Category Archives: Learning

Learning Differences MOOC-Ed

Posted in Learning by

With a preponderance of evidence that learning variability matters and increasing numbers of educators acknowledging the importance of inspiring optimism in the face of learning challenges, we find ourselves faced with the profound opportunity – and responsibility – to design learning that empowers all students for success. What educators, parents, coaches, after school providers, and others who work with growing learners need now are tools and strategies to translate these understandings into realities for the classroom, home, and the many places young people engage in learning.

That’s why we’ve been pleased to contribute to The Friday Institute for Educational Innovation’s Learning Differences MOOC-Ed. This free massive open online course launched last fall, with over 1,000 participants from 40 countries.  Chock-full of resources and interactive activities, the LD MOOC-Ed was an unequivocal hit. So we’re equally pleased to announce the six-week LD MOOC-Ed will once again be open, beginning February 9, 2015.

Learning Differences MOOC-Ed Course Description:

All of us, children and adults alike, have different strengths and weaknesses in our learning.  Historically, however, schools have approached student learning with a one-size-fits-all mentality and have struggled to adapt to changing student needs. That ends now.

In order to help you change the way your students learn, this course will expand your knowledge related to learning differences, provide actionable strategies to impact the learning experience of your students, and cultivate positive habits of mind. At the end of this course, you will have:

  • Deepened your own understanding of learning differences and the related constructs of motivation, executive function, and working memory.
  • Explored relevant strategies for supporting students with learning differences.
  • Applied strategies in your classroom and provided a more personalized learning experience for all of your students.

The Learning Differences MOOC-Ed is designed for educators including teachers, coaches, administrators, or allies who play a role in meeting the needs of all students.

Participant Quotes:

I believe the most valuable aspect of this MOOC-Ed was the chance to hear from others throughout each module, to hear from actual students who had learning differences, and to be able to obtain and add more strategies to my tool box to help the students I interact with.

I enjoyed the ability to print out info and articles to use as a reference and tool. I loved that I could work at my own speed and other people in my building were participating so we could have discussions!

I have been able to apply strategies to accommodate more time for some students, chunks of work and guided notes for those with working memory difficulty, and cues as well as rubrics to help students to self-monitor.

And our personal favorite:

I have started focusing on students’ strengths instead of weakness.

Chart of participant feedback on course objectives.

Learn more about and register for the LD MOOC-Ed here. 

Interactive Brain Map

Posted in Brain Facts, Differentiated Learning, Higher Order Thinking, Learning, Learning about Learning, Metacognition, Student Strengths, Student Weaknesses, Teachers, Whole Child by

Click below to explore OpenColleges’s interactive Brain Map. Filled with facts about the brain as well as strategies for leveraging those brain features to take ownership over learning. Enjoy.

Open Colleges Presents Your Brain Map: 84 Strategies for Accelerated Learning

An interactive infographic by Open Colleges

Misunderstanding My Misunderstanding

Posted in Learning by

We thought you would enjoy this repost from the CLC Network’s Blog by Doug Bouman.

 

Dear Mom and Dad,

I think the reason I struggle in school is I have no motivation, no goal, nothing that tells me to keep going.  Some kids have legitimate reasons for their school struggles – not me.  I am just lazy and it is 100% my responsibility to dig myself out of this academic hole I have created.  If I don’t improve you should pull me out of sports and eliminate all the things that mean a lot to me because I don’t deserve them.  

I love you

-7th grader, March 2010

Photo courtesy of MumblingMommy.com

When students misunderstand in school and are misunderstood by adults, things frequently get tense –inside the student and also between the student and parents and/or teachers. Inside them it can feel confusing, frustrating, or discouraging. Eventually, these feelings often lead to self-prosecution (e.g. I’m so stupid, I just can’t do it, etc.) Between the adults and students tensions may quickly increase as “nothing seems to work” and parents and teachers display ever-increasing frustration and discouragement.

How does this happen? Why? Reasons for student misunderstanding and adult misunderstanding of their misunderstanding are multiple. One possibility to consider is that the adults play out their autobiography into the life of the child. What does that mean? Without realizing it, we adults assume the student is us. So the automatic, default reason we lean on to explain the student’s misunderstanding or struggle in school is often the reason we (adults) might have struggled ourselves. This autobiography mindset often misses the mark, leading to misinterpretation. For example, if a parent had no trouble in school, they may interpret their child’s struggle as laziness. So what might this misunderstanding sound like around the home front? How about – “I know you are smart… I know you can do this,” or “You need to try harder – get motivated.” Yikes.

This process can heighten and tighten leading to a “triple whammy” for the student.

Whammy #1 – The student is struggling in school, knows it, and recognizes that they are disappointing the very people s/he is trying to please.

Whammy #2 – If the adults cannot identify a reason based on their own experience for why their student is struggling, they will often ask the student (i.e. “why can’t you just do this?”). The average child does not know why they are struggling, and the fact that the adults in their life do not have an explanation can be bewildering or increase their shame and anxiety.  In a sense, they have the right to ask, “Why are you asking ME? I’m the twelve year old here!”

Whammy #3 – The default reason everyone else is giving for a students’ misunderstanding or struggles in school is because they “don’t care… aren’t trying… aren’t motivated.” After a while, the student may even believe the misunderstandings of the adults in their life.

So, what to do? A few things to consider:

  1. Parents can remain open to a variety of explanations/interpretations for the student’s struggles. One particularly helpful book is A Mind at a Time  by Mel Levine, M.D.
  2. Parents can help their student by emotionally “shock absorbing” the situation. Amidst their struggle of misunderstanding, the student really needs the adults in their lives to really behave as adults — to  absorb some of the emotion flying around by remaining calm — easy to say, not so easy to do.
  3. Adults can help the student change their thinking or talking from “I can’t understand/do __________” to “I haven’t understood/done ___________yet.”
  4. Seek further comprehensive evaluation from CLC Network as a foundation for accurately understanding their misunderstanding, getting adults and the student on the same page and putting a specific plan in place which includes steps for parents, teachers and the student.

Ultimately, misunderstanding a student’s misunderstanding is understandable. And once we realize this, we can move forward to understanding our students’ struggles, to using that understanding to equip rather than guilt, and to making education meaningful and achievable for our kids.

Doug BoumanDoug Bouman is Director of Evaluation Services at CLC Network, a Nationally Certified School Psychologist and Licensed Masters Social Worker

Using Comic Books to Support Writing

Posted in Affinities, Differentiated Instruction, Differentiated Learning, Learning, Reading, Writing by

Super heroes are all around us. In the movies, on TV, on T-shirts, on lunch boxes, and of course in comic books.  While you may think of the stereotypical comic book character from the Simpsons, these visual narratives can offer young readers a new approach to learning. On this episode of the Mind Matters Show, Dr. Craig Pohlman talks to Dr. Pat O’Conner about how comic books can be used to support writing. (Check out part 1 on comic books and reading instruction here)

The first thing comics offer is a hook. If your young student struggles with getting motivated to write, the popularity of super heroes and drawings might spark their interest. Rather than trying to get through paragraphs or pages of plain text, try shifting the format. Creating a super hero storyboard of panels with narration and dialogue can be more fun and intriguing, while still providing writing practice and expression.

Another way to use comics is as templates. A parent or teacher can scan pages of comics and blank out the prewritten speech bubbles. The exercise would be to have to the student fill in the missing text based on the visual context. For example, what would this character be saying in this panel? Why would they be reacting like this? This scaffolding approach can be a fun different way to get students involved in the writing process.

Comics can offer an alternative approach to writing with visual storytelling potential as well as a fun and educational writing exercise. So why not give it a try?

 This post was originally published on Southeast Psych’s blog. 

Bruce Springsteen on Education

Posted in Affinities, Differentiated Learning, Learning, School Culture, Student Strengths, Student Weaknesses by

This  Bruce Springsteen quote is from an old video interview, which was reported on author David Shenk’s Genius Blog. The image was put together by the folks over at We Are Teachers.

In our books, this just reaffirms that he is, in fact, The Boss.

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Image source: We Are Teachers Pinterest

Memory, Social Cognition, and Predicting the Future

Posted in Brain Facts, Learning, Learning about Learning, Memory, Social Cognition, Social Emotional Learning, Whole Child by

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A recent article in Harvard Magazine reports on the research of psychology professor, Daniel Schater, who is delving into  memory, social cognition and how the mind imagines the future.

From the article:

During the past decade, Schacter says, a revolution has occurred in the field of memory science: researchers have shown that memory is responsible for much more than the simple recall of facts or the sensation of reliving events from the past. “Memory is not just a readout,” he explains. “It is a tool that’s used by the brain to bring past experience to bear when thinking about future situations.”

In fact, Schacter continues, memory and imagination involve virtually identical mental processes; both rely on a specific system known as the “default network,” previously thought to be activated only when recalling the past.

Of course, this makes sense. Why wouldn’t the brain utilize its resource of past experiences to anticipate the future and to imagine possibilities? Schater and colleagues began to wonder if these processes applied to social cognition and how individuals might predict other people’s behaviors.

They developed and implemented an experiment to determine what parts of the brains were activated when participants were tasked with thinking about how a person might behave in a variety of different situations.

Again, from the article:

The researchers concluded that memory and social cognition therefore work in concert when individuals hypothesize about the future behavior of others. The brain regions responsible for forming “personality models” and assigning them identities are intrinsically linked to the memory/imagination systems that simulate the past and future.

While it is too premature to draw any conclusions about possible implications for education and learning environments, it is worth noting that students, who are deeply embedded in dynamic and sometimes quite challenging social situations, are employing a number of cognitive functions throughout their day. When considering the complexity of the mental processes being utilized, it is no wonder that so many students find the kind of schooling that focuses primarily on fact memorization to be mind numbingly boring.

Perhaps this vein of research can lead to a better understanding of empathy and what types of experiences might build up students’ brains with the sorts of memories that help them better predict and imagine the future they want for themselves.

Photo Credit: Flavio~ via Compfight cc

The Myth of Average

Posted in Affinities, Differentiated Instruction, Differentiated Learning, Learning, Learning about Learning, Learning Challenges, Research, School Culture, Strategies for teachers, Teacher Effectiveness, Whole Child by

Todd Rose’s brilliant talk at TEDxSonoma expands on a startlingly simple point:

When you design for the average, you design for no-one. He suggests instead we to need design for the extremes.

For anyone who has worked with students, it is an intuitive enough concept, in theory. Yet in application, it has proven challenging, especially in a climate fixated on norm reference test scores, where average is king (or queen). How do we design and deliver for the wide variability of students’ learning profiles when there is so much pressure to get all students to the same level in all subjects?  The default has become education policies that claim to race to the top, but instead stagger for the middle, effectively limiting the extremes.

As Rose so eloquently demonstrates with a story from military history, in trying to target the average, we invariably isolate everyone.

What makes him an expert in this topic? He was a high school dropout with a 0.9 GPA who is now an author of “Square Peg” and a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

He says,

I’ve been to the very bottom of our educational system. I’ve been to the very top. I’m here to tell you that we are wasting so much talent at every single level. And the thing is, because for every single person like me, there are millions who worked as hard, who had the ability, but who were unable to overcome the drag of a educational environment designed on average. And their talent is forever lost to us.

Watch his talk above for more. We guarantee you will be even more inspired to cultivate that which makes your students unique, wonderful, and valuable to the well being of our communities.

RSA of Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” Talk

Posted in Classroom Culture, Learning, Learning about Learning, School Culture, Student Strengths, Teachers, Whole Child by

3036254720_052d0020ccIn the video below, the clever folks over at RSA Animate give visual engagement to Steven Johnson’s brief talk on Where Good Ideas Come From, an excerpt from his TEDtalk.

One of the things we love about this talk is that it confirms what we intrinsically know to be true — innovation is more about interaction and engagement than sitting and listening.

Why is this important?

When we think about involving and investing all learners in education, we run up against the contrast between the traditional practices that sustain a factory “batch and queue” model of education with the reality of how people actually learn. Out of this contrast is born the dichotomous tension between focusing on efficiency and “teacher effectiveness” (an inherently top-down approach geared toward achievement on standardized tests) with that of focusing on the learners and their strengths/affinities/needs as a starting point (an inherently bottom-up approach focused on the whole child).

That the top-down version is currently the dominant paradigm is easy to see. There is more talk about accountability and outcomes than student engagement or motivation. Yet this video lays out the simple truth: innovation, via creativity, necessitates interaction and connections. If we want the strengths of dyslexia and other learning differences to be harnessed and applied, we need to think differently about how we involve students in learning. What is the role of the teacher? What is the role of the student? What patterns, norms, and habits of mind do we want for our graduates and what kind of learning experiences will help cultivate those?

Such questions will not be quickly answered. So, in the meantime, check out the clever video below.

 Photo Credit: zetson via Compfight cc

Superhuman or Normal Variation?

Posted in Brain Facts, Learning, Learning about Learning by

This fascinating infographic highlights a few seemingly superhuman feats of the mind. While we do not disagree that they are amazing, we can’t help but think, “But, of course. With over 7-billion people on our planet, such variation is expected. Spend any time in a classroom and you will see such brains in development!”

Which leaves us wondering two things:

1. How many more savants (defined as “a learned person, esp. a distinguished scientist”) might we have if we all intentionally cultivated students’ strengths?

2. Where are the profiles of women?!

superhuman

Infographic source: Smarter.org

The Toll of High Stakes Tests on Non-Traditional Learners

Posted in Attention, Exams, Learning, Learning Challenges, School Culture, Student Weaknesses, Testing by

This guest post by Bobbi Snow, co-founder of The Community Public Charter School in Charlottesville, VA, exposes the impact high stakes testing has her school’s neuro-diverse students and the teachers who work with them. It was originally published on Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog. 

Exam

He was already exhausted and had 58 questions to go. On the second problem of the 8th grade math exam he was stuck for almost 30 minutes.  This is the state standardized test given to all 8th graders in Virginia. Jim is a visual learner and needed to draw the answers for each possible option. Pausing a moment Jim reached into his snack bag and announced “Help me out here Pringles.”  Turning to me he commented, “I hear salt helps the brain.” I smiled.

I was drained watching Jim’s agony, as he thought out every problem and bounced from question to question.  But if I was drained, Jim was miserable.  He wanted to do well.  He stayed at it for five hours. The computer doesn’t fit Jim’s style of learning or showing what he knows. He is a hands-on, multitasking young man who likes to verbalize aloud what he thinks and figure out multiple solutions. He is an outside-the-box big thinker.

Melissa had a similar experience taking her SOL test.  Melissa thinks like an artist and has the kinds of skills we will need in this  century.  She asks questions that connect to other questions and has trouble with information that is separated into decompartmentalized chunks.  She just kept drifting off the test into some other world more interesting to Melissa.  She tried to engage me in pondering some of these bigger interesting questions but I am a seasoned proctor and I gave my Buddha look and reminded her I could not have discussions during the testing.  I brought my sewing in to establish a calm environment and stitched away.  In the middle of the test Melissa said in a panic, “What if I fail this?”  My heart felt touched knowing how scared she was at that moment. She returned to the test muttering, “This is a disaster.”

These are two students who do their work, have good analytical skills, and an intense desire to do well in school.  Their families support them to use their minds well. Teachers did adequate review and they were well prepared for the tests. They both felt like terrible failures. So many of their peers felt the same.

And so did I.  I know as a charter school we are being judged by the outside world to do well on high stakes testing.  The mission of our school is to help students who have been unsuccessful in their previous schools become thinkers and creative problem solvers.  Our goal is to prepare young people for the real world and as a public school we also accept the responsibility of preparing students for their testing lives.

But there are so many consequences that come with this acceptance.  One of our first year teachers reviewed the results of the writing tests and felt devastated by a few of her student’s scores. She felt that she had let them down by not preparing them well enough to pass. She sunk into her own feelings of failure as a teacher and considered shoring up the curriculum to be more aligned to the test.  This was because three perfectly wonderful students who are able thinkers and creative beyond what most adults we know could ever contribute to a conversation much less a class were deemed not worthy of scoring the necessary 400 points to pass the essay test. They were close. But no cigar. Was their prompt they were given too off target for their life experience?  Was it their anxiety that day that kept them from a good sequencing of ideas?  What exactly was their issue?

One test, one day of a test, made this gifted teacher second-guess her whole year of teaching.  How will it affect her next year when she has to make decisions about our arts infused project-based activities?  Will she want to reduce the class to worksheets and drill to review concepts and skills?

I believe in accountability and knowing what works for students to be successful. There are better ways than this one-size-fits-all testing to assess and record what students know.

As educators, are we seen as so limited that we cannot be trusted to create our own rigorous assessment tools and be judged by them?  Let us become the agents of our own work and design how to define mastery and be held accountable to our standards.  We will invest ourselves to figure out the mysteries of what a quality education means and can provide.  Until then we are held hostage to a system that is archaic, harmful for many students and teachers and missing an opportunity to involve local stakeholders in addressing the crisis in education.

For now we will just have to hope that Pringles can help.

Photo Credit: albertogp123 via Compfight cc