Jewish Disability Awareness Month and North American Inclusion Month Blog Challenge

This month is the North American Inclusion Month and the Jewish Disability Awareness month.
For those that have followed my blog know that I am big believer in inclusion and meeting the needs of  our diverse learners. I would like to focus my posts this month on  the topic of inclusion and meeting the needs of  our diverse learners.

Please add your comments below for future topics to this challenge and invite others to join.
If you join please use the #JDAM15 and #NAIM hashtags. Please also post on the 30 day blog challenge on Facebook.

Here are some videos to kickoff this new challenge:

GRIT

picture: salestrainingconnection.com

Today's Teach Thought prompt is: "Is Grit a valid noun"


To be honest I am not sure what the question or prompt means.


When I did a google search for GRIT here is what I got:

grit

ɡrit/

noun

1. 1. 

   small, loose particles of stone or sand.

   "she had a bit of grit in her eye"

   synonyms:

   sand, dust, dirt; More
2. 2. 

   courage and resolve; strength of character.

   "he displayed the true grit of the navy pilot"  (I edited the list of synonyms)

   synonyms:

   courage, bravery,backbone, spirit, strength of character, strength of will, moral fiber, steel, nerve, fortitude, toughness,resolve, resolution,  determination, tenacity, perseverance, endurance

So to be honest I think we as educators, parents and just concerned citizens would we want the future generation to have a strong moral fiber, strength of character, perseverance, as well as courage and the other definitions.

To me the better question would be how can we instill "GRIT" and its expanded definition into our students.
Some food for thought as we end this challenge

Please share your comments and thoughts.

I am not sure with the Sabbath if I will have a chance to blog tomorrow but I wanted to thank the people at TeachThought for a great challenge

WE TEACH PEOPLE NOT SUBJECTS

picture: www.pinterest.com




This is today's TeachThought Prompt: What is one thing you wish you’d known when you first started teaching, and explain how you do it now.


I think for me and for many we become teachers and think that the teaching is the key and we focus on being prepared and knowing the material we are going to teach. That is important but it is only half the picture and the not most important part of picture. there is another side and that is LEARNING. The Learning is done by the student. Therefore perhaps more important than the material itself is how we relate to our students the connections we make with our students so that we create a connection that will facilitate learning. As I have said many time we teach students not subjects and that needs to be the focus and perhaps the hardest for many teachers to understand. It is also true that your students will remember the connection you made far longer than the material you taught them.


I want to share the following story that I have mentioned before to illustrate some of these ideas. I attended a Principals conference and someone shared the following story.

A number of years ago there was a Jewish foundation in New York that was giving $10,000 gift to excellent teachers. They had to submit a video of their teaching as part of the process. So this teacher gave his tape to his mentor ( the person telling me the story), and asked for his feedback. The mentor looked at the video but want impressed and didn't now what to do. So he just forgot about and wouldn't deal with it until he was asked. Well a few weeks went by and the teacher asked for his feedback. In the conversation the teacher was saying did you see how I was moving around the room, ad how I was using different techniques etc.

At this point the mentor understood what was going on. When the teacher saw the video he was looking at himself and his teaching and when the mentor viewed it he was looking at the students what were they doing, was there learning going on?

That was the first time I was made aware of the important difference between teaching and learning.


I think we need to put the needs of our students first and you will be surprised how playing with them at recess or asking them how their day is going or attending one of their sporting events will go a long way to making those important connections showing them that you care about them as people and that will lead to more meaningful learning as well.

INCORPORATING STEAM

Picture: psarts.org

I once heard the following quote" that any question that you could find the answer on google isn't worth asking"

Today our focus needs to be on critical thinking, innovation, creativity and the arts.


Incorporating the Arts and these other skills are important because as the quote  above suggests information is easily available it is these other skills that we need to be teaching.

The funny thing is that these skills come naturally to kids and can be easily found in kindergarten but for some reason tend to be less of a focus in older grades and that needs to change.

Also to meet the needs of all of our students, we need to focus on other "non academic"  areas to help them shine.

I am sure many of us have had students who don't do well in an academic setting but ask them to perform something or create something on the computer they shine.

Here is a short presentation I gave on STEAM

ENGAGING OUR STUDENTS

Today's prompt for the TeachThought blog challenge is about engaging our students.  When we engage our students then by definition they will become more motivated.

This is a post I wrote in September but thought it would be appropriate to repost it as part of the TeachThought blog challenge

This post is based on this months Educational Leadership Magazine.

Picture from ASCD

I think we could all agree that today we want our students to be motivated and engaged in the learning process. Daniel Pink says "With engagement you're doing something because you truly want to do it, because you see the virtues of doing it. However Pink contrasts that with complaint behavior when do something because someone told to do it.

Many classroom by default are places that we see more complaint behavior than engaged behavior and in reality we need to shift this so that students are engaged and are given a sense of freedom.

Pink says it best; We need leaders, both in organizations and in schools, who create an atmosphere in which people have a sufficient degree of freedom; can move toward mastery on something that matters;and know why they're do something, not just how to do it.........As parents, as teachers, as entire organization, our instinct it toward greater control. We think control is going to make something better. But people only have two reactions to control: They comply or defy. We don't want defiant kids but we also don't want compliant kids. We want kids who are engaged. If you truly want  to engage  kids, you have to pull back on the control, and create conditions in which they can tap into their own inner motivations." 

To have engaged students we need to give up on the control and allow the natural motivation to shine. All students are motivated the only question is what is their level of motivation. By giving up control and allowing the motivation to come through we will end up with more engaged students.

Jackson and Zmuda in their article "4 Keys to Student Engagement" also make the the distinction between Complaint and Engaged. They point out the following:
  "Real engagements not compliance. We can't pine for engaged learners when our policies and practices tend to focus on producing compliant learners. If we want to grow capacity in our students;unearth student talents, dreams, and aspirations; and instill perseverance through a focus on doing hard work, learning from mistakes and revising one's work,we need to design classroom practices around securing real engagement. 

To sort of wrap things up Cossett and Gilmore in their article "10 Standards for Motivation " give us a top 10 list:

1.  The need for Active Learning
2. Lessons incorporate student autonomy
3. Learning is relevant
4. Frequent opportunities for collaboration 
5. Appropriate use of technology
6. Multiple learning methods
7. A balance of challenge and success the create independence. 
8. Differentiate 
9. Feedback and authentic assessment
10. Inquiry that promotes a sense of curiosity and desire to learn

To sum up : Motivation + Autonomy= Engagement and Compliance and Control reduce motivation and therefore limit true engagement. 

MEETING THE NEEDS OF OUR DIVERSE LEARNERS

Below is a Presentation I gave on meeting the needs of Diverse Learners. Today more and more we are faced with a diverse student body and we as educators need to make sure we meet the needs of all of our students so that they are engaged in the learning process.
This is a topic that I am very passionate about. Please check out my Web site Star Educational Consulting 

Please let me know how I can help you or your school with your professional learning needs and helping insure that all of our students succeed.

TED TALKS - MY SHORT LIST

Today's prompt is about TED TALKS

Well I can't limit it to one Sorry!

The other day I shared a TED Talk about WHY so I won't be sharing that one again.

Here is Carol Dweck's on Mindset. Enough said




Another must watch is Sir Ken Robinson. Today we need to see creativity as an essential part of our curriculum the same way we once thought about Reading and Writing. Here is his play list

A TED playlist to watch: Ken Robinson: 10 talks on education http://www.ted.com/playlists/124/ken_robinson_10_talks_on_educ


I couldn't  put together a list of TED Talks without Angela Maiers  on  "You Matter" - What a powerful message  

b
This is a great way to end. This is just very inspirational