Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they're motivated by curiosity and peer interest.

Web 2.0 as Catalyst for Rethinking Teaching & Learning

Web 2.0 as Catalyst on Prezi

He Wrote the Book on Teaching, Learning, and Research

Wilbert "Bill" McKeachie shares lessons from his 60 years of teaching, research, and learning in a 2009 interview here, http://bit.ly/4sAYbe. He literally "wrote the book", the first one, on research-based teaching and learning in 1951. Teaching Tips has been updated 12 times, the latest one in 2007. (I own the 8th edition from 1986.) McKeachie also founded the first teaching and learning center in the USA in 1960 at the Univ. of Michigan. He was a psychology professor. From the above-cited interview of him at age 88, I've culled a few teaching tips...

Three Tips on Becoming a Better Teacher

1. Genuinely care about your students and their learning. Learn their names. Spend time with them after class, over coffee or tea. Share your passion for learning.
   
2. Talk about how to improve your teaching with colleagues and students. Elicit student evaluations about one month into the course rather than at the end. Discuss student concerns in class and be willing to adjust your teaching.
3. Maintain enthusiasm for teaching by accepting new challenges, teaching new subjects, and staying current with student culture.

Professor McKeachie has inspired a countless number of teachers over his long career and shown us how to improve our teaching. I plan to buy the latest edition of his book asap, which, by the way, is now a collaborative effort covering many new topics.

People inspire people. Who has inpired you to be a better teacher? How so?

Value-Adding Lectures

Lecturers contribute a bare minimum if all they do is repeat what's in the text or the slides. The situation is worse if you have a group of students (as I believe I do) who are independent learners and can absorb all the basic references without much help.

What, then, ought lecturers do to add value? Here are some ideas, by no means exhaustive:

• Give a fresh slant to what's in the textbooks - either give a new perspective or just challenge everything the writer says
  
• Lecture on a related sub-topic (one not in the generic handouts)
  
• Facilitate a discussion or a case-study (thus taking the class away from recall-mode to application-mode)
  
• Get the students to present
  
• Show a video
  
• Facilitate a project which takes them out of the classroom (kinda like a case-study on steroids)
  
• What else?

Adding value nowadays usually involves creating new value. Whatever this is, it's probably not repeating what's already available.

5 Steps to Charismatic & Influential Teaching

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Death by Powerpoint

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Bloom's Digital Taxonomy (v3.0)

Check out the third version.

10 Steps to Better Student Engagement

Tristan de Frondeville shares:

Create an Emotionally Safe Classroom

Students who have been shamed or belittled by the teacher or another student will not effectively engage in challenging tasks. Consider having a rule such as "We do not put others downs, tell others to shut up, or laugh at people." Apply it to yourself as well as your students. This is the foundation of a supportive, collaborative learning environment. To learn and grow, one must take risks, but most people will not take risks in an emotionally unsafe environment.

Create an Intellectually Safe Classroom

Begin every activity with a task that 95 percent of the class can do without your help. Get your students used to the fact that when you say, "Please begin," they should pick up a pencil and start working successfully. This gets everyone on the bus. Then make sure your students know that these initial easy tasks will always be followed by increasingly challenging ones. Create rich and complex tasks so that various students have a chance to excel and take on the role of helping others.

Cultivate Your Engagement Meter

Be acutely aware of when your students are paying strong attention or are deeply engaged in their tasks. Master teachers create an active-learning environment in which students are on task in their thinking and speaking or are collaboratively working close to 100 percent of the time. Such teachers notice and measure not only when students are on task but also the quality of their engagement.

Although it may take years to develop the repertoire of skills and lessons that enable you to permanently create this active-learning environment, you can begin by discerning which activities truly engage your students. The more brutally honest you are with yourself, the faster you will get there.

Create Appropriate Intermediate Steps

The first question I ask educators when I coach them on project learning is how many of their students say, "We can't wait to do another project," versus "Oh, no! Not another project." Teachers tend to get the first response when they scaffold challenging tasks so that all students are successful.

For example, take the typical task of interviewing an adult outside the classroom. Some teachers assign the task on Monday and expect it to be done the following Monday, confident that by including the weekend, they are providing sufficient support. Other teachers realize that finding, cold calling, and interviewing an adult are challenging tasks for most young people, so they create intermediate steps -- such as brainstorming, searching online for phone numbers, crafting high-quality interview questions, and role-playing the interview -- that train all students for success.

Practice Journal or Blog Writing to Communicate with Students

Japanese teachers highly value the last five minutes of class as a time for summarizing, sharing, and reflecting. A nice way to change the pace of your class is to have students write regular reflections on the work they have done. Encourage and focus their writing with a prompt, such as "The Muddiest Point and the Clearest Point: What was most confusing about the work you did today, and what new thing was the most clear?" Use this approach to guide future lessons and activities. Consider writing responses to student journal entries in order to carry on a conversation with students about their work.

Create a Culture of Explanation Instead of a Culture of the Right Answer

You know you have created a rich learning event when all students are engaged in arguing about the best approach to the assignment. When you use questions and problems that allow for multiple strategies to reach a successful outcome, you give students the opportunity to make choices and then compare their approaches. This strategy challenges them to operate at a higher level of thinking than when they can share only the "correct" answer. Avidly collect problems and tasks that have multiple paths to a solution. As a math teacher, I create problems that have a lot of numbers instead of the usual two. For example, I can present this problem:

5 + 13 + 24 - 8 + 47 - 12 + 59 - 31 - 5 + 9 - 46 - 23 + 32 - 60

Then I can say, "There are at least three fundamentally different strategies for doing the following problem. Can you find them all?"

Teach Self-Awareness About Knowledge

All subjects build on prior knowledge and increase in complexity at each successive level of mastery. Effective learning requires that certain skills and processes be available for quick recall. Many students let too much of their knowledge float in a sea of confusion and develop a habit of guessing, sometimes without even knowing that they are guessing.

To help students break this habit, paste the graphic at right next to each question on your assessments. After the students answer a question, have them place an X on the line to represent how sure they are that their answer is correct. This approach encourages them to check their answer and reflect on their confidence level. It is informative when they get it wrong but marked "for sure" or when they do the opposite and mark "confused" yet get the answer right.

Use Questioning Strategies That Make All Students Think and Answer

Pay a visit to many classrooms and you'll see a familiar scene: The teacher asks questions and, always, the same reliable hands raise up. This pattern lends itself to student inattention. Every day, include some questions you require every student to answer. Find a question you know everyone can answer simply, and have the class respond all at once.

You can ask students to put a finger up when they're ready to answer, and once they all do, ask them to whisper the answer at the count of three. They can answer yes, no, or maybe with a thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or thumbs-sideways gesture. That also works for "I agree," "I disagree," or "I'm not sure."

Numerical answers under ten are easy to show with fingers, but don't limit yourself to math questions. For instance, if you're teaching time management, have students let you know what their progress is halfway through the class by putting up one or more fingers to show whether they are one-, two-, or three-quarters done with the assignment, or finished. Do these exercises at least two or three times per class.

Practice Using the Design Process to Increase the Quality of Work

Students in school get used to doing work at a consistent level of quality. Unfortunately, low-performing students get used to doing poor-quality work. To help them break the habit, use a draft-and-revision process.

Many professionals use such a design process to increase the quality of their work. Engineers build prototypes, respond to critical feedback, and refine their design before going into production. Artists make sketches of big works and revise their ideas before creating their final piece. Use the design process to drive your students to produce higher-quality work than they are used to doing when they create only a first effort. Include peer evaluation as part of the feedback they receive.

Market Your Projects

When your students ask, "Why do we need to know this?" you must be ready with the best answer possible. Great projects incorporate authentic tasks that will help students in their lives, jobs, or relationships. Engage students by developing an inventory of big ideas to help you make the connections between your assignments and important life skills, expertise, high-quality work, and craftsmanship. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills provides a good starter list.

Also, search out the powerful processes and ideas experts in your own subject use repeatedly. (In math, for instance, my list includes generalizing and parts and wholes.) Keep a journal of the big ideas you've discovered simply by teaching your subject. By continually referring to these big ideas, you will encourage students to think and act like subject-matter experts and develop skills they will use throughout their lives.

Managing the Classroom

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Hi-Tech/High-Touch Classrooms?!

Timed lifts, rotating platforms, underground staff-rooms - check out these fantastic creations from the SLATT participants at TLC 1, and their ideas on the 'ideal classroom' and a few principles/tactics of classroom management.

What do you think? What would be in your ideal class?

Lesson Planning

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2 Elements of a Great Presenter

Seth Godin says they are:

1. Respect (from the audience)
2. Love (to the audience)

There are no doubt important evolutionary reasons why this is true, but in my experience, every great presenter earns the respect of the audience (through her appearance, reputation, posture, voice, slides, introduction, etc.) and captures the attention of the audience by sending them love.

Love takes many forms. I love you enough to teach you this. I love you enough to help you. I love you enough to look you in the eye. Or, in the case of rock and roll presentations, I love you enough to want to engage in various acts with you, right now, backstage.

Margaret Thatcher was a great presenter, even though she had none of the glib charisma people expect from someone with that title. That's because people (even those that disagreed with her) respected her before she started, and they understood at every moment that her motivation was to motivate and improve the lives of those she was presenting to.

In the famous interrogation scene in Basic Instinct (link not included so no one yells at me), Sharon Stone does a brilliant presentation. She instantly earns (a sort of) respect from the cops and their undivided attention at the same time. She replaces love with sex, and it works.

Tony Robbins is considered an astounding presenter for a similar reason. His stage presence and reputation and energy and sheer size earn him respect, and his generosity and complete connection with the audience is received by them as love. The result is a connection far bigger than the content alone would account for.

If you have love but no respect, you're a lounge singer. Fail.

If you have respect, but no love, you're like one of the rare self-promotional talks at TED. Fail.

Consider this clip from Patton. In 28 seconds, George C. Scott delivers both.

When you create a presentation, think about what your status will be as you begin the presentation. What can you do to prewire, to earn more respect from the start? How can you be introduced? Lit? Miked? What can you wear? If your reputation doesn't precede you, how do you earn it?

Don't apologize at the beginning of the talk. For anything. Don't hide in the dark. Don't hide behind a wall of bullet points.

And then, as the talk (pitch/presentation/interview) begins, don't focus your energy or concern on yourself. It's not about you. It's about them. The presenter who loves his audience the most, wins.

Nick Morgan's Trust Me

Highly recommended by Pamela Slim (of Escape from Cubicle Nation fame). What caught my attention was the fourth bullet point on what the book covers:

• Why you do need to practice to appear spontaneous
• How your brain drives your body language which can make you lose credibility (or gain it) before you even open your mouth
• The specific steps to build great trust and credibility with your audience
• Why the "Tell em what you are going to tell em, tell em, tell em what you told em" presentation structure that has been the standard for years is totally wrong. (I gulped a bit on that one, since I used to teach this)
• How to structure the content of your presentation for maximum impact
• Where to start if you are considering professional speaking as part of your business model or marketing strategy

Download the podcast?

Not Literacy but Literacies

Elona Hartjes counsels us to think of literacy in the plural as a way of helping our students connect their learning with their lives. She quotes Chris Vanellis' work on some important literacies today:

• computer literacy (using software)
• web literacy (surfing the internet)
• digital literacy (cells, email, MSN)
• visual literacy (graphics, text, TV)
• auditory literacy (radio, conversing)
• home literacy (routines, chores)
• community literacy (bus schedules)
• social literacy (manners, etiquette)
• work literacy (procedures, routines)
• curriculum literacy (school subjects)

21st Century Assessment?

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Outcome-Based Education

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Did You Know? (3.0)

Sugata Mitra on How Kids Teach Themselves

Bill Gates on What Makes a Great Teacher

TLC in the News

Apologies for the unreadable text. Go here for the top article and here for the second one. All credit and thanks to Jocelyn Loke for getting these out to press in December last year.