Retrieval Practice Grids

Posted on April 29, 2018 by admin

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”

Revision activities posters, made with PPT SmartArt

Posted on April 28, 2018 by admin

I created a list of independent revision activities for my students. Our parent teacher interviews are coming up and I wanted to have a list of activities which students can complete by themselves at home, as well as give parents study tools to suggest to their children.

I used SmartArt in MS PowerPoint to create a handout for my students. You can download the PPT itself, and use it to customise the SmartArt and make your own handout. Continue reading “Revision activities posters, made with PPT SmartArt”

How people speak at meetings (and in classrooms) is important

Posted on April 8, 2018 by admin

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”

An ode to Wikispaces

Posted on April 6, 2018 by admin

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”

Where is Syria?

Posted on April 18, 2017 by admin

The simple question “Where is Syria?” can lead to a whole world of related questions. It implies that the questioner does not know physical details about the Middle East and it could possibly imply they are unaware of the geo-political situation there, as well as socio-historical reasons for the civil war there.
Ted-Ed made a very informative site about the situation in Syria.

Geoliteracy

I believe that being interested in where places/cities/countries are, is one of the first steps in becoming a geo-literate ‘global citizen’. But how do we teach this most effectively to our students? When I was a kid, I was given endless Geography quizzes at school, and to be honest, I quite enjoyed them. Now, as a teacher and Head of Department, I have come to the conclusion that Geography quizzes still have a role to play, but only as a fun activity, a challenge or a game. I see them in addition to many other strategies of increasing students’ Geographic literacy.

Geographic literacy is a very important concept which goes so much further than ‘knowing where countries are’. This is a must-see video, created by the National Geographic Societies on Geo-literacy (4 minutes):

Continue reading “Where is Syria?”

Concepts in MYP

Posted on January 27, 2017 by admin

Work in progress.

MYP Concepts_relevant pages

From the MYP Guide, translated by me in plain English: (it’s an attempt anyway)

A concept is a ”big idea”. Concepts are like categories which students can use to frame their ideas about personal, local and global issues.
Concepts can help students to generalise, but also to make connections and to think more deeply about facts and topics. Concepts can help develop principles, generalizations and theories.
Here is the MYP version:

A concept is a ”big idea”—a principle or notion that is enduring, the significance of which goes beyond particular origins, subject matter or place in time. Concepts represent the vehicle for students’ inquiry into the issues and ideas of personal, local and global significance, providing the means by which they can explore the essence individuals and societies.
Concepts have an important place in the structure of knowledge that requires students and teachers to think with increasing complexity as they organize and relate facts and topics.
Concepts express understanding that students take with them into lifelong adventures of learning. They help students to develop principles, generalizations and theories. Students use conceptual understanding as they solve problems, analyse issues, and evaluate decisions that can have an impact on themselves, their communities and the wider world.

Click on the image below for an interactive and searchable version of the wordcloud:

Continue reading “Concepts in MYP”

Creating a graph of foreign relations + Google Tour Builder

Posted on November 9, 2016 by admin

Just sharing some materials from a lesson which worked well today. It’s on Italian Foreign Policy 1919 – 1940 but the activities can be tailored to any other topic.

The events to plot on the graph are taken from this Quizlet (created by students). Here is the student handout to cut out the separate events: key-events-italian-foreign-pol-from-quizlet
The graph activity is based on this idea: the-state-of-italian-foreign-relations-diagram_student-handout

I split the students in two groups. Group 1 created one graph to plot the German – Italian relationship and the other group created one graph for the French/UK – Italian relationship.

I also used Google Tour Builder to create a location based overview of the key events. Continue reading “Creating a graph of foreign relations + Google Tour Builder”

Thesis / Antithesis / Synthesis for essay writing

Posted on August 29, 2016 by admin

While researching Marxist ideology for revision lessons on the Russian Revolution, I came across the idea of thesis/antithesis/synthesis as an argumentative framework.

I have since used it successfully in my classes. I think the notion of Dialectics and thesis/antithesis/synthesis fits in well with my other ideas about essay writing (they are nothing new, I’ve just recast them in my own way: TEAC).

What is dialectics?

Dialectics of any sort is a means of trying to resolve a paradox.

It’s important first of all to understand the difference between a paradox and a contradiction. Two things contradict if they CANNOT co-exist. A person cannot have a broken leg AND not-have a broken leg. That is a contradiction. A paradox is something that SEEMS to contradict but which may possibly have some middle ground. For instance” All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others” or “You can save money by spending it”.

That, in a nutshell, is what dialectics does. To learn about something, it considers something that is almost its opposite, and then tries to figure out what the compromise is between the two. So perhaps you’d figure out the meaning of life by comparing it to the meaning of death. But that’s getting off-topic. ^a Continue reading “Thesis / Antithesis / Synthesis for essay writing”

http://askeveryone.ca/.question$6748319 (back)

Some resources for a Socratic Seminar

Posted on July 25, 2016 by admin

I have used the Socratic Seminar method to increase students’ talk time and reduce the amount of time that I talk. In researching the Socratic Seminar, I have found that there are many ways to ‘skin this cat’. I don’t think there is any single ‘right’ way, as long as the students talk through a difficult question or text themselves and respect certain ground rules of discussion.

The more you do this activity with your students, the better everyone will get at it and the more powerful it becomes. The feedback from my students was really positive and I found it an excellent way to get them to think through their own and each other’s points of view.

The principle of the Socratic Seminar goes by other names too: Socratic Circle, Fish Bowl Discussion and The Leaderless Discussion (by Ron Ritchhart).

Below are some resources I have used, and some of the instructions I wrote on the white board.

Continue reading “Some resources for a Socratic Seminar”

IB History IA workshop, Day 3

Posted on June 27, 2016 by admin

Work in progress! These are my notes from a three day workshop for the IB History IA (New course), held at Wesley College Melbourne, on June 25, 26, 27, 2016.

Day 3, Session 9, Designing an effective IA process, ideas, skills and strategies.

No name, no school names, no city name, no student number on the front page, the IA has to be uploaded completely anonymous. Only have the title on the front page.

We discussed our current IA practices and the ways in which we’d like to change those in the future. For me, I’d like to start earlier with finding a good research question. Formulating a good question is very challenging, so as soon as this workshop finalises the online student resource, I will introduce the students to it and will use some lessons to work on the RQ.

PDF version of the poster here: Poster PDF

Continue reading “IB History IA workshop, Day 3”

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Thinking, Learning, Teaching by @vanweringh

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