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  September 2011

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This site will now be used solely for my courses.  Please visit me at www.trishellis.net and enjoy an online community of learning related to the brain and how we learn.

If you have enjoyed reading any of the other pages on this site or if you are interested in the brain and how we learn, I invite you to follow my “All About the Brain” blog series.   Over the course of the next year, I will be writing several “All About the Brain” series.  The topics will range from The Adolescent Brain to Alcohol, Drugs and Our Children:  What Every Parent Needs to Know.  The first topic is going to cover the fundamentals:  How the Brain Learns.  If this is of interest to you, check weekly for a new blog post.  As always, I welcome feedback and suggestions to help make this series most effective and relevant to you.

www.amenclinics.com

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

“We’re educating people out of their creative capacities.”

These are two quotes from Sir Ken Robinson in his talk on “Do Schools Kill Creativity”.  If you like these quotes, you won’t want to miss his podcast on TedTalks.  What I find unfortunate is that he gave this talk in 2006, and I’m not sure if anything significant has really changed in our schools – or our business place – in the past four years.  Having said that, I am heartened by all of the teachers taking this course.  I am further heartened that we have a person working in the business world taking this course.  This course won’t save our education system, but it will encourage creativity among adults and provide a myriad of resources to bring creativity into our classrooms.

I feel the same about LibraryThing as I do about the other resources – quite awesome and very time-consuming to peruse, use, and share.  Having said that, this seems like one that would be worth the time for classroom teachers and their students.  Actually, I will spend more time checking it out, but I’m thinking it might be very helpful in cataloging my own library.  While I love my Kindle, I prefer my “hard copy” library for professional reading, so I have hundreds of books on neuroeducation, adolescents, teaching, professional development, gender differences,  and so on.  I keep thinking about creating an Excel document to catologue and organize my collection, but now I’m going to do a little more digging to decide if LibraryThing would be more efficient.

I’m with my colleague bugspsu . . . delicious seems like a great way to organize bookmarks, and in fact, I am using it.  However, it is very time consuming to set up all of the tags.  What I’ve found most consuming and exhausting about most of the Web 2.0 tools is the energy it takes to change the way I think.  Every single tool is helpful- no question.  It’s just that for me, personally, it takes a great deal of time and energy to wrap my mind around each tool and then assimilate it into all of the others.  This isn’t a complaint as much as an observation.  I find it fascinating how our thinking evolves from a generational standpoint.  My 21 year old niece would be flying through this course and all of these online resources because she was taught to think differently.  This course is great in that it started my brain exercising in a way it hasn’t done before.  This is a very brain-healthy thing.   It’s my job to sift and sort and manage my time.

If you don’t have a website or if you have a company creating and managing your website, you definitely want to check out  Weebly.com. About four years ago when I developed my company, Commitment to Learning, I tried creating my own website.  Whether I wasn’t as technically savvy as I am now (a bit of a stretch) or whether the tools are just more user friendly, I had no success.  The end product looked like a kindergarten project.  So I hired a design company, and their genius created a very professional website that has served me well for the past few years.  Enter 23 Things and Weebly.com.   Perfect timing, as I have been thinking that it would be nice to be able to edit my website when I want to rather than having to email someone else and pay them to do it.

I spent the past day playing around and wah lah . . . I created my own website that I can change any time I want to.  While I admit that it isn’t as spectacular as www.commitmenttolearning.com, I do think my new website, www.trishellis.net, serves its purpose perfectly – and even better because after the end of this course, I will be continuing my blogging through this new website.

Compare the two websites, and let me know what you think.

My online conference brought me back to the question I posed in my wiki sandbox:  When will we actually listen to the results of research in order to make effective changes to how we teach and learn?  In his online conference titled Self-driven and Classroom-based: Professional Development in the 21st Century, Konrad Glogowski emphasizes that the most effective professional development happens in our classrooms with out students.  He asserts that if we want to prepare our students to be successful beyond our classrooms, we must model for them inquiry learning and teaching, which means engaging them in asking questions and making decisions about what and how they learn.   Glogowski suggests that the most effective professional development begins with a clear understanding that our classrooms are our context, and therefore, most of our professional learning must happen in the context of our classrooms versus the context of workshops or conferences.  He further asserts that the process must be framed as learning with versus learning from.  This means we learn with our colleagues and our students through an interactive process that always keeps our student and the context of our classrooms at the center of that learning.

While I am in 100% agreement with Glowgowski, once again my opinion is irrelevant.  The research speaks much more loudly and effectively.  In 2009 the National Staff Development Council published the results of an international study titled  Professional Learning in the Learning Profession.  The results confirmed what engaged teachers have known for years:  collaborative, student-centered professional learning that occurs in the classroom has the greatest impact on student learning outcomes.  This, essentially, is what Glogowski is saying.  Collaborate with your colleagues.  Collaborate with your students.  Model how to be a reflective practitioner in the classroom with your students.  Here are two ideas:

• During first quarter – or fourth quarter if that’s what you have – engage your students in four different learning structures or tools.  These could include reciprocal teaching, independent projects, choice in a unit sub-topic to explore, application of any number of the tools we’ve been learning in our 23 Things course.  Then have them each individually and together as a group reflect on their experiences.  Which was most fun, which was most challenging, what surprised you, how did you learn best?  Allow them to make suggestions to you for future units and next year’s classes.  Don’t forget to be engaged with your students in this reflective process.  Share with them which lessons or teaching tools took you the most time to plan, from which did you learn the most, what observations of their learning did you make, which would you want to repeat or recommend to a colleague?

• Engage the students in the classroom observation and evaluation process.  Each quarter or twice a quarter, have one student be the observer for the day – or even for two to three days.  Work together to make an observation sheet of questions and areas of focus.  These might include how you communicated with the students, your explanation of the assignment or task, the amount of time spent engaging in activity versus transitioning or collecting papers – really any areas where you would like feedback.  They might even be observing the depth of discussion and learning of both teacher and students.  At the outset, make clear your goal and expected outcomes for this observation task.  Agree on what the product of the observation should look like.  The student then prepares the final observation product, which can be used as a springboard for an interactive classroom discussion.  Be prepared to tweak your teaching based on the results otherwise it is an empty activity and students will know that.

One final note . . . at first read, these may sound like activities only possible in a middle or high school classroom.  Not so.  In a simplified or modified form, both of these activities would be incredibly impactful at any grade level (channel your inner Montessori) and, in fact, would most effectively begin in our lower grades in order to create inquiring, engaged learners from the start.

Let me start by saying that I don’t know how people find the time to write blogs, read others’ blogs, comment on blogs, maintain wikispaces, surf the net, surf the net and actually read interesting sites/articles, apply new technology to respective industries, read the newspaper – online or from the front doorstep, do laundry, feed the dog, make dinner, pay bills, plan their next teaching lesson or unit, read interesting and challenging literature, pray and meditate, exercise (more than bending over to pull on socks), play with their children, take their children to dentist appointments, bathe, spend time with their spouses – and how about actually spending meaningful time with their spouses, and sleep.  Do any of you sleep?

Whew!  Just needed to get that out there.  Having dumped that, as you are choosing between the many activities of your day, check out this blog on the value of reading.  I maintain a subscription to Successful Teaching by Pat Hensley, which I have found to be a blog of substance consistently.  She comments on another blog entitled Encountering the Other:  How Literature Will Save the World.

Extraordinary post. I had not previously recognized that particular benefit from reading which was identified – the connection to and understanding of others. As I reflect on it, reading, and reading literature specifically, certainly does engage us with others across geography, chronology, and culture.

Our kids – and now I understand many adults – are becoming self-absorbed due to the nature of and time spent engaging in social media (Facebook, twitter). Moreover, the absorption appears to be very superficial. I recently heard that 25% of people who are on Facebook actually update their page before even getting out of bed in the morning. Seriously, what’s to update?

Reading is difficult. Thinking – and I mean really being engaged in the task of thinking – is difficult. Both require exertion. The author of “Encountering . . . ” makes a commitment  to engage herself and her students in the tasks of reading  and thinking about what they’re reading.  I’ve decided to make a more concerted effort in this area myself – and once you’ve read these blogs, I suspect you will do the same (in between doing the laundry, paying the bills, exercising, making dinner . . . ).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/angelaypablo/860181962/Our computers by Aranarth

http://www.flickr.com/photos/astrid/4151899795/ running with dog by AstridWestvang

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rajarshi/3729332748/ magic of books by Rishi S

After helping my mom through surgery and the initial recovery, I’m finally getting back on track.  While I suggested to her that I could document her surgical story for my slide show, she wasn’t too keen on that.  Thus, I’m falling back on what’s comfortable and doing a very partial slide show on cranberries.  FlickerCC didn’t have very many photos, but it was certainly sufficient to learn the basics of creating and embedding.  I invite you to view my very brief slide show here or on my wikipage – Cranberries:  The Partial Story.

I’m comfortable with copyrighted material. I grew up with respecting copyright as a student and then copyrighting my own work as an educational consultant.  It’s familiar and it’s safe.  Enter Creative Commons (CC).  CC is an unknown.  It’s not familiar, and it pushes me into an uncomfortable place of questioning everything I’ve understood about what’s mine and what’s not mine.  Frankly, it makes me feel like a hoarder for not sharing my work more freely.  I mean, if MIT makes available so many of their courses and course materials online through MITOpenCourseware, who am I not to share my materials?

When I started my company, Commitment to Learning, I was advised not to put my handouts on my website.  The thinking was that if you had my materials, why would you need to hire me?  Along comes 23 Things, where my world is being turned upside down, where “collaborating”(on wikispaces) and “sharing” (like MIT) are being taken to a whole new level.  Whew!  So glad that tomorrow is a day of rest.

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