Dive Into Reading-2019

This past month I have had the pleasure of working on a nationally recognized program Dive Into Reading. This program was designed to promote grade-level reading and combat any "summer reading slide" that may occur. It was launched in 2017 by Anna Maria Oyster Bar owners, John and Amanda Horne, and has been expanded quickly throughout Manatee and Sarasota Counties. Dive Into Reading has been designed to bring mentors and students together for a couple of hours each week at a restaurant or another appropriate location for a meal to practice their table manners and to work on their literacy skills.

 I believe someone said once, "It takes a village to raise a child," and the organizers of this program have taken that to heart. From the restaurants providing both food and wait staff to the hundreds of mentor volunteers that give of their time to work with students each week. However, there are those behind the scenes working to make sure that each site has what they needed, students are exposed to quality grade level text, and organizations that have donated books and school supplies for each student. Huge shout outs go to: Anna Maria Oyster Bar, Geckos, Pier 22, The Bishop Museum of Science and Nature, Manatee County's Library Services, Patterson Foundation,  Suncoast Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, Elks Club of Manatee, and of course our volunteers.  I feel it was an honor each week to witness each mentor and a student floursih and most importatly an apprecitation of literature being fostered. 

3M Young Scientist -The Power of Student Challenges 2

How often do you provide students with opportunities to solve real world problems?  I believe this is one of our most important roles as educators today.  You can learn more about my process by reading my prior post The Power of Student Challenges.   Every year, 3M and Discovery Education make it easy for me to continue fostering these types of  learning experiences through the 3M Young Scientist Challenge.  Here are some of my learnings from participating.

The first year we attempted The 3M Young Scientist. I threw out the challenge to my students with limited time to work on what I would call "real" STEM activities.  It was a bit bumpy, because though I felt I had a clear understanding STEM, I was not completely sure what guidelines to set, how to assess, or even where to start. It was a bit overwhelming.  The resources from the 3M Young Scientist site were able to provide me a scaffolded approach.

There are a lot of resources available with the "STEM" label on them, but it is often difficult to decide which activities are best suited for my students. I evaluated the STEM materials with our Gifted Laboratory's motto and principles in mind, "We are a laboratory, NOT a factory." We believe it is super important that students are given materials, task, and guidelines, but not a complete layout on how to complete the task. This means there will be more than one way to complete a task and students will have to think critically. Thanks to Discovery Education and 3M, I have been able to access a substantial amount of wonderful STEM Activities that not only serve as a great springboard for The 3M Young Scientist challenge, but also as problem solving activities.

We have utilized many of the Student Activities found on the actual 3M Young Scientist website  and the STEM Career Challenges found within Discovery Education.It's challenging to know what the future holds for our students, but allowing them to explore STEM careers with these resources will give them a critical look into their future.

I'm thankful that 3M and Discovery Education have partnered together to help promote problem solving with their challenge and STEM Activities to expand my students' ideas for their future careers.

It's not too late.  Learn how to challenge your students by visiting the 3M Young Scientist Challenge site

Higher Order Thinking Skills and Discovery Education's- Educational Partner's Challenges

I had originally posted this within in the Discovery Education's Online Community, but thought I would share it here too.

The thing I love most about the many Discovery Education Corporate Partners are the contests they hold. The beauty of many of these contests is their focus on solving real world problems. If students are encouraged to focus on the process of solving a real world problem, rather than just focusing on a solution, exponentially higher order thinking skills can be honed. Though the end result is what is ultimately judged, I am convinced that by solely focusing on outcomes, valuable learning and growth will go unrealized.  

In solving any problem, it is always important to dig deep, explore and thoroughly define the issue at hand. In my experience, this is an area most of my students and, quite frankly, some adults would rather skip right over. For whatever reason, students seem to prefer having problems defined for them, but defining the problem is a valuable step that is chalked full of higher order thinking skills. By giving time for students to process and completely define problems they are required to question and analyze deep with a topic by using Spotlight on Strategies (CDN).  For example, if I were starting a challenge with students, a modified version of the S.O.S. "Think-Puzzle-Explore" (CDN) could be used to open up students' thinking and put them in the driver seat. This S.O.S allows students to record what they already know, record any questions they might have and create a plan as to how they will explore a specific topic.


Another way to ensure students are honing their higher order thinking skills is by guiding students to utilize each contest rubric and/or checklist which will help guide and refine their work. I am a firm believer that I should not do anything for students that they can do for themselves; this includes reading and analyzing contest guidelines. In my experience, introducing these tools to students early allows them the opportunity to refer back to them on a regular basis and helps guide their projects. The number of times my students ask if things are good enough or if projects contain enough details have greatly reduced. It has been nice to watch as these topics have become conversations students are having amongst themselves. This has also meant the process of revision is slowly becoming a student endeavor and proves rubrics and checklists should not be utilized as simple tools in a very real and purposeful way.

   

Finally, I am a firm believer the best way to teach problem solving is by giving students the opportunities to attempt to solve actual problems we find in the world today. Thanks to Discovery Education and their Educational Partners we have been given several opportunities to do just that across just about every subject area.

Discovery Education in The Gifted Laboratory #1

For years now Discovery Education (DE) has played a huge role in The Gifted Laboratory and I thought I would start blogging about some of the ways DE makes an impact here. It has always been a desire of mine to help students realize that the world is much bigger than they can imagine and that history is constantly happening around them. Thanks to DE and their Global News Feature my students are able to get a tiny glimpse of both of those concepts. The Global News is a weekly two to three minute news segments that introduce students to a current event. In the past my students and I would watch a segment, discuss it, and then move on. However, this year I thought I would attempt to deepen their thinking around these topics by integrating different SOS's. 


For our first Global News activity we used the SOS (or Visual Thinking Routine) "Connect-Extend-Challenge". This is a teaching strategy that requires students to identify background knowledge, new learning, and what challenges students may have about the topic. This is a great strategy by itself, but this strategy fits very nicely into a Tree Map, which is one of the eight Thinking Maps. In this case we used our Tree Map to sort our information into ideas that students connected to their background knowledge, extended their thinking, or challenged them in some way.  With the combination of the two strategies, my students were not only able to collect information (or text evidence), but they were also encouraged to do some deeper thinking around that information before they were asked to write about the topic. 

After each student has had a chance to complete his/her individual Tree Map we took the time to discuss this event as a class. Students were encouraged to add to their maps anything they wished to from our discussion. I work very hard to build a healthy learning community and by
allowing students to add to their maps during our discussion it encourages the idea that we are better together. 

My final step was to guide students through a writing assignment in which they were asked to tell what they learned and why it was important. Admittedly, their writing is a tad bit bland, but my main concern for this part of the lesson was that students were able to see a strong connection from their Tree Map to their writing. We still have work to do, but this is not a bad start.  Here are a few links to student blog posts: Grade 4 Post and Prine Students' Post.

Thinking Maps #1

 About ten years ago I had a slight change in my career from general education to resource to gifted and this change brought about a change of focus. I have never been the package program kind of girl and I tend base my approach what my students need. With this approach in mind, I utilize a mixture of strategies and frameworks from a variety of places. Many of these things overlap or are used in conjunction with one another to help build a richer learning environment. The latest introduction has been Thinking Maps, which are the eight common visual maps based on research on how the brain actually learns. 

 I work at four schools all with their individual set of strengths and weaknesses. Lucky for me, all four schools are in various stages of implementation of Thinking Maps. At Abel, they are in year three of implementation and it is very obvious upon entering the school that they are all about Thinking Maps. Their walls are lined with examples from every grade level and subject.  When I am there I love wondering the hallways with my cellphone snapping all the shots I can.  Students are taught to utilize these maps to organize their thinking and ultimately to select the Thinking Maps based on the task at hand.  During the second half of the year, I observed that students were using different maps to complete the same task. This to me means that students are being taught and allowed to organize information into the Thinking Map that works best for them. For students to truly own their learning process that whole process will need to be put into their hands, which includes selecting what tools will work best for them.  

As I continue to explore and learn about Thinking Maps  I am looking forward to incorporating them many of the others strategies we use frequently in our Gifted Laboratory. Thinking Maps are tools to help students organize their thinking and by being intentional about the task students are given to complete within each map can only serve to deepen their thinking. Personally, I am looking forward to seeing what these tools will aid my students to producing this year.

Healthy Learning Community

 It is the beginning of the school year and one of the things I think about a lot of this time of year is building strong learning communities with each of my groups. This is not a new concept and certainly educators for years have been doing just that. However, we all know that some learning communities are healthier than others and that never becomes more evident than one stops working. This whole idea feels a bit more personal to me this year, because after twenty-three years I have found myself in search of one in the form of a new church. There is a lot things that have played a role in choosing a new place of worship, and in many ways what I was looking for has mirrored what I believe a healthy learning community should be. Throughout the years I have truly been blessed to be part of several healthy learning communities and my experiences have taught me that they do not just happen, but they take work and are strategically planned. 

As a learning community is being built I believe it is important remember that not all the members are going to have the same gifts, knowledge and enter the community at the same place. This means there will need to be a scaffolding activities to meet members needs. This is why procedures and systems need to be planned and followed. It will also mean that leaders might need to relinquish some control over the details of the process. I will be the first to admit that relinquishing up control as an educator can be tough, because it is more comfortable for me to know when and how things are being done. However, by the leader remaining in control we would all miss out on so much learning and growth. Within the Gifted Laboratory we have implemented several inquiry framework, such as Genius Hour and Challenge Based Learning (CBL), where my students have been involved with everything from topic selection to their solution development. As we made our way through each of these projects we have all learned a ton. At the same time, I have been involved in "learning communities" as an adult where these same principles have applied. One example would be Discovery Educator Network (The DEN), where members are encouraged to see needs within the community and then empowered to work together  to meet those needs. By giving community members a voice it not only builds the capacity for more knowledge to be gained, but it also builds trust. 

Also in healthy learning communities there will need to be a safe place for questioning, which means all members will need to feel comfortable asking any question at anytime. Teachers/leaders will have to learn to be comfortable with true exploration and/or being asked questions they may not have the answers to. As an educator, it has taken me awhile to get to use to and relax in the fact that I don't have all the answers. If I truly believe that questions are the birth place of understanding I will need to allow myself to be seen as a fellow learner and not the dispenser of all information.

Another principle I believe is that healthy learning communities need to include a growth mindset, which means that we believe that our talents and abilities can be developed through persistence. With growth mindset there is the expectation that one "gets smarter....." by preserving through challenges and these should be embraced as learning opportunities. There needs to be grace for those who don't get things right the first time,  and we all need room to fail. All members need to be seen as having the potential and are encouraged to grow. That failure is not seen as an end result, but dealt with and learned from with integrity. 

Finally,  I truly believe that at the core of a healthy learning community is JOY.  Learning is work, but that does not mean it has to drudgery. Strong learning communities know how to laugh and find enjoyment in each other. Sure there will be disagreements and times of frustration, but how a group learns to deal with that is what is important. I believe that learning to deal with these effectively is by building a strong foundation. This can be done in part by providing fun group building activities periodically. I have heard that a family that plays together stays together and I believe that is true about learning communities as well. Here is one of my most recent experiences with that principle in mind, which occurred at the Discovery Educators' Summer Institute (DENSI 2016) in July.

As I close, I want to give a shout out to those leaders who have worked so hard to strategically plan for the learning communities I have been blessed to be apart of. I have learned way more than you know and I will be forever grateful. 

The Need Challenge Based Learning (CBL)

   When I began using CBL with my students back in 2009 I knew it was a framework that we could use to cover the Florida Framework for K-12 Gifted Learners well, but it has also brought something else into light for both my students and myself. Within the CBL framework students are called to work hard to fully understand an issue completely before coming up with a solution, but when we look around the world today that is not what we are seeing. It seems like with so many issues we watch people take polarizing sides (sometimes aggressively) without truly understand the issue as a whole. 

I recently went and saw the Matthew McConaughey's War Drama Free State of Jones, which tells a different side of the Civil War and The Southern Reconstruction Period than what we find in our American History books. It tells the story of the Mississippi man, Newton Knight, who deserted from the Confederate Army and fought against slavery and injustice in the south. It also tell how one of his ancestors, who was one eighth African American was arrest in the 1960's for marrying outside of his race. That story along with the race issues that still remain in our country today I have to wonder if William Faulkner was right with his quote- "The past is never dead. It' is not even the past. " 

                               

      

With all that said, this post is not meant to enter a race debate other than to point out that with race, like so many other issues of today (economy, how to handle modern immigration, education....), there is a need for us to dig deep and fully understand an issue before taking a stand or creating a solution. 

Here is my real point, it is our job as educators to prepare our students for THEIR future. If we were honest, we have no idea what that future is going to look like, except that they will encounter real world problems. These problems will not come in nice neat packages, which is why I am so thankful for the CBL framework. This framework is teaching us to slow down enough to define our problems and then fully explore them before coming up with solutions. How much better would our world be if we all did that?