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Learn: what…why…how…you and…

A Plan for Nurturing…Kids as Executive Learners©

Updating  of a “Learn to Learn” Blog Post for June 26 2014

….taking this blog in a new Meta direction that will focus on 2 ideas:  (l) Developing a lesson planning format that focusing on helping kids become metacognitive learners (P.O.R.T.A.L.S.);  (2)Developing a framework for helping kids help other kids to learn (Kids as Executive Learners©).  With these 2 ideas as a base, I’ll develop a series of lessons using the P.O.R.T.A.L.S.  lesson planning tool.

I begin here with the first of a two part blog:   Part A. PORTALS Lesson Plan.  This lesson plan format reflects a “diagnostic teaching” approach to teaching/learning: that is, an approach that tries to understand and plan for factors that either facilitate learning or account for and then address breakdowns in learning for individual students.  Part B. Kids as Executive Leaners.©  This will be the introduction to the idea of  ”Kids as Executive Learners.”  With these 2 parts as a base, subsequent blog posts will provide examples of PORTALS planning focusing primarily on language, a literacy, and higher order thinking skills.

PORTALS Lesson Plan: Introducing the Idea of Lesson Planning and Meta Lesson Planning

Purpose (Your goal; the outcome you seek)

Operations (How you will achieve the goal through Processing and Transforming Information and ideas)

Remembering (Attending to and holding information in Working Memory and storing and retrieving it from Long Term Memory)

Team Work (Solving problems and achieving goals with help from others)

Action (Outcomes that Demonstrate and Disseminate your work

Laying a Foundation (All problems are about something—the content—the information and ideas. The facts, concepts, and ideas you will need.

Self-Management (You are in charge! ) What will you do to make this a successful experience?  After the fact:   How did the lesson turn out?  What did you learn about yourself as a learner?

This Lesson Plan format is based on five beliefs.

(1) Students are capable of learning to direct their own learning.

(2) Learning is situated in particular contexts and is most engaging when motivated by authentic goals and outcomes.

(3) Learning is most successful when it addresses both the strengths and challenges of individual learners.

(4) Students learn about something (concept/idea/skill/process) and use a variety of cognitive and affective processes to accomplish that learning.

(5) Building a learning community in the classroom/school benefits all learners.

 

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What Does a “Growth Mindset” Approach to Learning Look Like?

Growth Mindset Cautions

Recognizing and Overcoming False Growth Mindset

January 11, 2016

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/recognizing-overcoming-false-growth-mindset-carol-dweck?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=011316%20enews%20mindset%20gm&utm_content=&utm_term=fea1hed&spMailingID=13462731&spUserID=MjcyNTI3Njg3NDIS1&spJobID=700877895&spReportId=NzAwODc3ODk1S0

A brief excerpt

Identifying a False Growth Mindset

“It all started when my Australian colleague Susan Mackie informed me that she was seeing more and more false growth mindset. This is when educators think and do all sorts of things that they simply call growth mindset. And then I started noticing it, too. Here’s what I saw.

Praising Effort Alone

Telling Students They Can Do Anything

Blaming the Student’s Mindset

It is the educator’s task to create a growth mindset classroom. In the safety of these classrooms, students can begin to leave behind their fixed mindset and try out the idea that they can develop their abilities. We see this happening when teachers give students:

  • Meaningful work
  • Honest and helpful feedback
  • Advice on future learning strategies
  • Opportunities to revise their work and show their learning”
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Where Does “GRIT” Come From?

Girt and Learning

Posted by Bill Ferriter on Wednesday, 01/13/2016

A short “excerpt”

Yesterday, I had the chance to do some brainstorming about Design Thinking with John Spencer — a thinker and a friend that I greatly admire.  During the course of the conversation, I asked John why he thought that Design Thinking should play a role in modern classrooms.  His answer was a huge a-ha moment for me:

“Design thinking builds grit by giving a lot of slack.  We have this idea that perseverance comes form a buckle down and get it done mentality.  Design Thinking says you develop perseverance through tons of iterations and freedom to make mistakes and time to make revisions and improvements.”

Stew in that for a minute, would you?  John’s right:  We DO define grit as the ability to “buckle down and get it done,” don’t we?  

I’m not sure if that definition is a result of our compulsive obsession with bootstraps, our one-time belief that hard work is the Golden Ticket to Heaven, or the fact that we’ve been told time and again that instruction in our schools isn’t all that ‘rigorous’, but defining grit as a willingness to struggle through miserable experiences is a poisonous myth that harms students because it suggests that learning has to be painful in order to be meaningful.”

 http://www.teachingquality.org/content/blogs/bill-ferriter/poisonous-mythology-grittiness

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Meta Teaching in a Learning Organization

School as a  Learning Organization

Teachers working together in a 3 step process to offer one another ideas for making their teaching more effective….in a culture of reflection and improvement.  Very impressive  5 minute video

The Process

  1. Gather evidence (about the student’s work which is publically displayed)…a non- judgmental phase
  2. Interpret student work …what were the students doing and why?
  3. Implications for teaching and assessment!From the Deeper Learning Video Series

https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/reflection-on-student-work-ntn/?utm_source=newsletter2

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