Poetry on Slideshare

Just finishing a 2 week unit on imagery in poems and the class have done a great job of using similes.

I like teaching poetry partly because you don't need to write so much so, in terms used on the MAST maths course, it is a lower threshold activity. They used to call this lower barriers to entry in my Degree Economics course. Again, similar to my MAST activities which were rich tasks, it is definitely a high threshold activity, allowing children to soar when they get the bug!

Our home learning in class this week is to write a poem. Last week 29 out of 33 children handed in their project home learning with an incredible range of presentation styles. Have extended the deadline again this week to just over 2 weeks to allow a slower, more thoughtful, and hopefully higher quality end product. I was reminded of the great slideshare site with its enormous range of slides.
Here is a great teacher resource if you want to save some time teaching a number of poetry styles:

Teaching Poetry

View more PowerPoint from mungo13

 Here is one I'll also post to the class blog.

Writing for an audience - project based learning

When student work culminates in a genuine product for an authentic audience, it makes a world of difference.

Look here of the article from ASCD about projects and the  Expeditionary Learning Schools.

Project Based learning

This video is a great example of PBL. It comes from the Buck Institute.
It includes segments showing the planning stages and exemplifies how PBL should have a real purpose.
Here, the curriculum does not seem to be a rigid force which has to be manipulated, rather the project presents reasons for the skills and knowledge to be learnt.

Do the teachers keep track of what has been learned?
Do teachers make notes of who contributed, who succeeded and who worked the hardest?
Does this school ONLY use PBL?



The real life context of the learning provides the motivation...decisions which the children take will have a real effect on their surroundings and way of life:

The influence of contextual factors on cognition has also engendered a good deal of
research and has, according to the citations in PBL research, had an important influence on the
authenticity and autonomy elements of Project-Based Learning. According to research on
"situated cognition," learning is maximized if the context for learning resembles the real-life
context in which the to-be-learned material will be used; learning is minimized if the context in
which learning occurs is dissimilar to the context in which the learning will be used (Brown,Collins & Duguid, 1989).
(A REVIEW OF RESEARCH ON PROJECT-BASED LEARNING, John W. Thomas, Ph. D
March, 2000, )

Enquiry in School

Last year when Michelle, Anthony, Anne, Colin, John, Jackie and I met up we decided to work find out about Project based learning and Enquiry.

Here is Colin's review of the literature and good practice.
He kindly said I could publish it here.

G&T - contracts and compacting - maintaining the motivation

I was working away on my MA module which is to design a small scale research project. I have chosen to look at a form of differentiation which has been around in America for almost 30 years, and is called curriculum compacting. It appears quite frequently in the American literature, but I don't think it has really emerged as a concept in UK or international teaching.

Anyway I stumbled on a few gems.

One of them is the Education Resources Information Centre.
There was no cost and I didn't need to register. It seemed very easy to use and had a wide range of academic studies.

The other was the article I was able to download This pdf is titled Providing Curriculum Alternatives To Motivate Gifted Students. The part I was interested in, which looked at compacting a curriculum into a shorter period of time, was very clear and well worded. The idea was developed by Renzulli, Smith and Reis in 1982. It seems to be set against a teaching background in which there is little differentiation, seemingly dumbed down textbooks and a tendency for all teachers to teach by the textbook. The idea is not rocket science (speaking od which look at this for some rocket powered action) but tries to:

1. Identify the key learning objectives of a unit.
2. Identify children who have sufficient mastery of these even before they have started the topic.
3. Provide these G&T children with other opportunities for learning, at the same time as a giving them a study guide to develop new concepts. Eligible students will be expected to learn the study guide material, but it is understood that they will spend the majority of their school time working on their extension tasks. Students should not be required to write out the answers for the content of the study guide. They may use any means they choose to learn the material, but must be able to demonstrate mastery.
   

It is a way of maintaining interest in the curriculum while "buying time" to persue other learning interests. Seems sensible.

How much work would it take to do this for a subject? I'm not sure, but wouldn't it be good to have a framework to support teachers to develop these materials. It would certainly allow more able children to broaden their knowledge and understanding of the world. Non contact time for teachers to develop curriculum materials to support the G&T. The materials could be based on the QCA guidelines and learning outcomes.

Also part of the PDF was a good section on contracts and independent study. This could really support PBL (project based learning) as a small scale part of classroom activity.

I'm sure that this is the way forward if we want to make learning more relevant, interesting and useful for a life after school.

Monday 9th March - Colin, Ben, Anthony

We met and decided that if we meet next week briefly on Monday 16th, then aim to collect all of our reviews which point towards Project Based Learning for the following Monday, 23rd March. This would allow us to collect information on this site by the following week, 30th March. We could invite along MAMI and others. We could also include suggestions for ways forward...Action research, Year Group Short Term Projects...