Happy Friday!
Here’s some great reading from Ontario Edubloggers to kick off your weekend.
I always get inspiration and ideas from Deborah McCallum’s posts and this one is no different.
Speaking of different, she sets the stage by talking about the way that we’ve traditionally made the study of language different from the study of Mathematics. She introduces us to the concept of reading for meaning nicely to Mathematics.
Who hasn’t struggled with an involved question that you’re positive the teacher stayed up all night trying to get the wording just right to mess up your day?
So, just like there are tools and techniques for understanding reading material, could the concepts not be applied here?
She builds a nice argument and provides 10 suggestions to make it work.
Why not try guided reading to help students build cognitive, metacognitive and affective skills for reading complex math problems? I encourage you to give it a try.
What Makes A Partnership Work?
You don’t have to follow Aviva Dunsiger for long on any social media before you see a reference to her “teaching partner Paula”.
This blog post is really a testament to the powerful relationship that the two of them have in their kindergarten classroom that I now know has about 30-ish students.
It’s a typical Aviva post – lots of colours and pictures. You’re going to love them.
There’s a powerful message in this post about partnerships in their case. It’s built beyond the professional requirement that they be in the same place at the same time.
As always, she’s looking for comments about similar relationships Stories like this are inspirational in education, particular at this time in Ontario.
Sue Bruyns provides a bit of background with reading from Professionally Speaking but quickly gets to the heart of a very important issue.
It happens often in education.
I think we can all think of successful innovation stories. Little pockets of excellence at a school or within a department that swells and changes professional practice for others, sometimes changing the direction of things.
There are also other moments not as successful and we don’t always hear about them. Read Sue’s post and you’ll be exposed to one. A group of collaborators take to a piece of software, learn together, and make good things happen. Sue even notes that the company’s CEO flew in from British Columbia to help with some compatibility details. Staff persevered and the software started to show the results promised at Arthur Currie and other schools.
Then, it happened.
A directive from outside the school indicated that the software could no longer be used and that a board approved solution needed to be put in place.
You can’t help but feel sorry for those who spent two years learning and growing with the software. I hope that this gets past the software issue and that the skills and knowledge developed on the initial platform can be transferred to the board approved solution.
I really appreciated reading this post; we don’t often read thoughts from principals and even more infrequently their leadership challenges when influenced from outside the school.
Recess is as Real Life as it Gets
With a background in secondary school, I was out of my element here when the topic turned to recess. It just wasn’t a thing for me unless you counted “travel time” of five minutes between classes…
I really enjoyed the picture The Beast paints of recess and what happens there. I kept thinking that recess and some of the activities described were really application of the things that went on in class.
But, it’s not all fun and games.
And then, as The Beast does, they dig into just what recess actually is. More importantly are their thoughts about what recess could be in their perfect world.
I’m also still trying to figure this out…
Circle back around to the beginning of your post and what we know to be the difference between Dougie’s type of learning and actual learning.
When it comes to mental health in Canada, the gap is still too wide
Before we get to the message in Paul McGuire’s blog post, here’s an observation about format. For the most part, blogging platforms let you categorize and tag posts with words so that you can search later. Typically, this appears at the bottom of the post. In the format that Paul has chosen they appear at the top and one of the tags was “hope”. That helped me frame a reading mindset as I dug in.
He praises Supreme Court Justice Clement Gascon for publically acknowledging his challenges with mental health issues.
We live in a great country. Have we not resolved this?
The World Health Organization reports that in low- and middle-income countries, between 76% and 85% of people with mental disorders receive no treatment for their disorder. In high-income countries, between 35% and 50% of people with mental disorders are in the same situation.
Those statistics should shock you and I would hope would shock society into realizing that we need to do better.
This is a sobering post and I thank Paul for writing about it and bringing it to our attention. I encourage you to take the time to visit and read it. You may end up looking at some of those faces in your classroom differently going forward.
I kind of found myself out of water and then back in again with this post from Lisa Cranston.
I studied Mathematics and Computer Science at university so the concept of writing big research papers, much less a dissertation, is completely foreign to me. At the time, I hated writing – in high school it always seems that you were writing to be on the good side of the teacher instead of something that you were interested in. I probably have that all wrong but that’s how I remember it.
So, I’ve never had the stress and stressors that Lisa describes in trying to do a long-term writing project.
But, these days, I write every day, albeit not the long-term format Lisa describes. I enjoy writing now and doing whatever research goes into what I do. I was quite interested in Lisa’s suggestion for low cost, self care…
Some suggestions for low cost, short term self-care include: a hot cup of tea, a walk outdoors, playing with a pet, holding hands with a loved one, reading a chapter in a non-work related book.
I’ve got all this nailed except coffee is a replacement for tea and reading blog posts substitute for non-work related book. (although there always is something on paper beside my chair)
I’m curious though about her definition of “mindless screen time”. I’d really like a definition of that.
bringing back the participatory: a story of the #ProSocialWeb
I’m in love with this very long post from Bonnie Stewart.
Play this album while you read it.
I feel very old when I read her definition of “old-skool Web 2.0”
The participatory web, originally – the old-skool Web 2.0 where readers were also writers and contributors and people were tied together by blog comments – but also social media. Twitter. Even Facebook. Together, these various platforms have networked me into some of the most important conversations and relationships of my life.
That was me in the early days.
I like to think that’s me today. Maybe I haven’t moved on. I value those connections; I worked hard to make those connections; I learned that success didn’t happen over night; I valued the connections; I never thought of myself as a piece of data.
Things indeed are different now. Bonnie describes what is and why.
I love this quote that she includes in the slidedeck embedded.
“If you want to travel fast, travel alone. If you want to travel far, travel together”
I often wonder if those of us who were early adopters aren’t part of the problem. How many times have we shown the “power” of connections and the web and convinced others to join in? The missing part is that we don’t share how much hard work went into our initial learning to make it happen. We know it isn’t immediate gratification; do we share that?
Cringe the next time you’re asked to show the “power” of social networking by retweeting or liking a message.
You know that it’s much more than that and there’s great potential in the ProSocialWeb.
OK, inspired for a Friday – go forth and conquer now that you’re smarter than you were went you started. You did click through and read this amazing content, didn’t you?
Follow these amazing folks on Twitter.
This post originally appeared on:
https://dougpete.wordpress.com
If you read it anywhere else, it’s not the original.
doug -- off the record 
Leave a reply to adunsiger Cancel reply