Renovating My Classroom

Registration for the fall session for SCWIST’s fall 2012 eMentoring session ends Oct 6th.
(SCWIST = Society for Canadian Women in Science & Technology)

Female students in grades 11 & 12 are encouraged to apply.

The session runs from Oct 15 to Dec 7, six weeks in total.

A flyer for sharing this with students is attached below.

Questions: contact Jeannine McCormack at outreach@scwist.ca
eMentoring Poster Fall 2012.pdf

I am on the mailing list sent out by Laura Copeland (laurac@connect2learning.com) and she recently shared the following:

Anne Davies recently let me know that she has started a new ‘series’ on her blog called “6 Steps to Starting the School Year”.  The first step has been posted on Anne’s Blog on the left. The next five steps will be posted over the next while. This might be something you want to forward to your colleagues when the time is right.

After I read it, I asked her about leaders and what they do to start the new school year. She said, “They do the same kind of things, just for a different audience. When it comes to beginning with the end in mind there are lots of examples. Here are a few:

System leaders have the agreed upon priorities to guide their work and will engage the people with whom they work in co-constructing criteria around what it looks like when successfully implemented.

School principals will co-construct criteria around school goals. For example, one principal co-constructed criteria with the entire faculty around their school goal of assessment for learning. They went on an artifact hunt early in the school year, mid-way through the school year, and again near the end of the school year, to find evidence of working towards and meeting their school goal.

Professional learning communities will often co-construct criteria around their norms of collaboration or around their learning goals.  

The most important thing is that the learning destination for the system, the school, or the learning community is clear – not just in terms of words but also in terms of the evidence of achieving the results.”

There is much reading in Anne’s “Six Steps” and Laura makes the very important point that all of us, regardless of our roles & audience, need to have a clear learning destination and evidence that we are moving towards it.

This year’s Gairdner Symposium will be held at the Child & Family Research Centre [ www.cfri.ca].  This student symposium will be opened to Grade 10-12 students and will provide a unique opportunity for students to listen to presentations from two  Gairdner distinguished award winners, meet health sciences experts and have the opportunity to tour research labs. This year we will feature new research labs and  we will probably offer students the opportunity to visit three research labs instead of two, as in the past.

Great first post on Taking Risks & Using Social Media for Professional Learning

In the May 2012 issue of Education Update Brad Kutz shares how he shifts students’ focus away from grades and onto learning.  (article)

Brad’s front-loading is similar to the work that I have seen many teachers in Vancouver doing (in Mathematics, Science, Socials, and English) and it is having a very positive effect student engagement & learning.  This can be explored further in Chapter 3: Clarifying, Sharing & Understanding Learning Intentions and Success Criteria of Dylan Wiliam‘s recent book Embedded Formative Assessment.

Some of the key pieces to this work:

1. focus on specific learning targets* (phrased in language that students can understand)
2. share learning targets with students
3. refer to learning targets whenever introducing/exploring new material
4. “engage students in a conversation about what it means to demonstrate proficiency”
5. give students multiple opportunities to show proficiency

*sometimes called learning intentions or learning goals

Note: Learning Intentions do not need to be reductive or a simply checklist.  This caused me angst when I first started this work but Cindy Strickland’s work on Differentiated Instructive was very helpful to me.  Here’s my story…