I know I already posted this week, but since we are at the ACSI teacher convention, I thought I would discuss some of what I learned here. This is really an act of public note taking more than anything, but it could potentially help you as well. Who knows. ACSI has invited us to tweet our thoughts and download their app, so I thought adding a little blogging to the technological mix couldn't hurt. Also, it is helping me pay attention because two days in an uncomfortable chair in a darkened room can be taxing on the attention span. We are also participating in a school scavenger hunt while we participate. One of the challenges was to take a selfie of your scavenger team at the sign in table. Here's my group Bluevengers as well our librarian and English teacher husband wife team. They appear to be psyched about Nexus Live.
Dr. Dan Egeler - A Pilgrimage to Servanthood: Wearing the Mantle of Humility
Told story in which a monkey "rescues" a fish from the water and thought he had done a good thing. What was right for the monkey wasn't right for the fish. Servanthood is as important to leadership as any other quality, and it requires humility. Humility is considered a virtue. (Personal reaction: That's supposed to be true, but I'm not sure it is in our culture. We seem to think pride is a virtue and anything that humbles you is "shaming.")
Characteristics of a Christian Community
- hospitality
- gratitude
- truth telling
- promise keeping
Students need to connect to who the teacher is. We must teach their head, their hands, and their hearts. We do so with our hearts. The heart provides the catalyst for the head and the hands to be effective.
Five Elements for a Pilgrimage to Servanthood
1. Openness - the ability to welcome people into your presence and make them feel safe. Don't form an opinion about an important matter until you have heard all the facts.
2. Acceptance - the ability to communicate value, worth, and esteem to another person. Who a person is now is different from who they will be. The person you may be tempted to ignore or treat badly now may one day be a person you would be tempted to worship. People are not mortals; they are eternal. There are no neutral contacts. We are either nudging people toward eternal horror or eternal splendor.
3. Trust - the ability to build confidence in a relationship. Both parties must believe that the other will not intentionally hurt them and that the other will act in their best interest.
4. Learning - the ability to glean relevant information about, from, and with other people. This does not come naturally to most people. It requires trust and humility. (Personal reflection: You must learn from those who you want to teach.) Those you think you have nothing to learn from, you may learn everything from if you have humility
5. Understanding - the ability to see through others eyes. It requires the other four because there must be openness, acceptance, trust for people to open up to us. Only when we learn from them will we have the ability to see through their eyes.
Cynthia Tobias - Motivating Students to Take Charge of Their Own Success
This is one of my favorites of the day. Book: The Way They Learn
"My first year of teaching, I was so excited that all my students would want to learn and think like me. After all, I was a living example of how the way I think works."
I can help students figure out for themselves how they work, how they think, and how to be successful.
How to get the most of what you are learning:
1. Know Your Strengths - Once you know them, you can make a plan for how to use them.
2. Figure Out What You Need to Succeed - Come up with a plan.
3. Prove That it Works - If you try your plan and it works, keep doing it. If it doesn't work, don't do it again.
How Do You concentrate? If you are physically uncomfortable, it is impossible to pay attention. Whoever makes school furniture needs to know this. The brain can only absorb what the seat can endure. Sometimes it is as easy as changing the temperature of your classroom. It's not always neurological. Try some simple things just to make kids more comfortable.
"There are two kinds of people - morning people and those would like to shoot morning people."
How Do You Remember?
Auditory kids remember what they hear, but not necessarily what they hear from others but themselves. Auditory kids need time to talk. They will talk about what they are learning, but it will be mixed in with other things. It doesn't count if you don't say it even if it has been on the board all week.
Visual learners look for minor flaws because they are easily distracted by visual cues. Visual learners are more literal than most. They will be focused by the stain on your tie or where you got your shoes. They have a picture in their mind of everything. Pause to give them time to picture your instructions.
Kinesthetic learners are born to move. You need to allow them opportunities to move. Put in a swivel chair or something they can bounce their feet on. If you get them to sit still they will not be paying attention. Adults have learned more subtle ways to move. It not practical to expect someone to be still (unless they are in an MRI).
If you can do three things in every class, you will increase exponentially their ability to remember.
1. Give them something to talk about.
2. Give them something to visualize in their minds.
3. Give them something to do.
How Do You Process Information?
Analytical thinkers will get their work the second they get back if they didn't call from their sick bed. They pay attention to every detail but miss the big picture.
Global thinkers will ask if you missed them the second they get back. They pay attention to big picture, plot, and story. They learn intuitively and are very creative, but they think they are dumb because school are not really designed for them.
School doesn't always bring out the best in us, but you are not at an ordinary school if you are a Christian educator. You know how important it is to reach out to help every student learn. Communicating ways they can be successful and confident is not as hard as it sounds. Nobody likes to be analyzed, but everyone likes to be understood. You do not have any students in your classroom by accident; God put them their for a purpose.
Jon Bergmann - Taking the Flipped Classroom to the Next Level
Book: Flipped Learning
We have way too much "sit and give" and not enough active, engaged learning. Flipping your classroom changes what happens IN the class. Instead of sending them home to do the difficult cognitive tasks, they can do the lower parts of Bloom's taxonomy at home and do the harder parts while we are there to support them. This puts the point of need with the right resource.
Turning the Bloom's pyramid upside down is what you do to get a pHD. If we make the pyramid a diamond, we will spend the majority of our class time on analysis and application. The students will think the homework is easier, and then they will be excited that they don't have to listen to the teacher at school when they can interact with their friends.
Next steps:
1. Rethink Classtime - Flipping is NOT about the videos. It is about what you do in class. There is a lot more time for guided practice, walking around checking in on your students, peer tutoring, lab time, small group work, debates, small projects. It gives you class time back. Trying to have them do something active every day is a mistake. Use the class time for the best use, not just the fun use. Don't feel guilty about using it the best way.
2. Interactive Notebooks - Questions to answer about the video to keep them engaged while they are watching. Include a link to the video, so they can use them at the same time. Using a tracking tool (like EduCannon) will hold them accountable and give the teacher formative data.
3. Flipping Leads to Mastery - It makes for a bit of chaos because everyone is on different pages at different times, but they are all progressing at their own rate.
4. Flip Your Instructions - Put your instructions on video. You won't have to use class time, and they will always have access to it.
5. Time for student created content in the room.
6. It gives kids choices. If they prefer to read the textbook than to watch the video, let them (if the content is the same). Be careful about giving them TOO many choices, but if they have the power to choose based on their method of learning, they will learn it better.
7. The station model is like centers for elementary school. The class is divided into three areas in the room. It could be writing, research, and project work or whatever fits the lesson your are teaching. It makes your class kind of a workshop. Another version of this is the station rotation or In-Flip Model. If your students can't watch videos at home, one of your stations could be the video.
8. Choice boards - Give 2-3 choices using activities that cover Bloom's taxonomy in each of a few levels. Giving them choice, even if it is just the order you do it in, is empowering. Student Choice boards allow them to choose the input and the output while everyone has the same objective. Choice days are days the students can choose. Activity days are the days when everyone does the same thing together.
9. Explore-Flip-Apply - They start with inquiry until they need help. Then they get the video when they are ready for it or need it.
Challenging Thought: The world has changed. They have access to information like we can't even imagine. Most of what we teach is on youtube. We can be doing so much more than content delivery. "If you could be replaced by a youtube video, you should be."
Kristin Barbour - Walk a Mile in Students’ Shoes: Differentiating Between Low Motivation, Curriculum Casualties, and Learning Disabilities
Science has been studying learning with brain in mind for 20 years. We understand that learning disabilities are neurological, so they don't get better in a short period of time.
Phases of the Learning Process
1. Input: perception
2. Elaboration: processing, attaching meaning to the input, attaching a priority to it
3. Output
Give students time and tools to help with identification.
Lots of kindergarten level examples that I am not taking notes on because if my physics students need a letter of the week, there are bigger problems than I have.
This workshop is a reproduction of the FAT City Workshop done decades ago, but she is not giving credit to Rick Lavoie, so I am going to. I watched this video in 1997 in a college class.
Alan November - The Top Survival Skill for Teachers: Critical Thinking Using the Web
If you ask kids, "do you know how to use Google," they will say yes. However, they may not be using it effectively. They don't know how to get the best quality of information.
We should be balanced in our discussion of technology and acknowledge what can go wrong as well as what goes right. Google's algorithm assigns the most points when the search term is in the web address. It is not because it is the best information. It is also geographically biased. It places priority on sources closest to you. This will keep you from getting information from sources near the source of the topic. If you google Iran Hostage Crisis and use no sources from Iran, you are getting biased information.
When we teach kids about books. we teach them to understand the design of print; but we don't really do that with the internet. If you are preparing students for universities, you must prepare them to find content on the web. We should teach them to compare and contrast information. They might be manipulated if they don't understand the structure.
If you want to know how Google works, Google the word google and operator. You can get the google guide. Not teaching kids to use the google operators is the equivalent of not teaching them the Dewey decimal system in the library.
Ways to understand information. Use the site operators for searching. Use easywhois to find out who owns the site. Use the way back machine to find the original website when it was launched. Use country codes to limit your search to those countries. The internet gives the reader more tools to understand information, once you know how. If you don't know how, it is phenomenally dangerous.
The most powerful knowledge tool is Wolfram Alpha. It is only vetted scholarly information. "It is not like Google, where a twelve year old can give you constitutional law advice."
We should redesign our assignments so they can't look up the answers. Watch the TED talk from the Wolframs as they discuss what Wolfram Alpha and like tools are going to do to education. The problems we give kids need to catch up with the power of the information. Instead of asking kids to compare the nutritional content of two foods, ask them to design a food plan for the space station. Show kids a picture of a baseball field and ask them to design the perfect bundt because only a human can do that.
A lot of questions in life are not well organized. They are messy. Teachers should write messy problems. Give them more information than they actually need to solve the problem. Change the word solve to involve. Solve means every student gets the same answer. Involve means the student has to design the problem.
Follow Jessica Caviness on twitter to see how you can make kids design problems.
Dr. Bill Brown - Effective or Defective? Equipping Students for Lifelong Vision
All of the things we are learning converge when we think about the context of what we do.
The Bible opens and closes with humanity in close fellowship with God. In between is the fall and God restoring what was lost.
If your mission statement doesn't line up with God is doing, let God get in the way of your mission statement. You are where you are for a reason. What part is God giving you to play in His movement in whatever area you are in? You are part of the big plan of God. Bigger is not better; better is better.
How can we measure our effectiveness? You measure it 5, 10, 15 years after they leave. Are they still walking with Christ? Ask them if they were prepared for the world they are now facing? They need to know that you will never become in the future what you are not becoming today. We must educate for the world as it is becoming.
Agendas are short sighted activities to accomplish near sighted goals. Visions are expansive plans to achieve ambitious aspirations. We should be vision driven, not agenda driven. The only true vision is the one that God has, and we are part of that. How are you communicating vision to your students, your community, your faculty, and your staff? You don't necessarily have a Biblical worldview just because you know the Bible. You have to learn to think worldviewishly. Don't fill a bucket; light a fire. There is no safe place in the world where you aren't going to be bombarded with alternate views. We must prepare our kids to hold on to their faith in the face of opposition.
Know God
Know God's Word
Know God's World
Don't let them think being a Christian is knowing how to follow the rules. We need to equip and mentor them with God's word.
Action Steps: Be More Intentional
1. Develop or affirm your mission statement
2. Make sure everyone knows your vision.
3. Survey your parent and alumni to see if you are accomplishing your mission and vision.
4. Your own walk is crucial. You can't give away what you do not have (It's like measles).
Times are tough. There is every reason in the world to give up - but no reason in heaven.
A tweet from another conference attender:
Monica Remer @MonicaRemer
#NEXUS15 if you are different in ways that do not matter then you are just weird.
Let's view Christian education in an expanded light. If we as Christians are the light of the world, shouldn't our education also be light? Can we take Christian education and expand it from a defensive posture to an offensive posture? Rather than protect them from the darkness, we should prepare them to make a difference in the darkness.
I always ask the question "why you?" when I go into a classroom. I always know the answer is I Peter 2:9 - because you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people. He called you out so you may show his marvelous light. Is our posture causing us to underperform.
The buzz word is to provide students with a "world class education." That's the best they can come up with. Their best line should be our baseline. We want to give them a "Kingdom class education."
Education should be in three dimensions, not just the two that the world focuses on. The world focuses on the head and the hand, but they don't get a return on their investment if they leave out the heart dimension.
The facts of God's world should be integrated with the truth from God's word. If you have worldly content devoid of God's context, it will inevitably lead to wrong conclusions. For that reason, we must be students of the Word because His Word is truth. We are also empowered by God's Spirit. What do we do with this power? Without his power, the best we can be is influential. With the Spirit of God on your credentials and pedagogy, you can be impactful.
God isn't limited to working in only favorable circumstances. He can work with all children. We don't want to communicate that the best God can do is teaching children who are highly educable. It would be nice if we had kids who don't need grace and kids who don't sin. They are not beyond God's ability.
We are equipped with God's love. The words on the page are powerless to transmit life. When we take the stuff of the curriculum and make it a living curriculum through your love, you can impart life.
There are no children or families that are beyond the scope of God's power. We take the cards no one else wants and give them a kingdom class education so that they will walk out saying, "The Lord - He is God."
Dr. Kevin Washburn - Fueling Learning: Sparking Curiosity in the 21st Century Classroom
This is the speaker I have most been looking forward to hearing.
You don't start from a place of know-how. You start from a place of curiosity. Intelligence gets an awful lot of press, but even Albert Einstein put more importance on curiosity than intelligence.
Learning is movement, and movement requires energy. The same neural network that is active when you take a physical step toward a goal is active when you learn something. The brain interprets learning a movement.
Curiosity drives interest, excitement, and exploration. It is a hunger to know. It is sad to realize that all children are curious, but most students are not. What are schools doing to take away their curiosity? One of the things technology provides us is the opportunity for self directed learning, but they won't do it if they aren't curious.
Engagement does not equal curiosity. Looking at cat videos online is engaging, but it isn't sparking the curiosity we are looking for. How do we make them curious?
Atmosphere - Curiosity thrives in atmospheres of freedom where adults respond positively to student questions. If your students have a fear of asking questions, they aren't free. Curiosity is caught through conversation. Respond to children with questions. This requires attentiveness to every situation to see where you can take advantage of moments. How adults respond to children influences how curious they become. Think about what you are communicating to the child by the way you respond to a question.
Model Curiosity - Show them that you are trying to figure out things. Tell them what you are wondering about. Show them the process of seeking information for personal interest. When students are in the midst of learning, model questions with them. What new questions can we ask now that we have information.
Encourage Curiosity Even When it Goes Off Track - Curiosity is more critical to their development than the material. Coverage can be the enemy of learning. Work in time for the questions they may have. Question and support rather than directing and explaining. When you start explaining, the child stops thinking. Be cautious with cautions because we need more freedom to their questions.
Don't Try to Make Your Classroom Foolproof - You can't learn resilience through easy success. You learn it by regrouping after a setback. If you are trying to overcome an intelligence deficit, realize that that is only half of the formula. The other half is a combination of curiosity and resilience.
Question, Guide, Allow the Student to FIND the Answers because it produces more robust learning than explaining things to them. Prompt and provide opportunities to spark curiosity. Study how Rod Sterling got you to want to know things. He raised questions in your minds before going to commercial. Bring in an element of mystery to your class. "Why do you think you have a radish?"
Allow students to generate and record questions. As soon as you've got them asking questions, you've got them. The quality of the question matters, so help them refine the questions. It makes a difference in the brain's response if it is too challenging or too easy. The right level of questions releases dopamine, which makes the brain happy and also makes better connections between brain cells.
Curiosity makes learning and recall stronger. If the question is too simple, the brain doesn't care. Keep encouraging the student to ask why questions until you get to an appropriate level. Keep asking why - just like 4 year olds do. Why and how questions produce more mystery than where, who, and what questions.
- If it is too simple, ask why.
- If it is too general, open or close it until you get to a good question.
- If it seems like the wrong question, contextualize it.
Curiosity doesn't deserve the bad reputation it gets. It didn't kill the cat. Curiosity drove Moses to an encounter with God. He wondered about the burning bush.
Eric Metaxas - Miracles
Author of Bonhoeffer -
What you are doing makes a huge difference. You are probably not half as aware of it as I am. You probably forget that all the curriculum stuff is periphery to the big questions. Who am I? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is the meaning of life? Only Christian education deals with those types of questions. Others avoid the questions because the believe life doesn't have meaning, which is bleak. The difference you are making is beyond belief.
At the heart of our teaching is the understanding that we are made in the image of God. Others must look at their worldview, which is that we are here completely by accident. If they really believed that, they would kill themselves or go insane. The idea of meaning wouldn't even exist. All your feelings would be meaningless.
Making it explicit is great, but even if you aren't making it explicit, the assumptions that you have impart things to them they won't get anywhere else.
The heroic is a concept missing from secular education but is central to Christian education. God gives us examples throughout scripture. Faith is not about principles or rules, even though those things are important. It's about Jesus, who was a person who came to live among us. We transmit what we believe through life with the people around us. You draw people to Jesus by being like Jesus. We are potentially a hero to those around us, whether we know it or not, which is why we should know it.
When we read biographies of inspiring people, we realize the power of what they did. Those things are forgotten in our culture because we aren't being taught them any more.
Without a Christian worldview, you have no basis for believing that racism is wrong or any other moral standard. With a Christian worldview, the answer is the Imago Dei. We've got to be able to call evil evil rather than letting things go, calling it culture. Slavery was wrong even though it was culturally accepted. Boys being raped in Afghanistan is evil whether or not it is their culture. This is why moral relativism cannot work. Truth is not relative; it is not a cultural construct. WE HAVE TO COMMUNICATE THIS TO OUR STUDENTS.
William Wilberforce is a hero we must know. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is another one. He said, "Silence in the face of evil is evil." He stood up to the Nazi's. The fact that his story ended badly doesn't mean he isn't a hero. We must tell the stories of these people for others to be inspired by them. n't
Who are you affecting today? What you do matters. When you give young people stories of heroes and heroines, you are giving them something others do not have because we are so scared in our culture to say someone is better than others. We are so afraid of offending people that we are afraid to give them heroes.
God doesn't give you blessings for yourself. He gives them to you so that you can bless others. Greatness doesn't belong to a gender or a race. IT ONLY BELONGS TO GOD.
God calls us into all kinds of things because we need them all.
David Kinnaman - Why Our Students are Leaving the Church and What You Can Do About It as a Teacher
We want to understand through the lens of research what we can do about the trend of young people leaving the church.
The top reasons of young people leaving the church is that the church is overprotective, sexually repressive, anti-science, exclusive, appeared to be doubtless, and provided shallow experiences.
The world young people live in today is more complicated and complex than ever before. Are we meeting the challenge of helping students deal with that complexity? We have to be honest with ourselves about the students we have that are taking a journey away from faith. Christians are viewed as irrelevant and extremist today.
The way young people leave the faith fall into three categories
- Nomads - These are individuals who say they are still Christian, but they are not involved in any way with a church or Christian activities. They got to church on Christmas and Easter only.
- Exiles - Faith doesn't fit with the place where they are in culture.
- Prodigals - These are individuals who say they are NO LONGER Christians.
We live in a complicated, accelerated culture.
The best human inventions in history are in our pockets. Students spend 7 hours a day on some kind of media. We have become hyperlinked, multi-careered. Pop culture is our religion, but we crave meaning. We are lonely participants who are addicted to media and grazing information.
When Daniel lived in Babylon, he had be faithful in a different context. We are living in digital Babylon. Our students are living in a culture in which people are skeptical of scripture. We must teach them that the Bible has a countercultural narrative. Teach Ecclesiastes to a fame obsessed culture because it shows that the end of all their ambition is vanity. The idol of our time is fitting in and being up to speed.
Christian school students struggle with doubt more than public school students. They are more likely to remain active in the church. They seem to want more from their churches and to have a more integrated experience. Within this context, effective Christian education will provide meaningful relationships, cultural discernment, leadership development, vocational discipleship, and a firsthand experience of Jesus.
Millennials have been marketed to so much that they are skeptical. They think of our outreach as something we are paid to do in order to get them on our side, not as a genuine effort at relationship.
Be a learner. Emphasize purity within culture while having proximity to culture. Educate with young people. Teach a right theology of sexuality, work, and influence. Show how the Bible intersections with vocation and changes us as people. Model discipleship in our lives. Pray like we are exiles.
As much as we try not to be, we are part of the spirit of the age; so we have to work hard to examine our own hearts for the ways we are absorbing the culture of the age. What traditions are we keeping that need to be rethought?
Thanks for sharing your notes, Beth. Under Phases of the Learning Process, #3 is output.
ReplyDeletethanks for the good work here Beth!
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