Teaching Through The Arts

Walk into many high school classrooms a few minutes before class starts and what will you see? A large number of students will be on their cell phones, iPads, etc. and many of those will be playing games. So if they like playing games (and who doesn't?), then shouldn't we be figuring out how to take advantage of this in the learning process? Like making a worksheet into a "playsheet" perhaps. In her article "Beyond the Worksheet: Playsheets, GBL, and Gamification" (I love that term), Educational Technology Specialist Alice Keeler discusses how using electronic devices to play learning games in class has become a hot topic in education.  She defines the following terms as " GBL [Game Based Learning] is when students play games to learn content. Gamification is the application of game based elements to non-game situations." Keller also  goes on to discuss the use of playsheets instead of worksheets; it's a thought-provoking argument that may...

In this age of let's memorize this content or this form of writing so we can do well on the high stakes testing and pretend that we learned something valuable, it becomes more and more important for us to get our students to think and have a voice. Allowing students the opportunity to come up with their own ideas and cultivate a point of view can often get lost in the race to cover content. This activity called "Save the Last Word for Me" from Facing History and Ourselves is a way to facilitate thinking and voice for all of our students. I'm definitely going to use it this fall. Save the Last Word for Me Rationale “Save the Last Word for Me” is a discussion strategy that requires all students to participate as active speakers and listeners. Its clearly defined structure helps shy students share their ideas and ensures that frequent speakers practice being quiet. It is often used as a way to help students debrief a reading or film. Procedure Step one:...

I love learning new terms and putting language to concepts; it helps me to learn it better and also helps me to explain it to others better. Allowing students to move so they can learn and think has been a constant theme in this blog, and the term "embodied cognition," thinking with and through our bodies from the article "The Body Learns"   by Annie Murphy Paul on Slate.com discusses the importance of getting the body involved in the learning process. In a series of experiments carried out more than a decade ago, Arthur Glenberg of Arizona State University " found  that children’s reading comprehension improved when they acted out a written text , using a set of representational toys (a miniature barn and horse, for example, accompanied a story about a farm). Glenberg then  demonstrated  that the same procedure could work on a digital platform: In a 2011 experiment, he showed that having first- and second-grade students manipulate images of toys on a comput...

In our age of showing results through data, the Wiley H. Bates Middle School is doing just that. Check out their results after integrating the arts for just four years. Click on the link for Edutopia to read what they've accomplishes. It's worth the time. Arts integration has been shown by several rigorous studies to increase student engagement and achievement among youth from both low and high socioeconomic backgrounds   (Catterall, Dumais, & Hampden-Thompson, 2012; Upitis & Smithrim, 2003, cited in Upitis 2011; Walker, McFadden, Tabone, & Finkelstein, 2011) . Arts integration was introduced at  Wiley H. Bates Middle School , in Annapolis, Maryland, as part of their  school improvement plan  in 2008 after the district applied for and was awarded a four-year grant under the Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination (AEMDD) Grant Program. Since arts integration was first implemented at Bates, the percentage of students achieving or ...

When I was in 8th grade my history teacher had us learn about economics through, of all things, a comic book, and now almost 40 years later, I can still remember it. So what does that say about learning? It says to me that the material, which I found incredibly boring, was presented to me in a medium that engaged me-hence I truly learned it. Later when I got to high school I found myself bored to death in a chemistry class and distinctly remember having to memorize the periodic table. Why I had to do that, when I could have just looked it up when I needed the information, I'll never know. I did it, but didn't care about the information or understand why we were learning it, so I remembered if for the test and promptly forgot it. Sound familiar? But after looking at the University of Kentucky site The Periodic Table of Comic Books by John P. Selegue and F. James Holler, I wish I could go back and study it this way. Like the economics unit in my Junior High days, I would proba...

Think about how you position yourself when you read a book, use your laptop or peruse through a newspaper or magazine. Chances are sitting in a hard, straight back chair in front of a small desk doesn't rank high on your list. In fact as I write this I'm stretched out on a chaise in our living room with my computer resting on a portable laptop desk. Fact is we all have preferences as to how we'd like to be positioned when doing these tasks, so the question of why do we limit student options in this same area is a natural one to ask. We need to break out of the mindset of what the classic classroom looks like. Schools need to adapt for the betterment of the students; the students shouldn't have to adapt to the physical aspects of the school. The graduate program I went through at Lesley University met for one weekend a month; we would start at 5pm on Friday and go till 10, then go from 8-5 on Saturday and Sunday. Now for much of that time we were up and moving, but dur...

Sir Ken Robinson posted this video on Facebook, and I am so glad he did. It's been my contention all along that the real positive changes in our educational system are going to come from the students up, and these young people are making their voices heard loud and clear. Now it's up to teachers, administrators, government officials and other stakeholders to listen and act. Please go and check out what these students are producing, as they hit it right on the head. From their site "Welcome to edevolution, a video project thought of and created by G/T  middle students in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Thank you for taking time to watch the video and visit this website! For more information about what the Education Evolution is and what it means, take a look at a quick summary of us here or head to the blog page . Don’t know why you’re here or came here by accident? Watch the video anyway!"

I love this idea tweeted by Carol Jago, she writes, "Don't be afraid to bring a poem you don't understand to class. Model your own process for making sense of what's on the page- what's obscure" What a great idea to make sense out of something in front of and with the students in your class. Modelling this process will pay huge dividends with all students but especially those who give up easily saying they don't understand something. Of course these instances should be tempered by the fact that we should make meaning for ourselves based on a close reading of the text and not worry so much about what the author intended when he or she wrote it-it may be a fun exercise but who really knows? Teachers should feel compelled to give up some control in the classroom and admit when they don't know something, while encouraging everyone to figure it out together. This has been a very important practice in my classroom, as it makes it okay to be wrong or not kn...

Check out the West Virginia Department of Education site for some more examples of formative assessments. Some great ideas here. Thanks to teachersharetp for the Twitter link to the site.

Reading Dennis Pierce's excellent article in eCampus News on Harvard professor Eric Mazur's discussion that lecture is an outdated and largely ineffective way for students to learn. It seems like every day we read about or hear someone discuss the inefficiency of lecture as a tool for learning. So the question remains, why do so many educators keep up the practice? One possibility is that many people tend to teach the way they were taught and so the system propagates itself. If that's the case, then we need to break the cycle, and so, once again, we call for a paradigm shift in the way we prepare students to learn. The article goes on to say "educators need to transfer information... but students also need to do something with this information to make it stick—not simply parrot it back during a test, but actually assimilate it and take ownership of it, so they can apply this knowledge in a different context. If students can’t do that, he said, then they haven...

An interesting piece from Good Education on using alternative education models for all students. You can read the entire piece here . Something to really think about. "Research shows that alternative education—small learning communities, individualized, personalized instruction, a low student-teacher ratio, and support for pregnant or parenting students—works to get dropouts back on track. But ironically, notes creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson , current education reform efforts like the federal No Child Left Behind Act are "rooted in standardization" even though we know that a quality education should "be about personalization." Robinson, whose lecture on  how schools kill creativity  is the most watched TEDTalk of all time, was part of a forum on dropout prevention hosted last week by the  HeART Project , a Los Angeles-based arts education nonprofit. If what we now call "alternative education" methods became mainstream, said Robin...

Okay, so I may have gone "connectome crazy" here, but this Ted talk by Dr. Sebastian Seung is incredibly interesting and very accessible even for an English teacher like me. Give it a look-I'm sure you'll enjoy it and learn something important about the brain. Sebastian Seung: I am my connectome | Video on TED.com Here's more on Sebastian Seung, Ph.D on the MIT website .

I always enjoy learning new words, and I came across one this morning connected to one of my latest interests-brain research-and it's called the connectome. Here's an excerpt from the article Brain's Connectome from Branch to Branch appearing on Neuroscience News : "With some 70 billion neurons and hundreds of thousands of kilometres of circuits, the human brain is so complex that, for many years, it seemed impossible to reconstruct the network in detail. Each neuron is linked to about a thousand others by means of finely branched projections called dendrites and axons, and communicates with them using electrical signals. The connections between the cells are critical for brain function, so neuroscientists are keen to understand the structure of these circuits – the connectome – and to reconstruct it in a three-dimensional map." According to connectomes.org a connectome is a "synapse-resolution mapping of connections between all neurons in a...

Matt Damon’s speech at the Save Our Schools rally, July 30, 2011 ‘I think you’re awesome!”  I flew overnight from Vancouver to be with you today. I landed in New York a few hours ago and caught a flight down here because I needed to tell you all in person that I think you’re awesome.  I was raised by a teacher. My mother is a professor of early childhood education. And from the time I went to Kindergarten through my senior year in high school I went to Public Schools. I wouldn’t trade that education and experience for anything.  I had incredible teachers. As I look at my life today, the things I value most about myself— my imagination, my love of acting, my passion for writing, my love of learning, my curiosity— all come from how I was parented and taught.  And none of these qualities that I’ve just mentioned— none of these qualities that I prize so deeply, that have brought me so much joy, that have brought me so much professional success— none of...

We have a Wii system in our house, and we have a great time playing the games, especially together, doing Wii Fit , playing Endless Oceans, Let's Dance II and Zumba to name a few. The thing I love about all of those games is that there is no killing, violence or destruction in any of them-they are all putting out positive messages while helping with personal health and well-being. This seems to be the case with Dr. Deepak Chopra's new game called Leela , "an ancient Sanskrit word meaning 'play,'" according to SanDiego.com . "Leela is described not as a game, but as a groundbreaking experience, combining ancient relaxation and meditation techniques with technology, to bring focus, energy and balance to one's life." I'm not into endorsing products, and this one doesn't come out until November, but I can get behind the idea of increasing relaxation and meditation techniques with students and parents, many of whom are stressed out beyond be...

Dovetailing nicely with my last post about making school fun and making learning have meaning for students, I came across this speech by high school valedictorian Erica Goldson on the wonderful site The Innovative Educator . In less than ten minutes, Erica is able to eloquently point out the fallacies in our educational system and challenge educators to make a paradigm shift. It's worth a look. You can read Erica's entire speech on her blog America via Erica .

I've often asked teachers in our classes "when does school cease to be fun?" Years ago the answer was grades six or seven,  but now it's usually more like second or third. Why is that? Why does school have to be drudgery? Thinking back on my own high school experience in the seventies it was the same-classes were boring and little if any meaning could be put to why we were studying this material.  Today's brain-based research is clear, if students don't understand why they are learning something or if what is being learned has no meaning, then that information will be dumped within seconds and learning will not occur. So it begs the question...why are our schools still doing this to students? Why are they attempting to cram knowledge down students throats with the thought that this will come in handy later on in life or they need this subject to pass a test or get into college when it is known that it doesn't work? Certainly high-stakes testing plays in...

How many of our relationships, not only as teacher and student, would be improved if we were able to listen better? In another wonderful Ted talk, Julian Treasure discusses listening and gives 5 ways we can become better listeners. Worth a look.

Being informed on how the brain learns just makes sense if you are in the education world. The August issue of  Current Directions in Psychological Science gives a different view on "working memory" by neuroscientist Robert H. Logie. Read the entire article at How the brain keeps track of what we're doing  An excerpt: "We have a range of different capacities, each with its own function, and they operate at the same time" when we perform a task or think about something, says Logie. Within this "multiple-component framework," working memory capacity is "the sum of the capacities of all these different functions." This "workspace" in the brain, as Logie calls it, allows us to do something while other functions operate in the background or to apply ourselves to a single task involving more than one function."

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