Term 3 Week 8: Thunks

Everyone is flat out with marking and other school activities so this week's PD bite is short and fun. It is about "thunks".

"A Thunk is a beguilingly simple-looking question about everyday things that stops you in your tracks and helps you start to look at the world in a whole new light." http://www.thunks.co.uk/

Want examples?

• Is there more future or past?
• Is black a colour?
• If I switch the lights off does the wall change colour?
• If you are caught in a thunderstorm will you get wetter if you run to shelter or if you walk?

They are a great way to get students thinking, which is one of the key competencies of the New Zealand Curriculum, and could be used as "Do Nows" or plenaries. Once you've modelled a few thunks, the students will be able to write their own to share with the class.

 

The independent thinking website has lots of ideas about thunks, as well as other cool stuff. They even have their own Youtube channel.

 

It's all about supporting and motivating students to think independently.

Term 3 Week 6: Literacy and revision.

What's on this week and next

• 1st - 30th September - Save our Sight Month
• Thursday 8th September - International Literacy Day -this year's focus is literacy for peace.
• 11th -18th September - Conservation Week - "We Love You New Zealand"
• 11th -18th September - NZ Frog Week

Literacy Resources:
This Canadian website (Literacy Gains) has a section which provides subject-specific literacy examples and resources. For example in the Language/English section there is a unit which teaches students about metacognition and how it is useful before, during and after reading. There are resources for:

• The Arts
• Business Studies
• Career Studies and Cooperative Education
• Classical and International Languages
• Computer Studies
• French
• Geography
• Health and Physical Education
• History
• Language / English
• Library
• Mathematics
• Religious and Family Life Education
• Science and Technology / Science
• Technological Education

General Strategies
Teach Like a Champion - Technique Seven: The Four M's. Teaching objectives need to be Manageable, Measureable, Made first and Most important.

As senior exams are coming up here is another handy revision strategy: Text rendering- This strategy enables students to collaboratively construct meaning, clarify, and expand their thinking about a text or document.

Term 3 Week 5: e-learning and a great revision strategy

What's on this week and next

• 1st -30th September -  Save our Sight Month 
• 8th September - International Literacy Day

Professional Reading - e-Learning 
Use a Web Site to Help Manage Your Classroom - the ideas in this article are easily adapted to the Ultranet.

Video: Teachers and Principals talk about using google docs

e-Learning Strategies

• Classroom Guide: Top Ten Tips for Teaching with New Media
• It's not exactly a strategy but Youtube have introduced Youtube EDU. For a brief summary of what it offers read the edutecher review.

General Strategies
Teach like a champion - Technique 6: Begin with the end. We all know we are required to plan in order to teach.  Successful teachers plan in a way that puts the end result first.

Revision Strategy: Summarisation Pyramid - This strategy helps students look at different kinds of essential elements of the material to be summarized.

Term 3 Week 4: Differentiation

What's on this week and next

20-27 August - Keep NZ beautiful Week

26 August  - Daffodil Day - in support of the Cancer Society

29 August - International Day against Nuclear Tests

Professional Reading/ Listening
Disfluent Fonts - from This Way Up on Saturday 9 July 2011. Connor Diemand-Yauman is the lead author of a study showing that making something harder to read helps you remember more information.







Differentiation Strategy
101 Techniques to help you gauge whether or not your students have mastered the material you have taught.

General Strategy
Teach Like a Champion — Technique Number Five: No Apologies. Teachers with high expectations don't apologize for what they teach. No more "Sorry I have to teach you Shakespeare."

Term 3 Week 3: Thinking

What's on:

Friday 19th August - World Humanitarian Day - This year’s campaign "People Helping People" is about inspiring the spirit of aid work in everyone.
The actionaid website explains what "World Humanitarian Day" celebrates

Professional Reading:

This opinion piece by a teacher in Los Angeles suggests that governments must be prepared to put enough funding into ensuring a positive future for young people for teachers to be able to do their job effectively.
Extraordinary isn't enough: Yes, we need to get rid of bad teachers. But we can't demand that teachers be excellent in conditions that preclude excellence.

Thinking and Problem Solving - Readings and Strategies
Understanding How the Brain Thinks - Former neurologist and teacher Judy Willis presents a 5-part series on how young brains develop neurologically; she also offers some research-based classroom strategies to teach critical thinking and other 21st century skills.
Understanding How the Brain Thinks (Part 1 of 5)
The Brain-Based Benefits of Writing for Math and Science Learning (Part 2 of 5)

I will post the rest of the readings as they become available. She seems to be doing one a month.


General Strategy:
Teach Like a Champion — Technique Number Four: Format Matters. High expectations also means only accepting students answers in complete sentence with good grammar.

Term 3 Week 2: literacy - reading fluency and using non-fiction to build background knowledge

What's on this week?
Tuesday 9th August - International Day of the World's Indigenous People
Friday 12th August - International Youth Day (UNESCO)
Saturday 13th August - Left Handers' Day


Professional Reading: Literacy
Do you have students who cannot read the texts in your subject fluently? This article has some strategies that you can use to help with this. Students (especially in Years 7 to 9) should be given the opportunity to read individually, in groups and to hear the teacher and other students read aloud.

Literacy Strategy
Use Easy Nonfiction to Build Background Knowledge
Help all students — struggling readers and gifted students — to let go of the idea that reading easy books is embarrassing. Where do you go when you're looking for information about an unfamiliar topic? To a 400-page textbook written by experts or to an easy-reading online encyclopedia that summarizes the key concepts? Background knowledge is essential to the comprehension of more difficult text, and reading easy nonfiction that explains the critical concepts is an ideal way to expose all students to the essential background knowledge they need to understand their textbooks.

• We have a number of non-fiction picture books in the library.
• We also have access (through EPIC) to the Encyclopaedia Britannica which has different levels of texts. The easier version of information is often a good starter to use with students so that they get the key ideas of a topic easily before going on to learn more complex ideas.

General Strategies
Teach Like a Champion — Technique Number Three: Stretch It. This technique pushes a teacher to take correct answers and ask students to add depth or nuance to their answers.
This technique includes: (for examples of these strategies go to the link above)

• Ask for how or why.
• Ask for a better word.
• Ask students to integrate a related skill.
• Ask students to apply the same skill in a new setting.

For Teach Like a Champion Techniques One and Two check out the last two PD Bite blog posts.

Term 2 Week 11 - blogging, web tools and "Teach Like a Champion"

Professional Readings

• What students want - information gleaned from student focus groups about what they want from school and their teachers and what they need to do themselves in order to succeed.

e-Learning Readings and Strategies

• Fostering Student Creativity and Responsibility With Blogging - When sixth graders enter middle school, they are masters of some aspects of digital technology and lost when it comes to others. Despite their familiarity with some digital technology, they often lack specific skills needed for interacting with particular digital tools and interfaces. Many of them also lack the perseverance necessary for troubleshooting tech issues. This blog post also has links to other readings and resources about using blogs in education.
• Summer PD: Web Tools Collectives Part 3 -- Collecting, Organizing and Making Sense of Information - Access to the Internet brings an almost unlimited amount of content to our fingertips. Effectively collecting, organizing, and making sense of this information is critical to learning. Ubiquitous access to information provides many opportunities and challenges for "formal" education systems. After all, what good is memorizing the atomic number for Iridium when you can just text Cha Cha? This blog post has lots of great ideas about how to teach and support students as they conduct research online.
• Edutecher newsletter for July 2011 - This "Mega-Newsletter" shares some great new tools and resources, but you can also learn more about all of the new apps they have just released and see some of what went on at the ISTE conference last week.

General Strategies

Teach Like a Champion — Technique Number Two: Right is right. This technique accepts no half answers, but asks for complete and correct answers to questions.