The Significance of Low-stakes writing

A post about the significance of response writing:
http://tomakeaprairie.wordpress.com/2014/11/13/writing-meaningfully-about-meaningful-reading-part-1-a-look-at-low-stakes-writing/

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Expressing Voice - Poetry Out Loud

Significant Learning: Expressing Voice The homogenizing forces in education seem to abound these days, with standardized testing, teacher evaluation, and politics involved. I find that my soul sings as a teacher when I find something worthwhile for my particular students and polishing and prepare it for them in particular, adjusting, tinkering and making it real for them. In this act of curricular creation, I am expressing my voice as a teacher (albeit filtered through Common Core standards and common assessments). In turn, we need to create the space to allow students to voice their own ideas and concerns and to take the ideas seriously enough that they can be of consequence. For example, rather than simply an academic study of poetry, students at my high school learn to perform in through poetryoutloud.org . Such a shift pushes the learning target away from knowledge exclusively toward product, which represents a shift in the ways of knowing and the configu...

Blended Learning ELA White Paper Musings/Draft

Vision of Blended Learning ELA -- White Paper This vision concerns how implement Blended Learning in the High School setting, in an ELA department in particular. What is Blended Learning? In a secondary school ELA department, we see the opportunity to focus our work on three modes of interaction, each with several variations ( image link/credit ). The result, we feel, will be a constructivist learning space, in which teachers and students address literary texts, literacy skills, and real-world problems in a problem-based learning format. The primary educational mode is still face-to-face interaction, even in a blended classroom. Nothing seems to be quite able to substitute for the caring, insightful, focused presence of a teacher or coach, on hand and engaged with the learner in the content or skill being learned. In ELA, a discussion of social class in The Great Gatsby benefits greatly from seeing the reactions on classmates' or the teacher's face w...

Teachers of Significance

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