New Opportunities for Life-Long Learning

This is a great piece from the Sunday NY Times about the experience of online learning opportunities, like the Coursera classes that both Stacey and Hans have checked out.  While it doesn't offer any groundbreaking insight, I found it a particularly compelling advertisement for these content providers.  It seems like such offerings could be a tremendous addition to our individual Professional Development plans -- something that I hope to encourage many of our colleagues to develop in a more formal way in the year ahead.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/grading-the-mooc-university.html?_r=0

Influences on Student Learning by John Hattie

Blair brought this site to our attention at the last PDC meeting:

Growth Mindset

Can a Computer Grade Your Essays?

This article (link below) from today's NYT describes a new edX plan to offer essay-grading software on the web for free.  The software is a logical complement to edX's goal of providing free courses online, as it will allow those courses to use essays as evaluation tools.  Moreover, the software should provide students with quicker feedback on their written work.

Of course, critics are concerned about the software's ability to evaluate writing with a formula:
“Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’s statement reads in part.   “Computers cannot ‘read.’ They cannot measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance, convincing argument, meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity, among others.”

An interesting read, and the free software, once available, could be an interesting complement to what we already do in assessing student writing and providing feedback.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/science/new-test-for-computers-grading-essays-at-college-level.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hp

Furthermore, I know others (Hans and Stacey, for starters) have used edX or Coursera for online coursework, and I look forward to giving it a try sometime in the near future.

The Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning

Thanks to Marty Miller for passing along this link to The Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning at St. Andrew's Episcopal School.  The CTTL is run by former Blair faculty member Glenn Whitman, and the website includes a blog as well as links to other resources.

Another great source for professional development.

http://www.thecttl.org/aboutcttl/index.aspx

Signature Strengths

Thanks to Tiffany and a few articles on coaching, lately I've been playing with some of the strategies in Positive Psychology.  Martin Seligman started Positive Psychology several years ago, and its strategies are especially applicable to Blair.  One that I'm looking forward to trying in our remaining weeks is the Signature Strengths Test.  After taking a free questionnaire on Seligman's site, you learn your top five Signature Strengths.  Seligman's advice is to think of a weekly task- one you don't especially enjoy.  Then, find a way to complete that task using a Signature Strength.  By using something you're already good at, you'll be more likely to enter Flow, a state of Flourishing, in which time seems to stand still.  Check it out.  Turns out I'm Creative above all else.

Authentic Happiness Questionnaires

Three Random Links...

There's no real connection between these links, but they are things I've come across in my readings over the past couple of days and I thought they may be of interest:



1)  Freedom:  Internet blocking.  A simple app that blocks all internet activity for a period of time in order to help focus our work offline.  This has been recommended by a huge number of content creators and media professionals.  Perhaps, it could find a role to play in our academic/residential environment as well.

http://macfreedom.com/

2) Zotero:  Pinterest for Researchers.  I've not played with this much yet, but it has been recommended to me by some friends as something that has revolutionized their reading, researching, and writing along with Evernote and DropBox.

http://www.zotero.org/

3)  An Easy Way to Reduce Cheating:  Willingham argues that the context within which we discuss honest really does matter.  Labeling people as cheaters confronts the basic self concept of honesty in a way that doesn't allow them to rationalize cheating-behaviour.  An interesting argument...

http://www.danielwillingham.com/1/post/2012/11/an-easy-trick-to-reduce-cheating.html

Social and Emotional Education in a Community

The selection below is from a blog post by author Sam Chaltain (I've put the link to his blog below).  It inspired me to think about how we as an educational community structure social and emotional education at Blair.  While we regularly talk about this type of education as a strength of the school, there is little conversation about how this education is actually provided, other than through the "process" of Blair life.  Should we be looking at a more curriculum based approach to educating the whole student at Blair?  Are there are methodologies already developed out there in the world that would help us engineer more formal opportunities for social and emotional education in our dorms, our school meetings, our chapels, our dining hall and our classrooms?  How can we maintain a conversation about this issue at Blair?

The good news is that our historically myopic view of schools as knowledge factories is starting to fade away, and public voices like Brooks and Tough are helping to promote a more holistic view of education to a wider audience of Americans. The bad news is that too many public voices are continuing to overlook a body of research and evidence-based practices that schools can rely on right now to transform their learning environments.  Across the entirety of his new book, for example, Tough cites copious research studies and school-based programs – yet not once does he reference the expansive field – social and emotional learning, or SEL – that has, for twenty years, been at the forefront of researching how schools can apply the science of learning in ways that will deepen, not diminish, the art of teaching. (Sam Chaltain)

Links that may prove relevant to the discussion:
Sam Chaltain's full blogpost
The Ruler Approach
Greater Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life
Yale's Health, Emotion, and Behavioral Laboratory
Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning
Responsive Classrooms

Using Blogs with your Class

 

 I recently started using blogs for both my AP U.S. History and Western Civilization classes.  The Western Civilization blog has been a tad slower getting off the ground because of the power outages, but so far, I am quite happy with the results of the AP U.S. History blog and the posts the kids have created.  I task one student for each class to blog about our discussion, the areas we found confusing or that connected to previous discussions, or to write about whatever they feel like on that day.  The kids can post by sending an email which then goes into the 'drafts' section of the blog - I then go in and edit and add 'labels' so that the posts are easily searchable.

     My hope is that over the course of the year the blog will serve as a forum for discussion, a repository for the collective memory of the class, and a helpful site for students to review the ideas and topics we covered during the year.

AP U.S. History Blog:  http://blairacademy-apush.blogspot.com/

Western Civilization Blog:  http://blairacademy-westerncivilization.blogspot.com/

Many-to-One vs. One-to-Many: An Opinionated Guide to Educational Technology — The American Magazine

Another Econtalk podcast (see my previous posting regarding the interview with Paul Tough) led me to this article by Arnold Kling.  In this brief article, Kling offers his assessment of various technologies (tablets) or practices (flipping classrooms) that are being promoted in educational circles.  In particular Mike Eckert and I are going to use on upcoming unit to test out the "Independent Certification" idea he promotes.  Using Mike's syllabus, I will create and grade the assessment of his students.  Many-to-One vs. One-to-Many: An Opinionated Guide to Educational Technology — The American Magazine

Integrating the 16 Habits of Mind into Our Teaching

Some short tips on how to integrate the Habits of Mind into our teaching processes:

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/habits-of-mind-terrell-heick

John Palfrey's Blog

John Palfrey, new Head of School at Phillips Academy and nephew of our own Rita Baragona, maintains a blog that might be interesting to the Blair faculty on a couple of levels.  First, as we move forward in our search for a new Head and plan for the transition, Palfrey's experience could be instructive to us.  Second, he shares the professional development themes and discussions that are going on at Andover this year.  The two most recent posts discuss "connected learning" and Claude Steele's Whistling Vivaldi (which was assigned faculty reading).  http://jpalfrey.andover.edu/

Flipping Further

     

     TED has developed an education specific Beta test that, along with similar experiments on YouTube, may break new ground for those interested in utilizing the 'flipped' classroom or just making the most of the fascinating talks the conference generates. The lessons already online rely on clever animation to communicate material and include standard but well-organized sets of activities (multiple choice, open ended questions, further resources). Not only does the site organize education-friendly TED talks into easily navigable categories, but it allows the teacher or student to alter what is already there, Wikipedia style, in order to create interactive and customized lessons for the videos on the TED-Ed site AND for any video on YouTube. The new wave of the flipped lesson is taking hold, and TED joins the likes of Khan Academy and YouTube to promote the next incarnation of online learning.

     I recently used this TED-Ed talk as a means to introduce our discussion of Eric Hofstadter's 'The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It:  http://ed.ted.com/lessons/jonathan-haidt-on-the-moral-roots-of-liberals-and-conversatives