Before I begin I want to announce some exciting news! I just received a job as a part-time Adjunct Faculty Special Education Instructor at a local community college! It’s a great opportunity and I am really excited to help train and teach future Special Education Teachers. I’m excited to see how this new career shapes my… Continue reading Deliberate Practice in the Classroom
Blogging regularly is not easy…. I want to develop consistent posts, but I want them to be research based and meaningful. I’m finding this is difficult to balance with all my other work/life responsibilities- which are all new to me!! This month- I have been really slacking on my researching, writing and blogging. Most… Continue reading Quick Break
After reading the following post by Learning Scientists : The First Day of Class – where they provided a list of resources for enhance engagement and therefore promote learning starting with first impressions in the classroom- I decided to do the same, but focused on classroom management and routines.
In What Helps Students Learn? a thorough analysis was completed to determine factors that influenced student learning the most.1 This analysis developed a 28-category conceptual framework for factors that influenced learning. The study concluded that direct influences (e.g., teacher influence) had a greater impact than indirect (e.g., district policies) on learner outcomes. Various factors impacted student… Continue reading Classroom Management and Building Routines
Active learning is basically engaging our students in lecture, processing time and activities. It’s acknowledging that learning is not a spectator sport and that we need to be creative and continuously check for understanding. For more about the science and research behind it and examples please see my last post. Below I decided to list of… Continue reading More on Engaged Learning
“Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just by sitting in class listening to teachers, memorizing prepackaged assignments, and spitting out answers. They must talk about what they are learning, write about it, relate it to past experiences, apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part… Continue reading Active Learning
The last post focused on the importance of memory development in the classroom and how we design our units are integral to what students remember (repetition is the key). The strategies discussed were spacing learning over time by using delayed learning techniques and assessments for review. Though I want to post about assessments again soon… Continue reading Attention + Memory= Learning
“Delaying of reviewed produces an actual increase in the efficiency of learning” “Students typically remember much more when they have been exposed to information on two occasions rather than one” Designing a cohesive unit plan, in my opinion, is one of the most important aspects of our job as teachers. The development of unit plans and… Continue reading Spacing Learning Over Time
One of the schools I worked at liked to do surprise walk-thru’s that linked our evaluations to Depth of Knowledge (DOK) levels (more on DOK levels in another post). Evaluators wanted to see higher DOK levels, teachers were getting frustrated because not everyday can be a DOK 3/4 day so what do you do when your… Continue reading Organizing Instruction
Mind-craft 