Leadership Icebreaker

This exercise is always a fun component for the Leadership class... Students are put in charge for the first time in this class and lead an icebreaker "drill". Today they broke up into teams and began planning how they would implement it. Over the next two days the students will lead the rest of the class in the icebreaker. We will begin to see how they work as teams and who will emerge as leaders.

The teams are given a worksheet that helps them question how well they performed. It's the evaluative piece that gets them thinking about whether the icebreaker they chose was a good one and how they need to deliver some actual value to the classroom experience.

Have they learned everyone's names yet? That helps a lot. We will begin to see how this plays out over the next two days.

2nd day

Not that I plan to make a post each and every day, but two days in a row - now that's something for me...

So this is a quick post. Today I'll say the students were more in awe and not as squirrely at least for me.

I'm not sure why, but I tend to do well in this niche I've found at Euclid. Often I can diagnose a problem within seconds and I'm able to fix things that others have been stumped by simply by walking in the room (at least that's the impression I tend to leave LOL). At any rate it was one of those days where I was quite busy, tended to the problem(s) at hand and went on my way leaving them in "awe". That's always fun!

I know it sounds like I am boasting and I guess I am. The point I'm trying to make though is that I've found my little niche in the world here and it's wonderful for a person to find his/hers... It may be the most important aspect of doing a job day after day. I hope all of us can find our niche and make an impact however small (at least in my case right now) as it makes a job seem more rewarding.

So I'll leave you with that thought and move on. It was a good day.

First day back

Kids were squirrelly today. I hope this isn't a sign of the whole year. They were really chatty and not their usual reserved & respectful selves that I've seen in the past.

I watched our staff battle this all day long. Not sure if it was first day jitters on the part of the students or something else? Time will tell. As for me, my approach is to set a high standard and expect students to honor that. If they don't then school won't be nearly as fun as it could and learning will suffer.

Let's hope for a better day tomorrow.

Learning and Testing

Here’s an interesting notion that may challenge your thinking about learning taken from the NY Times: I've left the link below, but NYTimes typically remove links from their site after a bit so I'm pasting the article from their website...

To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test
By PAM BELLUCK
Published: January 20, 2011

Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques.

The research, published online Thursday in the journal Science, found that students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other methods.

One of those methods — repeatedly studying the material — is familiar to legions of students who cram before exams. The other — having students draw detailed diagrams documenting what they are learning — is prized by many teachers because it forces students to make connections among facts.
These other methods not only are popular, the researchers reported; they also seem to give students the illusion that they know material better than they do.
In the experiments, the students were asked to predict how much they would remember a week after using one of the methods to learn the material. Those who took the test after reading the passage predicted they would remember less than the other students predicted — but the results were just the opposite.
“I think that learning is all about retrieving, all about reconstructing our knowledge,” said the lead author, Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University. “I think that we’re tapping into something fundamental about how the mind works when we talk about retrieval.”
Several cognitive scientists and education experts said the results were striking.
The students who took the recall tests may “recognize some gaps in their knowledge,” said Marcia Linn, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “and they might revisit the ideas in the back of their mind or the front of their mind.”
When they are later asked what they have learned, she went on, they can more easily “retrieve it and organize the knowledge that they have in a way that makes sense to them.”
The researchers engaged 200 college students in two experiments, assigning them to read several paragraphs about a scientific subject — how the digestive system works, for example, or the different types of vertebrate muscle tissue.
In the first experiment, the students were divided into four groups. One did nothing more than read the text for five minutes. Another studied the passage in four consecutive five-minute sessions.
A third group engaged in “concept mapping,” in which, with the passage in front of them, they arranged information from the passage into a kind of diagram, writing details and ideas in hand-drawn bubbles and linking the bubbles in an organized way.
The final group took a “retrieval practice” test. Without the passage in front of them, they wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 minutes. Then they reread the passage and took another retrieval practice test.
A week later all four groups were given a short-answer test that assessed their ability to recall facts and draw logical conclusions based on the facts.
The second experiment focused only on concept mapping and retrieval practice testing, with each student doing an exercise using each method. In this initial phase, researchers reported, students who made diagrams while consulting the passage included more detail than students asked to recall what they had just read in an essay.
But when they were evaluated a week later, the students in the testing group did much better than the concept mappers. They even did better when they were evaluated not with a short-answer test but with a test requiring them to draw a concept map from memory.
Why retrieval testing helps is still unknown. Perhaps it is because by remembering information we are organizing it and creating cues and connections that our brains later recognize.
“When you’re retrieving something out of a computer’s memory, you don’t change anything — it’s simple playback,” said Robert Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved with the study.
But “when we use our memories by retrieving things, we change our access” to that information, Dr. Bjork said. “What we recall becomes more recallable in the future. In a sense you are practicing what you are going to need to do later.”
It may also be that the struggle involved in recalling something helps reinforce it in our brains.
Maybe that is also why students who took retrieval practice tests were less confident about how they would perform a week later.
“The struggle helps you learn, but it makes you feel like you’re not learning,” said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College. “You feel like: ‘I don’t know it that well. This is hard and I’m having trouble coming up with this information.’ ”
By contrast, he said, when rereading texts and possibly even drawing diagrams, “you say: ‘Oh, this is easier. I read this already.’ ”

The Purdue study supports findings of a recent spate of research showing learning benefits from testing, including benefits when students get questions wrong. But by comparing testing with other methods, the study goes further.

“It really bumps it up a level of importance by contrasting it with concept mapping, which many educators think of as sort of the gold standard,” said Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia. Although “it’s not totally obvious that this is shovel-ready — put it in the classroom and it’s good to go — for educators this ought to be a big deal.”
Howard Gardner, an education professor at Harvard who advocates constructivism — the idea that children should discover their own approach to learning, emphasizing reasoning over memorization — said in an e-mail that the results “throw down the gauntlet to those progressive educators, myself included.”
“Educators who embrace seemingly more active approaches, like concept mapping,” he continued, “are challenged to devise outcome measures that can demonstrate the superiority of such constructivist approaches.”
Testing, of course, is a highly charged issue in education, drawing criticism that too much promotes rote learning, swallows valuable time for learning new things and causes excessive student anxiety.
“More testing isn’t necessarily better,” said Dr. Linn, who said her work with California school districts had found that asking students to explain what they did in a science experiment rather than having them simply conduct the hands-on experiment — a version of retrieval practice testing — was beneficial. “Some tests are just not learning opportunities. We need a different kind of testing than we currently have.”
Dr. Kornell said that “even though in the short term it may seem like a waste of time,” retrieval practice appears to “make things stick in a way that may not be used in the classroom.
“It’s going to last for the rest of their schooling, and potentially for the rest of their lives.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/science/21memory.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

I prefer their term: “retrieval practice” over test-taking, but that’s my $.02 worth. Perhaps if one used retrieval practice where it wasn’t for a grade it would reduce test-taking anxiety for students and yield better outcomes. More research…

Do the best rise to the top?

Here's my leadership question for the day:

"Do you think we live in a meritocracy?"

I'll quote Webster's definition for the word meritocracy since it's not a word most of us use everyday.

• 1. a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement
• 2. leadership selected on the basis of intellectual criteria
  
  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meritocracy

When I was about twenty years old I read some of Ayn Rand's writings. This word, meritocracy, seems to jump back in my mind to impressions and feelings I had from her writings in Atlas Shrugged and Anthem.

• Anyway, what are you thinking about this word and this post and how does it relate to leadership, our students, and even today's leaders?
• How do we instill values in our youth to make them the greatest leaders of their time?
• How does one become tomorrow's leader - it is based on leadership ability or something else?

Brainstorming 101

The class worked in groups while working out the steps for a task that they will eventually form a team and conduct for the semester. The task involved them brainstorming and coming up with all the steps needed to award falcon feathers to students by placing it on their locker.

After several minutes of brainstorming we stopped the groups and made suggestions. One of the tenets of brainstorming is that there is no "bad" idea. The scribe at each table was to write down any idea that was offered. This seemed to open the flood gates and gave the groups more freedom to think of additional ideas. After we stopped the groups after another 2 minutes we found that they had nearly doubled their steps and seemed had come up with some issues that they had not thought about before...

New Look for the blog...

Thought I'd play around with some new templates on blogger. There's a new design builder and it's kind of fun to see what Google is offering now on their site. Sure, there's a lot of other tweaks I can do, but I simply picked a new look and want some feedback...

Tell me what you think. Do you like it? Is it too dark. Does it make it better or worse? Any input at all is okay. Thanks in advance!