Foundational Beliefs « learntolearn

A Plan for Nurturing…Kids as Executive Learners©

by Fran

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.

Beliefs About Learning Collaborative Learning Community Foundational Beliefs Meta Teachers

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

by Fran

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”

Beliefs About Learning Foundational Beliefs Meta Teachers

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Where Does “GRIT” Come From?

by Fran

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

Beliefs About Learning Foundational Beliefs Frameworks/Research Meta Teachers Theories of Mind

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How Well Do You Know Your Students?

by Fran

School neuroscience unleashes students’ brain power

Districts deploy the science of learning to engage students, close achievement gaps and overcome disabilities By: Matt Zalaznick

Neuroscience-based software has helped educators in Kentucky’s Boone County Schools better pinpoint students’ strengths and weaknesses.

http://www.districtadministration.com/article/neuroscience-builds-students-brain-power

An excerpt:

”Educational neuroscience empowers teachers with new insights into how all students learn and holds promise for enhancing special ed, but myths and exaggerations sprouting up around the burgeoning field could lead to children being labeled, which could limit their abilities, experts say.

Recent neuroscience research has debunked some popular modern education concepts but reinforced others as more is understood about how learning changes the brain physically, says Daniel Ansari, a cognitive neuroscientist at The University of Western Ontario and a director of the International Mind, Brain and Education Society.

“The notion of personalized education is consistent with neuroscience, just not in the way we have carved up individual differences—such as visual learner or right- and left-brain learners,” Ansari says. “We need better measures to differentiate learners.”

Beliefs About Learning Foundational Beliefs Learner Stories (Self-Management} Theories of Mind

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How Do We Tap Into an Individual Child’s Intelligence?

by Fran

http://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-research

Practices Supported by Research….. A short excerpt:

“Having an understanding of different teaching approaches from which we all can learn, as well as a toolbox with a variety of ways to present content to students, is valuable for increasing the accessibility of learning experiences for all students. To develop this toolbox, it is especially important to gather ongoing information about student strengths and challenges, as well as their developing interests and activities they dislike. Providing different contexts for students and engaging a variety of their senses — for example, learning about fractions through musical notes, flower petals, and poetic meter — is supported by research. Specifically:

Providing students with multiple ways to access content improves learning (Hattie, 2011).

Providing students with multiple ways to demonstrate knowledge and skills increases engagement and learning, and provides teachers with more accurate understanding of students’ knowledge and skills (Darling-Hammond, 2010).

Instruction should be informed as much as possible by detailed knowledge about students’ specific strengths, needs, and areas for growth (Tomlinson, 2014).”

Beliefs About Learning Foundational Beliefs Learning Process (Operations)

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Context and Learning to Learn (FB2)

by Fran

Learning Needs a Context by Jackie Gerstein, Ed.D.An excerpt:

“This is a follow up to a post I wrote, How Do We Learn? How Should We Learn? The purpose of these posts is to encourage educators to examine practices they take for granted, implement without deep reflection of their efficacy. This post discusses the instructional practice of asking students to memorize information…..”

The Need for Context

“Learning facts and knowledge about a content area topic is an important prerequisite to understanding that topic and then developing expertise. The key to this understanding is providing a context for the facts. The context becomes the glue to increase the stickiness, the longevity of long term memory of those facts. This is especially true for abstract concepts. These concepts need something concrete with which to attach.”

Beliefs About Learning Classrooms and Context Foundational Beliefs Frameworks/Research Metacognition

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