannot maintain its economic leadership unless our work force consists of people who have the knowledge and skills needed to drive innovation.” For more of Bill Gates thinking on this subject see: How to Keep America Competitive Innovation requires both a strong foundation in content knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge in new ways – usually across a variety of disciplines. Thus it requires using all of Bloom’s skills from knowledge through synthesis and evaluation.

Gates envisions a workplace of the future characterized by innovation and change.  Workers will need to be flexible and able to adapt to new situations – self starters capable of working independently and able to readily change teams in an ever evolving work environment. Innovation requires thinking out of the box with the ability to learn from success as well as failure.

That doesn’t sound like the learning environment created by NCLB. Our schools are aiming too low – we force feed the content required for “adequate progress” as measured by standardized state tests. Too little time is left for student-centered, project-based learning that allows students to work at the upper level of Bloom. Innovation requires much trial and error (Bloom’s evaluation). Learning to self-assess your problem solving approach is not a skill fostered in multiple-choice test-prep environment.

NCLB correctly put the focus on student achievement. Our students will need a strong foundation in core concepts. But schools can’t be filled with routine tasks. They need to be fluid environments focused on helping students take responsibility for thinking and problem solving where there sometimes isn’t a right answer.

PS When Microsoft “borrows” the Mac OS “widget” and adds it to their new Vista OS and calls it a “gadget,” does that qualify as innovation?

For my prior post see “Teaching innovation in routine schools?”

Image credit Flickr/s.alt

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350 Participants + Live Blog + Audience Responses System = Engaging Workshop

Ode07 Click Photo to enlarge. Showing collection of live audience response data.

This week I’m heading to Portland Oregon on behalf of the Oregon Department of Education (ODE). Over 350 educators from around the state are gathering at the Oregon Convention Center for a day-long session that will focus on rigor, relevance, reflection and 21st century literacy. The participants include teacher / administrator teams from middle and high schools from around the state as well as higher education, pre-service teachers and others. I want to offer participants a rigorous and relevant session that engages their thinking and provides them with practical ideas. I’ve tried to design a workshop that uses technology, content and structure to model the evolving nature of collaboration and creativity in the 21st century.

During the morning session I’ll guide the group through a consideration of rigor and relevance with a focus on what it can actually look like in the classroom. I’ll model a selection of practical strategies that they can use to build student skills in defining, summarizing and comparing. Teachers always like to leave with some practical ideas.

Next I’ll turn to 21st century literacy, with a focus on how the information world our students are raised in differs from our experience. We’ll consider how digital technologies are creating new opportunities for research, innovation, and collaboration. I’ll share some exciting opportunities in digital publishing that allow student to design and write for an authentic audience.

In the afternoon I’ll be joined by educators from two Oregon high schools who will share their success in managing education plans, profiles and student portfolios. The session will close with team time devoted to processing and reflection.

I felt it was important to model what we preach so I’m using two technologies to engage audience reflection and participation. All participants will have audience response units provided by TurningTechnologies. I’ll use them in to create a large-scale Socratic seminar that will gather audience opinion and search out area of consensus and disagreement.

Since large group discussion will be rather limited, I’ve also created a workshop blog that features reflective questions tied to the major themes in the workshop. It’s been up a week and already it’s drawing some thoughtful comments and suggestions for our agenda. Both the blog and the audience response system will serve as workshop evaluation tools. We’ll also use them to gather input for ODE and next steps for future conferences. You can visit the workshop blog for a detailed look at the program and presenters. I’ve uploaded my presentation with TurningPoint audience response data. (3.5MB pdf) Here’s the presentations by Rex Putnam High School and Colton School District (363kb pdf)

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Foster Higher Order Thinkers

This week I was in the metro-Detroit area giving a workshop at the St. Clair County Regional Educational Service Agency in Maryville, MI. The one-day session was sponsored by the Successful Practices Network.

We focused on techniques for fostering student skills in higher-order thinking and problem solving.  Participants included high school teachers and administrators.  I used my TurningPoint audience response system and posed questions which probed participant expectations of students and instructional strategies. The system allows me to capture participant thinking and use it foster some lively discussion and reflections. You have to model what you preach, so we worked through some higher-order thinking and problem solving ourselves. Participant feedback on workshop strengths included:

“Practical strategies that can be immediately implemented.”
“The way Peter took us through the response process modeled the struggle our students would go though in class.”
“He challenged our thinking with the data we submitted with the response units.”
“We convinced ourselves that our students / all students can think and perform at higher level.”

Updated handout with audience response data Download pappas-handout-stclair.pdf 1.8 MB pdf.

For more information on TurningPoint contact Mike Venrose at mvenrose@turningtechnologies.com

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Strategies for Rigor and Relevance

I just returned from an engaging one day workshop with over 100 high school teachers and administrators from the Green Bay Wisconsin area (sponsored by CESA 7).
I brought my TurningPoint audience response system to gather feedback and generate discussion on some essential questions:

1. What does rigor and relevance look like in the classroom?
2. To what extent is learning student- or teacher directed?
3. How can I help build literacy and still teach my content?

Here’s some comments from the participant evaluation:

“Well-organized, interactive and well structured. Peter demonstrated  his own method for rigor and relevance while teaching us, so we participated as our students would”
“Changed the way I will instruct my student. And changed my expectation of my students as well.”
“The workshop was effective because you made us reflect on our classroom practice and our expectations of students. Then you supplied us with techniques and strategies to improve instruction.”

Updated handout with audience response data Download pappas-cesa7-handout.pdf 1.8 MB pdf