Debbie Crave once assumed that all of her children would go to college. Then she had kids. This is how USA Today started its article on “What if a college education just isn’t for everyone?” Worth a read.
Archive for the ‘differentiated instruction’ Category
Should we let kids reject college prep?
Just how unique are we?
The bankruptcy earlier this month of DeCode Genetics raises the question, “Just how unique is each human being?” The well-funded ($700 million) company found that the genetic underpinnings of human disease are much more complicated than scientists anticipated. It seems that at minimum thousands of genetic mutations – rather than just a handful – cause what look like the same disease.
As a New York Times headline put it, “A Genetics Company Fails, Its Research Too Complex.”
For longer than any of us has been alive, our society has minimized the differences between people. Mass marketing firms have spent literally trillions of dollars convincing us that our needs could be met by products produced in huge quantities on assembly lines. We lacked the motivation or the knowledge to refute this belief.
But now scientists are peering deeper and deeper into what makes us tick. I suspect that they will discover that each person is unique in far deeper and important ways than most of us yet realize.
Study 1,000 people with “lung cancer” closely enough, and you will likely discover that it is a gross overstatement to say they have the same disease.
Offer 1,000 students an education in which they truly receive differentiated instruction, and you will likely discover they learn far better than students taught with a traditional classroom approach.
The differences between us have been minimized for so long, we don’t even have a way to identify them. Most market research questions only offer a handful of possible answers. Most newspaper articles only have room for a handful of facts. Few teachers have the time or inclination to understand what makes each of their students unique.
But we are unique. The more closely we study how human beings work, the more obvious this will become.
What the iPhone can teach us about teaching (from Mindsteps)
(excerpts) What if we taught like an iphone? Apple doesn’t try to anticipate my needs. Instead, it built a phone that is flexible enough that I can make it fit my needs. In the days of DVR’s that allow you to watch TV when and how you want, and Pandora radio that lets you create your own radio station customized to your tastes and preferences, it is hard for many students to sit and get lessons that are pitched to the nebulous middle… Maybe instead of differentiation, we should focus on building lessons that are flexible enough that each student can find a way to access the curriculum. Maybe instead of trying to adapt our lessons to meet each student’s need, we should create lessons that students can customize themselves. (Read entire article…)
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Touch technology used to accelerate learning (from Fortune/Brainstorm Tech)
(excerpt) Smart Technologies, the makers of the interactive SMART Board whiteboard have also introduced the SMART Table to classrooms. Already in more than 500 schools, SMART Tables have been an incredible success already both for business and for students.
New York’s Verrazano School has used SMART tables in its classrooms since May, and teachers say it’s helping low-performing students with their cognitive skills. “They don’t realize that they are actually learning, because the table has many activities that incorporate fine motor and gross motor skills,” says first grade school teacher Joyce Li. Not exactly a business, but definitely investing in the future, says principal Gregg Korrol, who feels that the SMART table has only helped improve classroom dynamic and encouraged students to participate more in the learning process. (Read entire article…)
How Social Networking Will Transform Learning (Tom Vander Ark)
(excerpt) I’m betting on social learning platforms as a lever for improvement at scale in education. Instead of a classroom as the primary organizing principle, social networks will become the primary building block of learning communities (both formal and informal). Smart recommendation engines will queue personalized content. Tutoring, training, and collaboration tools will be applications that run on social networks. New schools will be formed around these capabilities. Teachers in existing schools will adopt free tools yielding viral, bureaucracy-cutting productivity improvement.
In the coming decade, most middle and high schools will adopt some version of 1:1 technology, online learning will play an increasing role, and learning experiences will be conducted and coordinated on social learning platforms. While adoption won’t be simple and smooth, it will cut through the typical barriers that block other reforms. (Read the complete article…)
Remarks by Jason Levy, Principal of CIS 339 in the Bronx
(excerpt) I presented yesterday at the GooglePlex in Mountain View at the Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age conference. I was on a panel called “New Learning Designs: Scaling Innovation to Reverse the Dropout Crisis.”
My goal was to paint a picture of 339’s turnaround (so far) and the role technology has played. Keep in mind — I only had eight minutes for my remarks!
A theory I’m developing is the the modern Internet is a language. I’ll be writing more about that and further fleshing it out in the coming weeks…but for now here’s a transcript of my remarks. (click to read remarks.)
Learn360 allows learning to go on despite H1N1
(excerpt) Learn360, an interactive media-on-demand service for the K-12 educational market, is enabling educators to maintain continuous learning in spite of a potential widespread outbreak of H1N1 and other flu viruses. This initiative is helping school districts comply with the U.S. Department of Education’s recent mandate to minimize academic disruptions should their schools be faced with the decision to close. With the help of Learn360, teachers can effortlessly communicate class assignments and activities to students and track their progress remotely. … This flu season, Learn360′s online classrooms are keeping students engaged in learning with teacher-created multimedia lesson plans containing videos, speeches, songs, images, encyclopedia articles and activities. Teachers can create assignments and projects, and prepare and deliver quizzes and tests online, which students can access at home or in the classroom. (read full article on Reuters)
Bios Christian Academy offers differentiated instruction
(excerpt) The teachers provide “differentiated instruction” – tailoring goals and expectations to each individual student, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach that teaches students the same concepts at the same pace.
“It’s self-defeating for kids to come into a classroom . . . and see that they’re all expected to do the same thing that day,” said Tim Ihms, the school’s administrator, Bible and history teacher. The advantage to differentiated learning is that a student advances through the course work only after demonstrating he or she understands the current concepts before them. (read full article in The Arizona Republic)
Differentiated instruction example in Illinois school
(excerpt) Madison Elementary in Hinsdale, IL uses at least four diagnostic or standardized tests a year to detect student strengths and weaknesses so it can address them in “differentiated instruction.” A reading specialist works with small groups of struggling kids, and a gifted specialist joins classroom teachers in third, fourth and fifth grades to provide advanced math instruction to higher-scoring kids. Differentiated instruction has become popular statewide in recent years, but at Madison, it’s been a long-time practice — and one started by teachers, McMahon said. (read full article in Chicago Sun-Times…)
Help a student learn a new language
Rosetta Stone can be, in some ways, more personal and helpful than a classroom experience.
Many students will appreciate the pacing of the program. It provides as much time as needed to answer a question, but changes the type of question frequently enough so as not to bore.
The program is designed so that regardless of the language you speak, you can begin learning immediately just by looking at the pictures and learning nouns and verbs. The lessons themselves are mostly fun to use. Although the matching games got a little tedious for me, the speech and listening lessons were fun.
One of the most useful, and novel, uses of Rosetta Stone is the speech recognition technology. With the use of a headset and a downloadable plugin, the program is able to listen to your speech and give feedback on pronunciation. Overall, the technology is very impressive – the site could always tell what I was saying, and tell me how well I was saying it.
In order to further test it, I tried mispronouncing key english words in a sentence. The program almost always successfully highlighted the mispronounced word, and asked me to try it again. It is a joy to use.
A smart idea included in speaking questions is that, even if you do not pronounce the words perfectly, a close answer will be accepted, helping to alleviate frustration, as well as give the speech recognition technology some room to make mistakes.
One of the coolest lessons included in the program comes at the end of units, in the form of what the site calls a “Milestone.” The program walks the user through a story, told by a series of pictures taken from a first-person perspective, with dialogue delivered by people in the story. The characters speak to the user, and the user speaks back with phrases he or she has learned. The program at first lets the user try and figure out what phrase should be used, but it eventually tells the user if he or she is having difficulty.
Rosetta Stone is a very enjoyable way to learn a language, and as a supplement to the class, it can be undoubtedly useful. The program is not an intense study of a language, nor a replacement for a real class or a real teacher, but it is useful for picking up key phrases and manners of speaking in a language. Coupled with the speech recognition tools, Rosetta Stone is a great choice for anyone looking to enjoy learning a language.
Most of this article was written by my son, Jeff Kasanoff, a high school student.