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Word Warriors on 2009-06-23
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Christensen calls writing "thinking made manifest."
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"The teacher marks everything that's wrong with the paper. 'Ten points off for that comma splice.' 'Where's the past tense?' It makes students feel small and not want to give very much."
Beauty
Your lips, your eyes your soul are
Like a work of art, the most effective thing
Is your beautiful heart. If you
Were a painting, no beauty could express the
Beauty deep inside you. A rainbow
Nothing less. -- Tanya
The model used by the Oregon Writing Project emphasizes what students do right. After taking Christensen's classes, Chrissy Lathan, language arts and social science teacher at Boise-Eliot Elementary, threw away her red correction pen. "If we can build on what students are doing right and well, then they're going to be more willing to change the things that need to be changed," she says.
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Supporting teachers to help children become great writers is powerful because writing is about giving kids power over their lives
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Educational Leadership:Revisiting Teacher Learning:Brain-Friendly Learning for Teachers on 2009-06-22
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The brain's biological mechanisms responsible for learning and remembering are roughly the same for learners of different ages. However, the efficiency of these mechanisms varies with the degree of development of the brain regions involved (Shaw et al., 2006). Emotional and social factors and past experiences also enter into play in terms of the brain's efficiency and an individual learner's motivation. Because these factors are more developed in adults than in children, they have greater influence over adults than they have over children.
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maging studies show that regions in the brain's emotional and cognitive processing areas are activated when an individual is motivated to perform learning behaviors.
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Four key factors affect the intensity of a learner's intrinsic motivation in any given situation: emotions, feedback, past experiences, and meaning.
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How we feel about a learning situation often affects attention and memory more quickly than what we
think about
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Adults may also come to a learning activity with strong emotions. But a fully developed prefrontal cortex enables most adults to consciously dampen their emotions.
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Negative feelings, on the other hand, cause the hormone cortisol to enter the bloodstream. Cortisol puts the brain into survival mode; this shifts the brain's attention away from learning so it can deal with the source of stress. Instead of learning, the brain remembers the pressure and registers these kinds of situations as unpleasant.
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Feedback is a key contributor to motivation. The need to be valued is a potent emotional force, and positive feedback fills that need. In our professional development with West Orange teachers, each participant presented a minilesson and received constructive feedback.
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Past experiences always affect new learning. As we learn something new, our brain transfers into working memory any long-stored items it perceives as related to the new information. These items interact with new learning to help us interpret information and extract meaning, which is part of the principle called transfer (Sousa, 2006).
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Working memory draws on the individual's past experiences to help it answer two questions: Does this new information make sense? and Does this information have meaning for me personally? When both sense and meaning are present, the likelihood of long-term storage is high.
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When teachers actively participate in a demonstration of the primacy-recency effect, for example, they more clearly recognize that the brain remembers best the first and last items presented in a learning episode—and they are more likely to sequence instruction with this phenomenon in mind.
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Math Awareness Month 2009: Mathematics and Climate on 2009-01-23
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Learning Through Listening | Graphic Organizers on 2008-02-24
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Learning Through Listening | Benefits of Teaching Listening on 2008-02-24
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Students with good listening skills are generally more successful than their peers who are passive listeners.
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Students who use active listening strategies also exhibit better
concentration and memory. Active listeners filter information, connect
to what is important, use it and store it in a meaningful way.
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Active listeners tend to have more successful interpersonal relationships.
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Students who use active listening skills are better able to determine
when miscommunications have occurred. They are also more successful at
gleaning additional information from the speaker.
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Since active listening skills can increase your students overall
success, finding ways to integrate these skills into your classroom
would benefit everyone. How can you fit explicit listening instruction
into your daily classroom?
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Model and practice these steps over and over, in the context of your curriculum.
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When introducing new content to your students, use the active listening
steps to check their comprehension. What do they think the main points
are? What connections have they made? What questions did they ask and
what were their answers?
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Learning Through Listening | Recommendations on 2008-02-24
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It is extensive reading that encourages the development of deep interests that is the hallmark of successful learners.
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Audiobooks and digital texts can be accessed and read on a specialized
e-book player, on the computer, over the Internet, via an iPod or over
a cell phone.
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Introduce the various tools to students, demonstrating how to open or
download the text and use the various features, such as read-aloud
options, navigation, bookmarking, note taking, and so forth.
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Providing listening strategy supports can help students become “thinking listeners” and therefore more successful learners.
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Just as students predict, question, summarize, clarify, visualize and
monitor their understanding with print text, they should be applying
these strategies when reading and listening to digital text.
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Learning Through Listening | How New Technologies are Changing What a Literacy Program Should Be on 2008-02-24
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it is apparent that new technologies for the classroom have at least two agreed upon advantages
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pedagogy that prepares students for living in the 21st
century. New technologies are obviously essential in teaching students
how to be literate with the tools that they will need for their futures
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Centered in the affective networks of the brain described earlier,
engagement is individually based and, for the most part, socially
constructed. Recent studies on how human beings become experts in
fields as diverse as sports, business, science and the arts suggest
that while talent is important, even more essential to developing
expertise is a high level of interest and commitment
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Tanya, too, thrives in a learning environment where she can make choices and be creative in fulfilling the assignment.
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The passage of IDEA in 1997 increased the use of audiobooks by students
who have print-related disabilities, such as students with visual
impairments, limited physical mobility or dyslexia.
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he vast majority of digital content on the Internet is not supported by human voice narration.
In this regard, the advantage of TTS tools that can read any content
in digital format “on the fly” is obvious. There are many TTS tools
available commercially and as freeware. Once acquired, there is no
additional cost for audio support, whether the student reads 10 words,
100 words, or 10,000 words. TTS can also read words that the student is
producing in a Word document, on a web page, or in an e-mail message.
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Thus, speech support may be an important means to not only support
individual differences in recognition, providing access to the
curriculum and strengthening literacy skills, but also support affect
by boosting confidence and motivation.
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The potential to integrate listening activities with effective
instructional frameworks is great. The RAVE-O (Retrieval, Automaticity,
Vocabulary, Engagement and Orthography; Wolf, Miller, & Donnelly,
2000) reading program is a research-based literacy program for children
in grades K-4 who have difficulty reading.
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. Dalton and colleagues (2002) showed that struggling readers reading
universally designed versions of novels with TTS support and prompts
for the application of reading strategies outperformed peers using
printed versions of the novels and participating in offline reading
strategies instruction.
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Learning Through Listening | How New Technologies are Changing the Relationship Between Literacy and Listening on 2008-02-24
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Second, individuals must learn how to listen actively rather than passively hear. They must learn the tactics and strategies needed to comprehend, review, and remember a variety of sounds, from simple language streams to complex soundtracks with sound effects, music, and human speech. These active listening skills require practice and effort: they need to be learned.
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Third, to be successful, learners must learn what is important to
listen to. From among the many things that they will hear at any
moment, successful listeners must learn what to select for further
attention and what to ignore. Moreover, a listener must learn the signs
and symbols of significance in language—the ways in which sound and
language convey value and importance, highlight critical features,
manipulate mood and affect, and generate appeal or excitement.
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Over time, written language emerged and overcame the primary weakness of oral language, its impermanence.
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In the new media age, new ways of making speech (and other sounds)
permanent, transportable, viewable and recordable have emerged.
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The irony is obvious: while new media are making listening even more
important in students’ everyday interactions, listening does not
receive the sort of emphasis it should in school, especially in the
development of literacy skills.
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Once speech is captured in digital format, it can be transformed in
multiple ways to support students’ learning, without loss of the
original representation
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First, successful reading depends on phonemic awareness, the ability to
recognize the elements of oral language on which reading depends
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successful reading is intimately connected with what one has learned from listening.
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That is, comprehension relies on connecting to general background
knowledge, previously learned vocabulary, the concepts and principles
that tie words together, the oral discourse structures for telling
stories, participating in conversation, giving directions, etc.
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Recent brain research has revealed an important finding: when
individuals are engaged in active, strategic listening, they use the
same executive functions in the prefrontal cortex that are engaged
during active, strategic reading
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Listening comprehension is critical to reading comprehension because
listening and reading require the same strategies. Students who do not
know how to listen carefully and strategically also will not know how
to read carefully and strategically.
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“three potential stumbling blocks” to learning to read (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998):
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Importantly, these three stumbling blocks directly correspond to the neurological divisions described earlier.
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Listening is a vital alternative to the limits of print for some
students, especially those with disabilities that interfere with the
fluent use of printed text (e.g., students who are blind, dyslexic,
have visual processing disorders, and so forth)
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Learning Through Listening | How New Technologies are Changing our View of What Listening is on 2008-02-24
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Most of the posterior half of the brain’s cortex is devoted to pattern
recognition (Farah, 2000; Mountcastle, 1998), with one region
specialized for recognizing the patterns that we call sound (Figure 1).
This auditory region makes it possible to identify what an auditory
stimulus pattern is—to know that a particular pattern is a dog’s bark,
the sound of car brakes or a melody from Beethoven.
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Within slightly different regions, even higher-level patterns are
recognized, patterns that help us identify a specific speaker’s voice,
style, place or origin, and even intent.
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Recognizing the shifts in meaning that result from a simple change in emphasis is another essential part of listening.
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Normal variation in the ability to recognize the information in sound
and language can occur by virtue of differences in the amount of cortex
or the extent of neural networks allocated to auditory recognition or a
particular facet of auditory recognition.
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The brain’s ability to quickly recognize the auditory pattern of a
word, the syntax of a sentence and the pattern of meaning in speech is
critical to listening. But it is not enough.
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Hearing is reactive, while listening is strategic. The strategic,
effortful, selective aspect of listening recruits a different part of
the brain than the posterior regions with which we recognize sounds.
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Overall, the prefrontal cortex, often called executive cortex, allows
us to be strategic rather than reactive, such that our own goals and
plans dominate the way we interact with the environment and with other
people
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To extract meaning from speech we must effortfully hold the information
in memory, compare it to background knowledge, predict what is ahead
and sustain attention. This is what we call active listening, and
cognitive neuroscientists have shown that it engages a large portion of
the prefrontal cortex
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On the other hand, individuals with strong strategic listening skills
can compensate to an extent for problems with speech recognition by
predicting, hypothesizing, and filling gaps in what they hear.
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What we regard as important to listen to changes over time, depending
on our status, history, expectations and the many features of what we
call our personality.
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Affective networks, part of the extended limbic system at the central
core of the brain, process this content in order to determine the
value, importance, and significance of what we listen to.
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Individuals clearly differ in their ability to employ and interpret
emotional cues when they are listening, just as they differ in their
ability to understand semantic content or to apply strategies for
listening and remembering.
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Learning Through Listening | Plato Revisited: Learning Through Listening in the Digital World on 2008-02-24
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It turned out Plato was right only in part; although writing did change
the meaning of literacy it enabled incredible advancements in knowledge.
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In this paper, we argue that the proliferation of new technologies will
not diminish literacy but rather expand it. In particular, we shall
argue that new technologies—from functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) to iPods, sound blogs and
text-to-speech—have revived the importance of listening and
“re-balanced” literacy such that printed text remains an important
facet of literacy but is not itself synonymous with literacy. The new
literacy, in which listening and oral literacy regain an important
role, will be a literacy that even Plato would have admired.
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