A Personal Learning Network (PLN) is
an extension of the self that enables a learner to harness the knowledge and
experiences of many voices through a collaborative connection. Here at school, PLNs
often take form based on grade level or content area assignments, professional
areas of interest, or simply the location of your room in the building. These are the
people we call upon for advice, to help solve a problem, or fill in the gaps
when we can’t figure it out on our own. This network of friends enhances our
learning and offers the support necessary to grow professionally.
Over the next few months, we will use time during bi-monthly
meetings to read and discuss a number of highly praised professional books
together, further strengthening our PLNs as we meet physically, or virtually to
revisit the important talking points within each book.
Here are the books we will be reading and discussing:
by Jeff Zwiers & Marie Crawford
The following is from Zaner-Bloser's Professional Book Discussion Guide...
Learning is a social endeavor, and conversations, especially
academic conversations, help students to deepen their understanding of a topic
in a profound and meaningful way. Academic conversations are those back and
forth dialogues that occur in a supportive and purposeful classroom
environment. They help students focus on a topic and explore it, while
building, challenging, challenging, and negotiating important ideas with their
peers.
Classroom talk and discussion is usually teacher-dominated.
In fact, most classrooms spend less than two minutes per hour on classroom
conversation or discussion. Most talk does not advance beyond short question
and answer sessions because teacher have never learned how to initiate and
maintain effective academic conversations in the classroom. There are five core
communication skills that help students hold productive academic conversations
across academic content areas. These skills include: elaborating and
clarifying, supporting ideas with evidence, building and/or challenging ideas,
paraphrasing, and synthesizing. This book explains how to weave these skills
into all teaching practices and approaches. Specifically, this book helps
teachers to use conversations to build the following:
- Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application
- Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing
- Complex and abstract essential understandings in content areas such as adaptation, human nature, bias, conservation of mass, energy, gravity, irony, democracy, greed, and more
- An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual support
The following is from Heinemann's website...
In Comprehending Math Arthur Hyde (coauthor of the popular Best Practice) shows you how to adapt some of your favorite and most effective reading comprehension strategies to help your students with important mathematical concepts. Emphasizing problem solving, Hyde and his colleagues demonstrate how to build into your practice math-based variations of:
How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed- Ability Classrooms
by Carol Ann Tomlinson
ASCD Study Guide
The following is from ASCD's website...
Make Just One Change:Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions
(click on title to view video)
by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana
No matter the content area, students need to develop clear
ways of thinking about and understanding what they learn. But this kind of
conceptual thinking seems more difficult in math than in language arts and
social studies. Fortunately we now know how to help kids understand more about
mathematics than ever before, and in Comprehending Math you’ll find out that
much of math’s conceptual difficulty can be alleviated by adapting what we have
learned from research on language and cognition.
In Comprehending Math Arthur Hyde (coauthor of the popular Best Practice) shows you how to adapt some of your favorite and most effective reading comprehension strategies to help your students with important mathematical concepts. Emphasizing problem solving, Hyde and his colleagues demonstrate how to build into your practice math-based variations of:
- visualizing
- asking questions
- inferring
- predicting
- making connections
- determining importance
- synthesizing
Comprehending Math is based on current cognitive research
and features more than three dozen examples that range from traditional story
problems to open-ended or extended-response problems and mathematical tasks. It
gives you step-by-step ideas for instruction and smart, specific advice on
planning strategy-based teaching.
Help students do math and get it at the same time. Read
Comprehending Math, use its adaptations of familiar language arts strategies,
and discover how deeply students can understand math concepts and how well they
can use that knowledge to solve problems.
How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed- Ability Classrooms by Carol Ann Tomlinson
ASCD Study Guide
The following is from ASCD's website...
"Curiosity and inspiration are powerful catalysts for
learning." In this 2nd edition of a book that has provided inspiration to
countless teachers, Carol Ann Tomlinson offers three new chapters, extended
examples and information in every chapter, and field-tested strategies that
teachers can use in today's increasingly diverse classrooms. Tomlinson shows
how to use student's readiness levels, interests, and learning profiles to
address student diversity.
In addition, the author shows teachers how to differentiate,
or structure, lessons at every grade level and content area to provide
scaffolds as well as high-speed elevators for
- The content of lessons,
- The processes used in learning, and
- The products of learning.
Teachers can draw on the book's practical examples as they
begin to differentiate instruction in their own classrooms. Strategies include
curriculum compacting, sidebar investigations, entry points, graphic
organizers, contracts, and portfolios.
As Tomlinson says, "Differentiation challenges us to
draw on our best knowledge of teaching and learning. It suggests that there is
room for both equity and excellence in our classrooms."
(click on title to view video)
by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana
All students should and can learn to formulate their own
questions
All educators can easily teach the skill as part of their
regular practice
Make Just One Change not only makes the case for the
importance of teaching students how to ask their own questions, it also
provides a clear step-by-step process for teaching a sophisticated thinking
skill to all learners. Its simplicity belies the significance of its approach
for teaching students to actually think for themselves. No small accomplishment.
“As the title of this book indicates, Dan Rothstein and Luz
Santana believe that education can be transformed if students, rather than
teachers, assume responsibility for posing questions. This idea may sound
simple, but it is both complex and radical: complex, in that formulating good,
generative questions, and being prepared to work toward satisfactory answers,
is hardly a simple undertaking; and radical, in the sense that an apparently
easy move can bring about a Copernican revolution in the atmosphere of the
classroom and the dynamics of learning. The authors modestly quote physicist
Niels Bohr who once said, ‘An expert is someone who has made all possible
mistakes in a field and there are no more to be made.’ In reading this powerful
work, I was reminded of what Albert Einstein said, when he learned of Jean
Piaget’s pioneering questioning of young children: ‘so simple only a genius
could have thought of it.’”
– Howard Gardner, The John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs
Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education
“[The authors] provide…an inspiring vision of education at
its best and an extraordinarily clear, low-tech, practical intellectual tool
for turning that vision into reality.”
– from the foreword by Wendy D. Puriefoy, president, Public
Education Network
Join thousands of educators around the world who are reading
the book, implementing the next day, discussing with colleagues the changes in
students they observe, and organizing book clubs to share their ideas on how to
spread the practice from classroom to classroom, from school to school and from
community to community.
More from Harvard Education Press
(click on title to view videos)
by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst
"Just as rigor does not reside in the barbell but in
the act of lifting it, rigor in reading is not an attribute of a text but
rather of a reader’s behavior—engaged, observant, responsive, questioning,
analytical. The close reading strategies in Notice and Note will help you
cultivate those critical reading habits that will make your students more attentive,
thoughtful, independent readers."
—Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst
In Notice and Note Kylene Beers and Bob Probst introduce 6
“signposts” that alert readers to significant moments in a work of literature
and encourage students to read closely. Learning first to spot these signposts
and then to question them, enables readers to explore the text, any text,
finding evidence to support their interpretations. In short, these close
reading strategies will help your students to notice and note.
In this timely and practical guide the authors:
- examine the new emphasis on text-dependent questions, rigor, text complexity, and what it means to be literate in the 21st century
- identify 6 signposts that help readers understand and respond to character development, conflict, point of view, and theme
- provide 6 text-dependent anchor questions that help readers take note and read more closely
- offer 6 Notice and Note model lessons, including text selections and teaching tools, that help you introduce each signpost to your students.
Notice and Note will help create attentive readers who look
closely at a text, interpret it responsibly, and reflect on what it means in
their lives. It should help them become the responsive, rigorous, independent
readers we not only want students to be but know our democracy demands.
by Mark Barnes
The following is from ASCD's website...
Named one of the best professional books of 2013 by Teacher
Librarian
Want to make your students more responsible for their own
learning? Want to create an academic environment in which students thrive and
develop a genuine thirst for knowledge? Want to improve your students’
standardized test results but avoid a "teach-to-the-test" mentality
that throttles creativity and freedom?
In this book, Mark Barnes introduces and outlines the
Results Only Learning Environment—a place that embraces the final result of
learning rather than the traditional methods for arriving at that result. A
results-only classroom is rich with individual and cooperative learning
activities that help students demonstrate mastery learning on their own terms,
without being constrained by standards and pedagogy.
By embracing results-only learning, you will be able to
transform your classroom into a bustling community of learners in which
- Students collaborate daily on a number of long-term, ongoing projects.
- Students receive constant narrative feedback.
- Yearlong projects target learning outcomes more meaningfully than worksheets, homework, tests, and quizzes.
- Freedom and independence are valued over punitive points, percentages, and letter grades.
- Students manage themselves and all but eliminate the need for traditional classroom management.
Learn how your students can take charge of their own
achievement in an enjoyable, project-based, workshop setting that challenges
them with real-world learning scenarios—and helps them attain uncommonly
excellent results.
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