My weekly Education Week Teacher advice column/blog will begin next week. It will be an advice column comprised of questions submitted by readers and answers contributed by me, readers and special guests.
This blog’s readers have already submitted several great questions that will get the column started, and I’ll be constantly looking for more. Ask anything related to K-12 education, including classroom management, instructional strategies, school reform, administration, etc. And if I don’t know anything about the topic, I have plenty of valuable colleagues from around the world who do!
Anyone whose question is selected for this weekly column can choose one free book from a selection of twelve (including mine) published by Eye On Education. I’m not a big believer in using incentives, but just thought this might be a nice way to get good books in the hands of teachers.
For now, you can leave questions in the comments section of this post.
I have an extended lesson plan in my book, Helping Students Motivate Themselves, designed to help students develop a little more personal responsibility and not blame others as often times as many do — I suspect we’ve all heard the comments “He made me do it” or “It’s your fault.”
A new related study was just published today, and I thought I’d use it as an excuse to bring together a few previous posts I’ve written about the topic.
Of course, students aren’t the only ones who can fall into the “blame game.” I’ve included a few posts here that might relate to the school reform debate. This is not to say, however, that it’s never okay to place blame where it’s appropriate. It’s just that I think we all tend to lead more with blaming instead of having blame come out of introspection, reflection and analysis.
Feel free to suggest additional resources. When you go to some of my posts, please be sure to check out the comments.
Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Helping Students Learn The Concept Of Not Blaming Others:
FOR STUDENTS:
Can Blaming Others Make People Sick? is the headline of the article on today’s new study. Here’s an excerpt I’ll certainly be adding to my lesson:
Unlike regret, which is about self-blame and a case of “woulda, coulda, shoulda,” acrimony points the finger elsewhere — laying the blame for failure on external causes. “When harboured for a long time,” says Wrosch, “bitterness may forecast patterns of biological dysregulation (a physiological impairment that can affect metabolism, immune response or organ function) and physical disease.”
McREL Blog has a good summary and commentary on a report on who’s to blame for dropouts. The post is called Addressing High School Dropout: Taking a Look Inward. In the report, a lot of people are blaming someone else for the problem — except for one group. I’d encourage you to read the entire post. Here’s a quote:
“Here’s what’s interesting, though—according to the “ Silent Epidemic” report, most students (70%) do actually blame themselves, saying they could graduate if they had tried harder. Further, the report informs us that “while most dropouts blame themselves for failing to graduate, there are things they say schools can do to help them finish.”
Thus, it appears that everyone else seems to be blaming someone else, except the kids who drop out. What should that tell us?
Our dropout crisis will persist until each of us takes a look at those fingers pointing back at us, and identify our own culpability in our nation’s dropout crisis.
Change will require us to be introspective and acknowledge our own shortcomings. Once we do that, then we might be able to collaborate to present viable solutions to address high school dropout.”
Sock Puppets is a simple iPhone app that lets you easily record a student and upload it to YouTube. It can be used to briefly record a student speaking or reading in class, or even to have two or three students record a simple play (the free app allows thirty seconds of recording while for 99 cents you can upgrade to 90 seconds). One major advantage of using this for speaking practice is that it’s the sock puppet that’s actually speaking on the display, not the student. It looks like it could have potential. Thanks to techchef4u for the tip.
David Einstein writes an advice column on technology for the San Francisco Chronicle, and recently wrote one on apps for translating languages on smart phones. It’s short and worth reading. Here are the three he recommends:
Obviously, photos can be great educational tools with English Language Learners and with any students (see The Best Ways To Use Photos In Lessons). I post about many photo galleries, also called slideshows. To do it in a little more organized way, though, I recently began this weekly feature called “Photo Galleries Of The Week.” This post is a “round-up” of online slideshows I’m adding to various “The Best…” lists:
The summer always feels so long at the beginning and so short at the end….
It’s getting that time again — a new school year.
I have an extensive chapter in my book, Helping Students Motivate Themselves, on getting the school year off to a good start, and I thought I’d also share here some free online resources.
Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Planning The First Day Of School:
I’ve got to start off with a previous post titled Answers To “What Do You Do On The First Day Of School?” There, I shared what I do on the first day, and many other teachers shared their strategies, too.
Education.com shares a number of first day ideas, and I can’t endorse all of them. But I particularly like one — having students share their high points from the previous year. Not only could that be energizing, but a teacher could learn a whole lot about their students based on what they say.
Over the past few months, I’ve recommended several posts from Gary Rubenstein’s blog, and here’s another one — this time, about the first day of school. His book, Beyond Survival, also has many more hints — about the first day and beyond.
Eva Buyuksimkesyan published a fabulous 24th Edition of EFL/ESL/ELL Blog Carnival chock full of “Warmers, Fillers and 1st Week Activities.” This is a Blog Carnival that teachers will be referring to for years to come!
I’d strongly encourage you to read the whole piece. Here are some excerpts:
Teachers actually control a very small part of the variance. Parents control some of it. Neighborhoods control some of it. What people decide to put on the test controls some of it. And the weather, and whether a kid is sick, and lots of other things determine the final score.
So when we create these score-based systems, we not only tend to focus teachers on a very small subset of [what we want schools to accomplish], but we also reward them largely on things that are outside of their control. And that’s a very, very bad system.
I think that we just need to get people who really care about teaching. We need to pay them a living wage, and we need to make sure that they are proud of what they’re doing. We need to give them autonomy and flexibility, and we need to put trust in them. And that would motivate them.
A couple of years ago I posted The Best Basic Sites For K-12 Beginning English Language Learners. For every other “The Best…” list I’ve revised, I’ve just made changes to the original post. However, even though there are a number of changes in this revised list, I’m leaving the older post as it was since there are still some good sites on it.
In a few weeks I begin teaching Beginning English Language Learners again after a bit of a break — I’ve been teaching either Early Intermediates or Intermediates for the last few years. I’m generally going to be pretty strategic about what I ask them to do in the computer lab for reinforcing activities (and for creating their own online content). However, I also wanted to identify a short list of sites I encourage them to periodically explore.
This “The Best…” list is the result.
Let me know if you think I’m missing any from this list, or if you think any that I’ve included should be taken off….
Here are my choices for The Best Ten Basic Sites For Beginning English Language Learners (Revised) — and they’re not listed in any order of priority, except for the first one:
English Central, of course, is the favorite of many ESL/EFL teachers. I’ve written about it constantly, and continue to be amazed by the site. In fact, this Tuesday morning it’s coming out with a major upgrade, which you can read about at David Deubelbeiss’ blog. And, in the unlikely even you don’t know what English Central is, here’s a short video explaining it:
Henny Jellema’s Online TPR Exercises has got to be on this list. You’ve got to see this site to believe it. I can’t imagine the amount of work that went into creating the exercises. However, as he cautions, it’s critical to combine using his online activities with real-life Total Physical Response lessons.
U.S.A Learns is an incredible website to help users learn English. Even though it’s primarily designed for older learners, it seems very accessible to all but the very youngest ELL’s. It’s free to use. Students can register if they want to save their work and evaluate their progress. It’s a joint effort of the Sacramento County Office of Education (SCOE), Internet and Media Services Department and the Project IDEAL Support Center at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.
Starfall has to be on this list, too, for its extraordinary beginning reading activities.
Kiz Club also has a great collection of accessible stories.
For other reading activities, I’m sort of cheating by listing the Fiction Stories and Non-Fiction section of my website and counting it as one for the purposes of this list. There are links to thousands of “talking stories” there. I’ve been a bit lax in keeping up some pages of my student site, but these should be relatively up-to-date.
Strivney is a free newer site for beginning readers (it has a special section for English Language Learners) with 1,000 interactive exercises and games. You need to register for most beyond the sample exercises, but it’s super easy to do so. The site also has printables you can use to reinforce the online activities.
ESOL Courses has a good, basic introduction to English.
Into The Book has interactive exercises that reinforce students learning how to apply reading strategies.
Fotobabble is my favorite all-purpose Web 2.0 site. Students can grab any photo off the web, or upload their own, and record a one minute narration that goes along with it. It can be used for speaking practice, as a formative reading assessment with students reading a weeks apart so they can see their improvement — the list is endless,and I’ve posted many times about how I use it with students.
In my classroom, and in my books, I often share short folktales to help communicate “life lessons” — perseverance, the importance of relationships, etc. Obviously, we teachers can and should use our own background knowledge and skills to find these stories and develop interpretations for them.
Sometimes, though, it’s nice to have had someone do some of the work for us already.
Here are a few sources of good folktales — with interpretations already clearly embedded in them. I hope readers and share other sites, too.
Thee are my choices for The Best Sites For Finding Folktales To Teach “Life Lessons”:
I have a huge backlog of resources that I’ve been planning to post about in this blog but, just because of time constraints, have not gotten around to doing. Instead of letting that backlog grow bigger, I regularly grab a few and list them here with a minimal description. It forces me to look through these older links, and help me organize them for my own use. I hope others will find them helpful, too. These are resources that I didn’t include in my “Best Tweets” feature because I had planned to post about them, or because I didn’t even get around to sending a tweet sharing them.
Here are This Week’s “Links I Should Have Posted About, But Didn’t”:
A new study reports that training people through online games to strengthen their working memory results in a substantial increase in their impulse control.
This could be just one more tool in a teacher’s toolbox. I could see trying something like this out with a student who has not responded well to the multiple other strategies I might have tried — perhaps, for a couple of weeks, during the fifteen minutes of practice reading time we have at the beginning of each class, instead just inviting him to use my computer to play some memory games to see what happens (after, of course, explaining to him its purpose and the research behind it).
As always, of course, often the fact that students see that the teacher is going the extra mile to help them has as much of an impact, if not a far greater one, than any potential direct cognitive impact an intervention like this might have.
Here are a few online memory games I’ve found that appear decent — please share others you suggest in the comments section (I primarily want to find games that don’t have easy links to other non-memory games that could prove tempting):
Google+ now gives members a link that up to 150 people can use to join the network. So, if you want to check it out and you’re one of the first 150 people to click on this link, it will let you join.
Smurf Yourself lets you choose and dress a Smurf, record it saying something, and then send or post it on blog or website. No registration is required. It’s a fun and simple way for students to practice their English.
The eight articles are pretty impressive, and I’m honored that one I wrote on parent engagement is included. My article is titled Involvement Or Engagement?
I’m writing another one for them — this time on teaching English Language Learners. I wonder if it will make the cut for next year’s “Best” issue?
It has some interesting info, including the fact that Comcast was required to do a program like this in order to get their purchase of NBC approved earlier this year.
