Synergy: life and learning

Friday I was in Joliet with an enthusiastic group of teachers. Our workshop was entitled, “Boys and Books.” Much of the workshop features data comparing boys’ and girls’ success rates as measured by high school achievement and post high school attendance as well as a good body of current research on gender differences in the human brain. We also talked about we could differentiate instruction to better meet the needs of boys based on the data and research that I shared.

After I returned home, I set myself to work on my grad lesson for Monday’s class. My class is studying qualitative research, and in that bent, we are specifically looking at caring. My assignment was to read four texts and write a reflection…something that I felt really entangled itself with my concern for boys at this tine in our educational history and their point of adolescence as they move towards maturity and responsible citizenship.

Let me share a bit of my reflections with you here:

“Caring implies a continuous search for competence” (Nodding, 1995). The reading of those words echoed in my mind. Only yesterday, I had spoken to a group of teachers about the need for “self-efficacy” among students if they were to move from the roles underachievement to the lists of college applicants anxiously awaiting acceptance letters to the institution of their choice. I agree with Nodding. Teaching concepts of care can both widen and deepen opportunities for content instruction; furthermore, developing concepts of care can provide educators opportunities to connect content to real-world scenarios and provide authentic learning….

As I read and reflected on my Friday workshop, I could not help but consider current brain research and consider again the relationship of fear and discomfort to learning and retention. Our students come to us troubled and unsure, but they come and we must meet them where they are if we are to help them find their way out of circumstances that will lead only down circuitous one-way roads. But teachers, too, are wounded. And because of those wounds, they need caring principals that impart trust in the process of gaining mutual respect for all engaged in the growth and learning of a healthy community….

Alice Walker’s phrase, “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender” speaks to me on this theme. Before today, I did not have those words to bolster my sense of self. Though I have always considered myself a feminist, (I shared that during my Friday workshop) I challenge how feminism has serviced or disserviced our schools. Have we pushed our girls into arenas they would have otherwise chosen to avoid? Have we limited our boys at the expense of creating equal environments which are no longer fair? Are we caring about all of our students’ needs? Are we sensitive to the differences in gender? I would think that to be “womanist” would to be inclusive rather than exclusive, to be full of color and concern for all rather than to be diminished by the absence of color whether that color be real or symbolic….

Bring It On!! Using Technology to Motivate Reluctant Readers

I’ve have been absolutely swamped with work this last month! That is a good thing! More and more educators are inquiring about tools they can use to motivate learners and enhance achievement.  Among other topics, this workshop in Atkinson, Illinois explored ways that teachers can build students’ literacy skills by incorporating graphics into instruction; isn’t that part of the allure that HDTV has over our viewing?

Rather than complain about how visual kids seem to have become, I say, “Embrace it!!” Use visuals to teach thinking skills and then….transfer those very thinking skills to written texts. Think about incorporating a “You Tube” into instruction, perhaps one that reviewed a book or area of study that your curriculum was designed to teach. Couldn’t we teach the skills of prediction, connection, questioning, and inference from a video and then transfer those skills to content text?

On Friday, I have a workshop in Joliet entitled “Boys and Books.” There, I will lead the group in a discussion about the differences between girls’ and boys’ attitudes and achievement levels as shown in standardized testing as well as through  qualitative studies built on interviews among those very populations. When we talk about independent reading, questions concerning assessment arise. How do we asses their reading? How do we know they have read? How do we come to see what they understand?

In the past, this has been done through book reports–a genre that I drudgingly pulled myself through about three times and then threw my hands up in despair. I hated reading book reports; no wonder kids hated writing them. From there, I went to book talks, and though they were more entertaining for all involved and more accurately appraised real comprehension because kids had to answer live questions, they were time consuming and a bit biased. Those who like the stage were more confident and therefore, able to perform at higher levels than the more shy of my students. Of course, I offered options, but book talk was generally preferred by all except the shiest who still chose to write the forumulaic book report.

Okay, where does the technology come in? The Podtalk!

I am sure someone is saying, “Well that’s nothing new! I’ve been doing that for, for, for months!” Try using G-cast, a free web-based service that allows your students to use their telephones and an 800 number to set up their podcast. Once recorded through the phone, the gcast is available online. From there, it can be posted for the world to hear, just like this one…..