Happy New Year!!

Hello, and welcome to 2017....A new year always makes me feel like it's a fresh start.

I hope everybody is coming back from the break feeling rejuvenated, and ready to write this years new chapter in the book of life:)

As we get back into our business of focusing on increasing student thinking, and talking in order for students to develop a deeper understanding... folks are always asking for additional protocols for group work to ensure ALL students have a voice in some capacity every day.

There are so many wonderful strategies, and I would like to share an additional one with you. I hope you try it on in your class and report in the comments about the experience.


This strategy would work well with an article that you wanted all students to engage with meaningfully.

***By the Way***

Here is a link to free, printable bookmarks for students!! These are awesome, and great for reminding students that "Reading is Thinking". Grab some thick, cool paper, and get these in the hands of students!!

"Save the Last Word for Me"

1. Organize students into partner, triads, or groups of 4.


2. Each student silently highlights a passage that addresses what he/she considers to be the most significant idea or something that sparked their thinking.


3. The students number off. Student One reads his or her passage out loud to the group, and then he/she remains silent.


4. The other 3 participants each have 1 minute to respond to the passage, saying what it makes them think about, what questions it raises for them, etc. Have one student or all students be notetakers during this process in their notebook.


5. Student One then has 3 minutes to state why he or she chose that part of the article and to respond or build on what he or she heard from his or her peers.


6. Then the pattern is continued with each member of the group. Each student will have a chance to be the presenter and to have “the last word.”


7. As an option at the end of the activity, the whole class can have an open dialogue about the text and the ideas or questions raised during the protocol, or students can summarize the experience and how their thinking has changed because of it.

Here are some sentence starters that you can try on for different situations to support all students with access to appropriate academic-talk language:

The link is here for a pdf of these starters that you will find below. These are great to turn into table-tents for students to access on their desks for talk, print out for their toolbox in their notebooks, 

Lastly, I have a HUGE passion for notebooks...if you ever work with me you know this! Many folks are really excited to use notebooks as a tool for making thinking visible. Due to a variety of reasons many teachers have expressed interest in using a digital format of the notebook. The important piece with the digital variety is keeping the notebook organized. Recently, working with a small group of teachers and IST we found an awesome resource that we are all planning to explore to try on to get smarter with digital notebooks. Take a look at this resource, tutorial, and template ....and give it try!

Please leave your experiences, advice, and challenges in the comments section below. The more we use our collective intelligence, the more we can grow our own practice to impact student learning.

Take care!

Sara

Deep Thinking Moves

Momentum Learning Instructional Focus: All learners co-construct meaning and demonstrate deep understanding through relevant, rigorous, and inquiry-based learning tasks aligned to standards.

So how exactly do students get to deep understanding? Harvard's Project Zero researched this question and found that there are several thinking moves that when coupled with student talk lead to deeper understanding. Additionally, they created several quick strategies for making student thinking visible that can be found at Visible Thinking Strategies.

Student Thinking Continuum

So how do you integrate these thinking moves into your lessons?  Here are some prompts, questions, and strategies to use when planning lessons. 

Civil Conversation Challenge for Teenagers by NY Times

     As this year kicks into high gear, and the days start flying by...I think it's a perfect time to: slow down, take a deep breath, and simplify. Education sometimes feels like it's always changing, but at the core the basics remain the same. We want to provide opportunities for kids to problem solve, make meaning, and ...talk!!

In previous blog posts we have discussed different instructional strategies to encourage student talk, and co-constructing meaning. This is a graphic organizer Steve Williams and I made adapted from the "8 thinking moves". If you were at our first science planning workshop we introduced this in our notebook toolkit. Please feel free to make a copy in your drive and adapt/revise to use with your students.

Many people across our district are engaging kids in a unit around the election. Indeed whether I am listening to NPR, social media feeds, or just talking with colleagues and friends this election has been like no other I can remember. In fact, sometimes it gets so edgy that we have to remember how to have civil conversations. As an adult it can be frustrating...and even emotional to engage in discussions with people that hold different political views, and imagine how tough this can get for kids.

I have frequently mentioned the NY Times Learning Blog as a resource for teachers as it has complete free lessons for all content areas and usually attached informational text resources, essential questions, and relevant topics to what is going on in our world.

Right now they have a unit designed to create opportunities for Civil Conversations for teens around the election, and the heated topics that are associated with different points of view.

(from the NY Times Learning Network Blog Post)

Welcome to an experiment.

For much of this year we’ve been thinking about what more we could do on this site to help students grapple with both the issues of Election 2016 and the classroom challenges of a race marked by extreme rhetoric and deep partisan divide.

Here’s what we’ve come up with:

Every day during the week of Oct. 3, we will be posting a newStudent Opinion http://www.nytimes.com/column/learning-student-opinionforum related to one of the big issues dividing Americans this campaign season. The forums will be open to comment from Oct. 3 to Nov. 7 and will focus on the following:

Oct. 3: Immigration

Oct. 4: Gun control and Second Amendment rights

Oct. 5: Climate change and energy

Oct. 6: Race, gender and identity

Oct. 7: An open forum for students to post about any other election-related issue they care about

The challenge? We are asking students from all over the nation and, perhaps, around the world, to practice the skills of respectful, informed conversation across ideological and demographic divides by not only posting their own thoughts, but by reading the thoughts of others and replying to them. What we’ll be looking for are not so much excellent posts by individual students, but civil, productive discussions between students.

Asking teenagers to post their opinions is nothing new for us, of course. Every school day since 2009 we’ve asked a Student Opinion questionabout something covered in The Times, and all year long we runcontests that invite students to interact with news in a variety of ways. In fact, we chose the four issues we are spotlighting in this challenge because we know, from our Summer Reading Contest and last year’sStudent Council, that teenagers are particularly passionate about them.

But what we’re asking for this time is different. Most of the hundreds of thousands of comments we’ve fielded over the years have been just that — lone comments. With the exception of our weekly, live What’s Going On in This Picture? discussions, students rarely seem read what others write, or respond to each other.

For this challenge, we invite you to have a conversation, and we’ll be “listening in” as we moderate, and looking to find exchanges between students that:

1. Follow Times commenting standards and are civil and respectful. No name-calling, no profanity, no SHOUTING.

2. Advance the conversation about an issue somehow, whether introducing a new idea or perspective, asking useful questions, making connections to other issues, finding themes or commonalities among comments, presenting new evidence, or anything else.

3. Are grounded in fact, and buttressed by sources. This is not to say that everything you post must be footnoted sentence by sentence, but commenters should provide reliable sources for any controversial claims they make.

4. Show evidence of “listening” and attempting to understand other points of view.

To help students learn to do all this, we’ve published a companion lesson plan: Talking Across Divides: 10 Ways to Encourage Civil Classroom Conversation On Difficult Issues. You can find teaching activities for each of our guidelines there.

Although this isn’t exactly a “contest” with traditional winners, sometime after Election Day we plan to reflect on the results and call out some of our favorite comments and conversations from the five forums.


This lesson is coming in a little late to follow their exact posted timeline, but you can use any/all pieces as you see fit within in the time we have.

As always please leave comments below if you try this lesson in your classroom. Share what worked, challenges, and cool things you switched it up with:) 

Have a great weekend,

Sara

Do you need history resources? We have them!

Dear teachers,

I'd like to share our Momentum Learning U.S. History and World History lesson guides developed by a group of our teachers, coaches, and SDCOE history-social sciences coordinator Matt Hayes over the past year for your review. 

The California History/Social Science framework has been approved.  The California History/Social Science standards remain in place and have not changed; however, the way we teach it has.  The framework, as well as our Momentum Instructional Focus, calls for an inquiry driven pedagogy to teach content standards and California Common Core Literacy in History/Social Science Standards.  

Our lesson guides are not our new adopted curriculum, but they are a resource to guide teachers in meeting the instructional shifts called for by the new framework. Both guides include lessons that cover all of the History/Social Science Standards for world and U.S. history.  Additionally, suggested learning targets/success criteria and possible summative/formative assessments are included. 

If you would like to engage in one-on-one and/or small group professional learning/coaching around designing and teaching inquiry lessons for history/social science, please contact me to schedule a time to collaborate.

The guides can be found at:

U.S. History 
https://docs.google.com/a/sdjccs.net/document/d/1aFOk9-NqYAknq8amIgs-cMiPoUta2pQmuzXnAdWh5ZU/edit?usp=drive_web

World History -https://docs.google.com/a/sdjccs.net/document/d/1xqpF1B_Xo_JGHjdUMgJfxkF4B3qoxBy8nbUv4iYwxMg/edit?usp=drive_web

Melanie

Welcome back coaching letter

Welcome back! We hope that you had an amazing summer!

The Coaches are here as a resource for all teachers...and we are excited for another year of working together around a student-centered goal!

Some of the areas that we can offer support in are:

• Support with Momentum Learning's Instructional Focus
• All learners co-construct meaning and demonstrate deep understanding through relevant, rigorous, and inquiry-based learning tasks aligned to standards.
• Support with Implementing the Newly Approved California History-Social Science Framework
• Support with Implementing the NGSS Science Standards
• Track II Evaluation - Creating a Student-Centered Learning Goal and Evidence/Data Collection
• Lesson Planning/Design
• Literacy Across the Curriculum (Reading, Writing, Speaking)
• Notebooking as a Thinking Tool
• ELD Implementation
• Student Talk
• Questioning Strategies
• Learning Targets/Success Criteria