Issue 66: Oct 26, 2009 Connections Newsletter

Appreciate Professional Development?

Learning-Focused
Oct 26, 2009

As a classroom teacher there are myriad demands on your time and energy - the list sometimes seems endless. Why then should professional development be viewed as anything other than just one more thing? With all else that must be done is professional development worth the time?

There are many reasons to answer those questions positively. In the first place, professional development allows for additions to your teaching toolbox. New research on exemplary practices allows us to take advantage of years of expertise and experience from others. Teachers value learning and appropriating what others have learned is a hallmark of effective teachers. Secondly, professional development can remind us of ideas and practices that we have used in the past but that have been lain aside or forgotten in the daily rush. Excellent teaching ideas are often sitting in the filing cabinet gathering dust waiting to be rediscovered. Thirdly, professional development opens up opportunities to further your educational horizons. Meeting colleagues and presenters at workshops, classes and conferences expands your network of contacts, opening avenues that may offer unexpected opportunities now and in the future. Next, professional development enables you to fulfill the requirements for keeping your teaching credential up to date. Finally, professional development allows you to find ways to make your teaching more effective which leads to an increase in student achievement and efficacy - the holy grail of teaching.

With the pressure of AYP and high stakes testing looming over most teachers, any advantage is to be exploited. Rather than viewing professional development as a necessary evil, look at it as a chance to help yourself and your students by opening new worlds of opportunity.

Graphic Organizers at Their Best

Carol Brewer
Oct 26, 2009

Do you ever wonder which is the BEST graphic organizer to use with your students? Don't worry, it is a popular question for many teachers. The ultimate of course is when students design the graphic organizer that best fits their needs, but until that happens, we need to supply students with the best tools for note taking.

When choosing the best graphic organizers, consider the use of Text Structures. These Text Structures are how the authors organize or structure the text they write. For example, the author writes to compare and contrast different weather patterns, so the graphic organizer choice would be a compare and contrast matrix. When an author writes the steps in a process, the graphic organizer choice would be a sequence organizer.

The Text Structures are:

• Descriptive
• Sequence
• Compare and contrast
• Cause and effect
• Problem solution
•  

The suggested graphic organizers are:

More information about the Text Structures can be found in the Reading and Writing Assignments books and flipcharts in the Learning-Focused Literacy Collection.

Top 5!

Debbie Cargill
Oct 26, 2009

David Letterman has his Top 10 list every evening, Learning-Focused has a Top 5 list! Actually, this Top 5 is a compilation of research from Marzano (2001) and the US Department of Education (2002) that identified 33 instructional strategies that significantly impact student achievement. The Top 5 strategies are Extending Thinking, Summarizing, Vocabulary in context, Advance Organizers, and Non-Verbal Representations. The goal is that Learning Units will incorporate each of these strategies and that Acquisition Lessons will include Summarizing, Vocabulary in context, Advance Organizers, and Non-Verbal Representations.

Extending Thinking (#1 strategy) is the second level of learning. It is at this level that knowledge, skills, and concepts previously acquired (acquisition level) is taken to a deeper level of understanding. Students are given opportunities to create connections and think on a higher level. The Learning-Focused Model includes eight research-based thinking strategies to be used in designing Extending Thinking lessons and/or activities: abstracting, classifying/categorizing, constructing support, analyzing perspectives, deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, error analysis, and comparing/contrasting. Teachers choose an Extending Thinking strategy based on the content to be extended. Students should be taught the strategies and given multiple opportunities to use them.

At #2 on the Top 5 list is Summarizing. The key to using Summarizing effectively is to recognize that it is a learning strategy, not a teaching strategy. Summarizing can also be a tool for teachers to assess student knowledge and check for understanding throughout the lesson. Distributed throughout the lesson, Summarizing becomes a formative assessment tool which provides teachers with immediate information about student needs and students with immediate feedback. At the end of the lesson, the Summarizing strategy provides students with the opportunity to perform, produce, and/or answer the Essential Question. At #2, Summarizing is one of the easiest strategies to implement immediately.

Rounding out the Top 5 list is Vocabulary in context, Advance Organizers, and Non-Verbal Representations. Embedding vocabulary instruction into the content helps students to gain a greater understanding of the content. Advance Organizers provide students with an organizational structure for new information. Word maps, pictures, or graphic organizers can be Non-Verbal Representations.

Individually, each of the Top 5 strategies has been shown to have a significant impact on student achievement. When CONNECTED and used deliberately and purposefully in learning units and acquisition lessons, they are powerful tools for increasing student learning.

Click here to view resources for implementing the Top 5!