Since Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe published their signature book, Understanding by Design, the idea of planning “with the end in mind” has become an important part of educational parlance. There are few endeavors where this advice is more important than Project-Based Learning.
Because a project, by definition, has a prescribed outcome, it’s tempting to focus on the material objective rather than the accompanying learning. Regardless of the nature of the project, the important questions are:
Small children learn by asking questions and testing the answers they receive. This tendency forms the roots of critical thinking. Unfortunately, question-generation eventually takes a backseat to receiving and storing information both at home and at school as children mature. In a traditional classroom, questions are the provenance of the teacher. In a project-based learning classroom, however, questions drive the entire learning process.
In my last post, I covered the importance of satisfying students’ curiosity about why they “have to learn” various skills, facts and processes by connecting curriculum to real world applications. Project-Based Learning (PBL) is one important approach that accomplishes this task and far more.
As the fastest growing student population in America’s schools, English Language Learners are critical to America’s future economic and civil prosperity. While the achievement gap between native and non-native English speaking students has narrowed, a social and academic chasm persists. Concept mapping is an effective strategy for educators to use to support language learners and prepare them for success in school and beyond.
Campus Technology reports that a study conducted by the Oregon State University Ecampus Unit found that a majority of students use video captioning and transcripts to support their learning. The study showed that students with a diverse range of abilities can benefit from tools that aid focus, comprehension and retention when viewing videos.
This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.
In 1871, the poet and thinker Walt Whitman wrote:
… the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That [would result in] a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-train'd, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers.
When we picture a reader, we imagine a person leaning over a text, still and silent. However, if we could peek into the reader’s “thought bubble,” we’d see instead someone wrestling with ideas, leaping between past experience and new applications, and dismantling words and phrases. Reading isn’t a passive endeavor.
The Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero defines Visible Thinking as “a flexible and systematic research-based conceptual framework, which aims to integrate the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters.” The Project has distilled this framework into several thinking routines that are simple protocols for exploring ideas and make students thinking visible. Teachers are encouraged to integrate these routines into daily classroom life and use them with their students to extend and deepen their thinking. These easy-to-learn mini-strategies are focused on four "thinking ideals" – understanding, truth, fairness, and creativity.
With our new Classroom edition, it’s easy for educators to get started and use concept mapping in a digital learning environment with their students. Ideaphora Classroom provides all the features of the platform for individual users plus administrative tools for teachers: Google Classroom and Edmodo integration, class roster and workflow management, safety/privacy controls, and settings for content access and other preferences.
This week students at every level from kindergarten to college have returned to school. But, hitting the proverbial books may no longer hold true as teachers and professors increasingly shelve print materials and transition to digital content.
Students must learn how to derive meaningful information from digital content and develop 21st century skills to be prepared for the demands of college and careers in the future. Concept mapping is one method students can use to ensure they are gaining deeper understanding of online material and exercising higher order thinking.
This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.
It’s been a long time since I was a student, yet every year as autumn approaches I become nostalgic for the days when my only job was learning. I’ve been very fortunate in my teachers, but the highlight of my student days was surely the three years I spent at the University of New Hampshire studying under the guidance of Donald Graves and Jane Hansen. I ended up with a lot more than a Ph.D.
In the late 1980’s, literacy studies were undergoing a renaissance, and UNH, home of the Reading and Writing Process Lab, was at its center. Graves and Hansen were pioneers in new pedagogies that emphasized students’ abilities rather than their deficits. They also knew every other literacy guru—Jerry Harste, Ken and Yetta Goodman, Frank Smith—and made sure that we knew them too. One of the most influential for me was Louise Rosenblatt, author of The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work.