Sliced Bread

 Enjoyed this article @ NAIS while watching the opening ceremony, hope all those 888’s turn lucky for my team. Thanks Darcy for alerting me to it.

Transforming Students’ Motivation to Learn  by Carol Dweck

This is why so many bright students stop working when school becomes hard. Many bright students find primary school easy and coast to success early on. But later on, when they are challenged, they struggle. They don’t want to make mistakes and feel dumb — and, most of all, they don’t want to work hard and feel dumb. So they simply retire.

Dweck’s research also found

It is the belief that intelligence can be developed that opens students to a love of learning, a belief in the power of effort and constructive, determined reactions to setbacks.

The children praised for their intelligence did not want to learn. When we offered them a challenging task that they could learn from, the majority opted for an easier one, one on which they could avoid making mistakes. The children praised for their effort wanted the task they could learn from.

How do you praise students? Can we do it differently? (Croatia is just marching in … Aussies are third last… d’oh)

By focusing them on the process they engaged in — their effort, their strategies, their concentration, their perseverance, or their improvement.

“You really stuck to that until you got it. That’s wonderful!”

“It was a hard project, but you did it one step at a time and it turned out great!”

“I like how you chose the tough problems to solve. You’re really going to stretch yourself and learn new things.”

Another top read “You Can Grow Your Intelligence”.  I’ll share this with my Year 7’s on Monday morning.

Back to the Games, the Aussies are on soon, I hope.

 

I have sensed the frustration of a powerered down, disconnected learner these past 3 weeks. This is not a good feeling at all. Maybe this reflects many students views of 21st century school education?

At work, early most mornings, I have been trying to access, download and install four free on line software programs for the past 3 weeks. I did this at home in my holidays in less than 10 minutes.

Not having admin rights to these simple installs, I have many hoops to jump through before I can continue my PD at work, Dumb? You betcha.

Java, Moodle, del.icio.us and the DET NSW Promethean IWB package will all help me learn more about this read/write world of web2.0. 

I am trying to learn at work, engage with what I see as valuable PD and yet my growing sense of frustration in achieving even these basic steps makes you reconsider.

I will persevere because I think this is important but why is DET NSW making it so hard? Surely we can all do better?

An interesting article in this months Australian Teacher Magazine

Networking sites such as MySpace and changes in the way we socialise. The problem is: teachers, like many adults, don’t “get it”. Danah Boyd says educators need to consider the role social networking sites play in teens’ lives and discuss online practices.

Boyd says educators should not condemn these sites, but invite debate about issues involving them.
“There’s a lot to be said about educating people, [instead of] telling them the rules, to understand how the decisions they make in these spaces will affect their lives.”

Choice theory, reality therapy revisited.