Month: April 2018

I have tried something new-old. It’s new because it’s a different way, but it’s old because most teachers do this anyway: retrieval practice. I stumbled upon a post by Kate Jones (@87history) about ‘Retrieval Practice Grids’ and I really liked the way she set this up.

I made my own for my VCE French Revolution class. You can download the PPT/handout here, it contains the grid (made with Smart Art) which you change to suit your needs.
Activities like these have worked well in my class, students respond positively. It works like an amped-up version of think-pair-share. The 10 – 15 minute of individual thinking time forces each student to rely on their own thinking first, and the pair-share element allows them to check, correct and consolidate their knowledge.  The point element adds a hint of competition to it. Continue reading “Retrieval Practice Grids”

Next time you are in a meeting, pay attention to the style of speaking and listening. Do people build on each other’s conversations, do they listen attentively and ask probing questions to deepen their understanding of each other’s ideas? Or do only a few speak, is the dialogue disconnected and are the questions procedural and technical? This goes for the classroom too. Do students actively build on each others’ ideas, or are there a few who dominate and the rest are passive?

Identifying the problem is halfway to solving it. Below is a great description of four types of teacher talk in meetings, but I feel this equally applies to classroom conversations.

Getting good “teacher talk” starts with a good plan, preparation, a culture of respect for people’s time and ideas, modeling and training.

4 Types of Teacher Dialog in Professional Learning Contexts

DISCONNECTED TALK:

• Teachers’ comments are disconnected from each other and the group’s collaborative purpose; teachers tell stories and give each other advice.
• Comments are authoritative statements or personal stories.
• Talk about teaching is general and there’s frequent use of labels and generalizations.
• Claims are asserted as fact with only anecdotal evidence.
• Teachers are very sure of what they say.
• When questions are asked, they are technical, procedural, or personal; meanings, assumptions, beliefs, and values are seldom questioned – and when they are, it’s considered rude.
• There are few links to instruction.
• Knowledge and beliefs are fixed.
• Teachers are congenial with each other, but some don’t contribute.

Continue reading “How people speak at meetings (and in classrooms) is important”

It’s the end of an era. Wikispaces is closing down. Ah wikispaces, how I loved you in 2008. I had just started at the school where I still happily work, and I made Wikispaces for all my classes because I found Blackboard and Moodle so hard to work with. I never liked PBworks, Wetpaint or Wikia, they were less intuitive. No, Wikispaces was my thing. I made 36 of them, for all aspects of my teaching. The original logo contained the by-line “Wikis for everyone”. How democratic, how Web2.0. Remember Web2.0? That was a big thing in 2005. I made WordClouds, opened up a ‘backchannel’ in Todaysmeet.com (both are still going strong), I surfed the net (people don’t say that anymore) and I had RSS feeds. My first Wikispaces were really basic, but as I discovered the joys of tinkering with HTML, my pages became a bit fancier. I started including wikis in projects for students, and soon my students were leaving wikis all over the web, like little squirrels leaving acorns in the internet forrest. I think it’s a shame Wikispaces is closing. They were an application of their time, they were the vanguard of easy content creators, particularly for education. Vale Wikispaces, it has been fun. Thank you. Continue reading “An ode to Wikispaces”