Cognitive skills - one may be bad in one but it can improve if there is much practice.
Spell name backwards
Spell Colorado backwards
1. Attention - three kinds
- stay on task for a long time (to measure, use many of colored words of colors)
- selected attention (stay on one input and not distracted)( to measure, say the colors)
- multi- task( to measure, word, color, and alternate) (listen and take notes at the same time)
2. Working memory( short term memory for quick processing) (to measure, see if he can remember simple, short instruction. Can he add 23 to 58 in head)
3. Processing speed - how fast brain handles information. (to measure: does he transition from one task/thought to another well
4. Visual processing - (to measure. Can he draw backwards pictures or from back side of screen)
5. Auditory processing - hear the differences in sounds ( to measure, can he spell? Read?)
6. Logic reasoning - ( to measure, can he debate, manage projects or school work?)
7. Long term memory. Store and recall information. (to measure, can he remember things over time?)
Skills:
1. Reading fluidity - decode and understand what was read.
2. Attention , not just going through the motions
3. Visualize the story
4. Associate newly read to old memory
5. Vocabulary is important but less so than these other skills
Autistic children can not block out unnecessary information. They might get frustration and shutdown completely.
ADHD child may not rely on brain to control decisions. ADHD child often hooks on present, instant gratification and immediate feedback.
Brain helps working memory to decide what information to keep. Keeping all information will distract our focus. Working memory and long-term memory work together to block out needless information.
Long- term memory is enforced by
- emotion
- repetition (works at any age)
Dyslexia can be overcome by training and repeated practice .
Kids with poor comprehension can not form a picture in their mind while listening to a story. We should help them to visualize.
Next step: repetition.(or he will forget the new skills)
Drill:repetition of a single skill.
Sequence the activities. Kids can learn a lot.
Introduce distractions to train the brain to filter out unwanted inputs.
Goal is to build up kid's will to succeed.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Students are criminals?
Sometimes a school is thinking that all students are criminals and needed to be watched at all time's; this creates a lot of stress for the staff because they have to be on guard all the time. It is bad for the kids too because you treat the kids like criminals, they will behave like crooks.
Reward for learning?
Much of the education Of younger people that I've seen is done with coercion, tricking, or giving candy and things like that. As a result teaching them in high school is a problem if there is no reward or some kind of points. Some students will just sit there and do nothing.
This tactic wouldn't work in high school because students are old enough to know you're just saying it. You can't do anything about it if they just don't respond so should we continue with harsher methods? Should we start thinking, "well they're about to be adults, I need to switch tactics, i need to help them to see that learning is for their own good".
This tactic wouldn't work in high school because students are old enough to know you're just saying it. You can't do anything about it if they just don't respond so should we continue with harsher methods? Should we start thinking, "well they're about to be adults, I need to switch tactics, i need to help them to see that learning is for their own good".
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Scared people
It seems so many people live in fear, even in america. People do not respond to a friendly smile. People who refuse to look at others walking by.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Father figure
Audrey Hepburn said that she lacked a father figure. She said she suffered from that throughout her life until her death. It seems Jane Fonda is the same story. Her parents were very remote. She worked very very hard throughout her childhood just to please her dad.
Refuse to learn
Many young students are forced to learn or they have been bribed to study. when they get to high school they really don't want to do anything. they know the teachers can't really do anything about it.
this is currently an issue for me and I think I need to help them to mature. I need to let them know that studying is their job and there is no need for me to force. gradually, they will turn into adults instead of staying as children in the attitude.
this is currently an issue for me and I think I need to help them to mature. I need to let them know that studying is their job and there is no need for me to force. gradually, they will turn into adults instead of staying as children in the attitude.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Teachers want the freedom to teach
The greatest teacher incentive: The freedom to teach
By Vicki Davis, Published: July 19
In the wake of the Atlanta cheating scandal and recent cheating allegations in other school districts (including Washington, DC), On Leadership convened a roundtable on how best to approach teacher incentives in the U.S. education system — with opinion pieces by Duke University behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely, teacher and education blogger from Georgia Vicki Davis, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Howard Gardner, and Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein.
“The last thing I will do is refuse to take your test,” said an angry 15-year old to a math teacher who’s a friend of mine in Georgia. “I just wanted to teach him to balance his checkbook, something he would use in the real world,” she said, “but the school system made me sit there and watch him sullenly refuse to write on the ‘high stakes’ standardized test for the two days before his 16th birthday when he would quit school. This is not teaching.”
My friend is just one of the many dedicated teachers who are losing hope in a system that has lost its way.
In our rush to make teachers accountable, we have made them accountable for the wrong things. We are pushing them to turn kids into memorizing automatons who remember a lot of facts only to forget them right after the test. These tests are not the products of educational research. In fact, according to Bloom’s Taxonomy, “remembering” is considered lower-order thinking. It doesn’t even require understanding.
In the video “No Future Left Behind,” made by students at Suffern Middle School in New Jersey, there’s a memorable line: “You can’t create my future with the tools of your past.” They’re right. We’re using a 20th-century measuring stick to measure a 21st-century learner. No wonder businesses are yelling that education is getting worse: We’re using the wrong stick. Students should graduate with portfolios of work ready for a world that will value them on their ability to create. Take for example a student I know from Evansville, Indiana, who finally fell in love with learning during his senior-year project. Using a netbook purchased with curriculum funds, he engaged in stop-motion animation using Legos. His school attendance went up, his grades went up, and he is now graduating and going on to college.
We need to define what it means to be a well-educated person in the 21st century and then support our schools to move toward that vision. And the greatest incentive we can give teachers to improve learning is to let them start focusing on teaching.
What we need in our schools are teacherpreneurs like they have in Finland, where the “teachers choose their own textbooks and customize their lesson plans.” Reginald Garrard, who left his Camilla, Georgia, teaching job after 33 years says, “My biggest complaint was the trend towards cookie-cutter teaching. The fact that we were expected to be on the same page at the same time in the same way. Your creativity is being stymied with the pressure to pass the test.”
Schools should have the ability to personalize learning through technology. Scripts may make a bad teacher palatable, but they make a good teacher (and her students) miserable. Filling out a worksheet is not learning. Students need interactions with teachers and with each other, not with a piece of paper.
I’m reminded of an autistic child in Austria on one of our projects who became fully communicative the first time he was allowed to video himself, unleashing his ability to contribute. That’s not to say it’s just about technology, though. Putting computers in the hands of kids doesn’t make them any smarter than if they rubbed Einstein’s head. It is how the technology is used—by interacting—that improves learning. Students are the greatest textbook ever written for each other, and yet most schools close the book on social learning.
In my own experience, managing the Flat Classroom Projects, the hardest schools to collaborate with are those in China and most U.S. public schools: They both block everything and have inflexible systems that don’t allow innovation. Many U.S. teachers don’t even have the authority to upgrade their web browser or fix a printer. And these schools that have very little technology often still ban bringing devices from home that could mitigate the situation.
As Mike Soskil, a fifth-grade teacher in Pennsylvania says, the main charge for educators should be to “just teach well, and let the chips fall where they may”—whether that’s getting creative about using technology or having the autonomy to customize lesson plans.
Every day teachers across this country are asked to act in ways that cause students to lose their love of learning, and drop-out rates are skyrocketing. Doctors take an oath to “do no harm”; and yet with education, we’ve created a scenario where we’re asking teachers to do harm because we’re missing the big picture as a nation.
When empowered in my own classroom to follow research-based best practices in lieu of testing, I have fallen in love with teaching again. This is what I want for every student and teacher in the country I love: freedom. Freedom to teach, and freedom to make learning come alive for a generation that I am afraid will one day accuse us of educational malpractice.
Vicki Davis is a full-time teacher at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia. She is also a leading educational blogger, with a focus on improving learning for all students—starting with the teacher in the classroom. She tweets @coolcatteacher and is coauthor of Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds (January 2012) with Julie Lindsay from Beijing, China.
By Vicki Davis, Published: July 19
In the wake of the Atlanta cheating scandal and recent cheating allegations in other school districts (including Washington, DC), On Leadership convened a roundtable on how best to approach teacher incentives in the U.S. education system — with opinion pieces by Duke University behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely, teacher and education blogger from Georgia Vicki Davis, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Howard Gardner, and Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein.
“The last thing I will do is refuse to take your test,” said an angry 15-year old to a math teacher who’s a friend of mine in Georgia. “I just wanted to teach him to balance his checkbook, something he would use in the real world,” she said, “but the school system made me sit there and watch him sullenly refuse to write on the ‘high stakes’ standardized test for the two days before his 16th birthday when he would quit school. This is not teaching.”
My friend is just one of the many dedicated teachers who are losing hope in a system that has lost its way.
In our rush to make teachers accountable, we have made them accountable for the wrong things. We are pushing them to turn kids into memorizing automatons who remember a lot of facts only to forget them right after the test. These tests are not the products of educational research. In fact, according to Bloom’s Taxonomy, “remembering” is considered lower-order thinking. It doesn’t even require understanding.
In the video “No Future Left Behind,” made by students at Suffern Middle School in New Jersey, there’s a memorable line: “You can’t create my future with the tools of your past.” They’re right. We’re using a 20th-century measuring stick to measure a 21st-century learner. No wonder businesses are yelling that education is getting worse: We’re using the wrong stick. Students should graduate with portfolios of work ready for a world that will value them on their ability to create. Take for example a student I know from Evansville, Indiana, who finally fell in love with learning during his senior-year project. Using a netbook purchased with curriculum funds, he engaged in stop-motion animation using Legos. His school attendance went up, his grades went up, and he is now graduating and going on to college.
We need to define what it means to be a well-educated person in the 21st century and then support our schools to move toward that vision. And the greatest incentive we can give teachers to improve learning is to let them start focusing on teaching.
What we need in our schools are teacherpreneurs like they have in Finland, where the “teachers choose their own textbooks and customize their lesson plans.” Reginald Garrard, who left his Camilla, Georgia, teaching job after 33 years says, “My biggest complaint was the trend towards cookie-cutter teaching. The fact that we were expected to be on the same page at the same time in the same way. Your creativity is being stymied with the pressure to pass the test.”
Schools should have the ability to personalize learning through technology. Scripts may make a bad teacher palatable, but they make a good teacher (and her students) miserable. Filling out a worksheet is not learning. Students need interactions with teachers and with each other, not with a piece of paper.
I’m reminded of an autistic child in Austria on one of our projects who became fully communicative the first time he was allowed to video himself, unleashing his ability to contribute. That’s not to say it’s just about technology, though. Putting computers in the hands of kids doesn’t make them any smarter than if they rubbed Einstein’s head. It is how the technology is used—by interacting—that improves learning. Students are the greatest textbook ever written for each other, and yet most schools close the book on social learning.
In my own experience, managing the Flat Classroom Projects, the hardest schools to collaborate with are those in China and most U.S. public schools: They both block everything and have inflexible systems that don’t allow innovation. Many U.S. teachers don’t even have the authority to upgrade their web browser or fix a printer. And these schools that have very little technology often still ban bringing devices from home that could mitigate the situation.
As Mike Soskil, a fifth-grade teacher in Pennsylvania says, the main charge for educators should be to “just teach well, and let the chips fall where they may”—whether that’s getting creative about using technology or having the autonomy to customize lesson plans.
Every day teachers across this country are asked to act in ways that cause students to lose their love of learning, and drop-out rates are skyrocketing. Doctors take an oath to “do no harm”; and yet with education, we’ve created a scenario where we’re asking teachers to do harm because we’re missing the big picture as a nation.
When empowered in my own classroom to follow research-based best practices in lieu of testing, I have fallen in love with teaching again. This is what I want for every student and teacher in the country I love: freedom. Freedom to teach, and freedom to make learning come alive for a generation that I am afraid will one day accuse us of educational malpractice.
Vicki Davis is a full-time teacher at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia. She is also a leading educational blogger, with a focus on improving learning for all students—starting with the teacher in the classroom. She tweets @coolcatteacher and is coauthor of Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds (January 2012) with Julie Lindsay from Beijing, China.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
