Pedagogy & ICL (N-Q)
Newspapers (Digital)
When students write newspaper articles in historical context or as a school community project they readily role play and author for a wider audience. Placing students working in teams to write and publish a full newspaper adds complexity to the task. Such project-based learning puts students in authentic roles and gives them ownership over the process and final product. Students could start with a class newspaper and possibly progress to publish an online newspaper to reach a wider audience. Here is a middle school example of a newspaper reporting on the events of the school community. Upper elementary students could definitely do a junior version. A social studies teacher might have students write a newspaper from the perspective of a set time and place in history.
Note-taking
Guiding students to analyze text and media to then take notes is a very important instructional practice. Students first need to understand common text structures in non-fiction text. As we know, non-fiction text comes at us in many different forms. The complexity can at times be a bit overwhelming for students so helping them with visuals can enhance the learning. Here are a few of the main text structures: Cause and Effect | Chronology - Sequencing | Compare and Contrast | Main Ideas and Details | Problem - Solution
I was fortunate to work with a teacher who teaches lessons connecting the text structure to specific note-taking strategies. The teacher, Monica Escobar, shares the following strategies with her students using diagrams to connect the strategies to the structures. She teachers the following strategies: Annotated Diagram | Boxes and Bullets | Cause and Effect (Flow Chart) | Cornell (my addition) | Reverse Boxes and Bullets | T-Chart | Timeline | Venn Diagram | Web
Here are images of the strategies and the structures they support:
Personalization
Educational consultants Barbara Bray and Kathleen McClaskey created the chart below to help distinguish between personalization, differentiation and individualization as we work to design learning opportunities for our students. Blended learning with students having more control over their learning is one way to help personalize learning especially as students use their ICL skills to find and curate learning resources as they construct their personal learning systems. See the PD & ICL section of this site for information on personalizing teacher professional development.
There are many resources on the Web to guide teachers to work with students to personalize their learning. Here are three practical ones that you can try. To spur ongoing inquiry and research, students can be challenged at the start of the year to do a long term research project that they do outside of the units of inquiry. Jamie McKenzie’s 500 Mile learning project is one example. Another ongoing approach is to support students doing short term research projects that include the creation of learning products to share with their classmates. If they are digital, they could be curated for students to access outside of class to learn from one another. The Genius Hour learning strategy is one way to approach the short term project work. Both of these research strategies support students personalizing their learning. Another pathway is to help students create their Personal Learning System adapting tools and strategies around learning skills and subject areas. To learn more about using technology to personalize learning look to review the ISTE publication entitled "Personalized Learning: A Guide for Engaging Students with Technology".
Podcasts
See the Audio Recording section of Pedagogy & ICL (A-D) for more information. The Education to Save the World blog has helpful descriptions of PBL and Concept-based Learning. See the listing below of their criteria for a PBL unit of study. It is pretty clear how engaging PBL units of study designed around concept(s) attainment can be for our students.
Project-Based Learning (PBL)
The Education to Save the World blog posts helpful descriptions of PBL and Concept-based Learning. See the listing below of their criteria for a PBL unit of study. It is pretty clear how engaging PBL units of study designed around concept(s) attainment can be for our students.
Students create projects working on real world questions, using research with hands on learning while collaborating to then communicate their thinking. This process definitely involves ICL. There are so many excellent resources to support PBL. Here are a few.
Assessing PBL via Edutopia (Edutopia is rich with PBL resources)
Buck Institute for Education PBL Works (BIE is the one stop place for PBL)
Questioning Toolkit
Central to many of the strategies listed in this site is the art of questioning. We help our students to come up with ideas while making connections. As the list above points out, we want our students to become critical thinkers who engage metacognition. By using intellectual standards and processes, our students further exercise their minds with questions and logic to build deeper understanding.
There are a great many resources from which to draw to develop one's questioning toolkit. ASCD has a very practical article on how to design questions. A place to start is with the work of Jamie McKenzie who has helped educators around the world to develop their questioning skills. Jamie's pioneering From Now On and The Question Mark Web sites provide many resources as well as a list of his excellent books that also offer guidance with information literacy and technology integration. His Questioning Toolkit article was published in 1997 to give you an idea of how long Dr. McKenzie has been a leader in the field. Terry Heick at TeachThought constructed a nice list of prompts to help students formulate project questions. Another resource for questions is 40 Reflection Questions from Edutopia. Also look to the Thinking Routines section of this site for more question-based strategies. And don't forget about our ESPRAT+G site developed for social studies teachers.
Andrew Miller writes about "driving questions" at Edutopia. Here are a couple of his articles- In Search of the Driving Question and How to Write Effective to Write Effective Questions for PBL Learning.
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Image Sources: Note-taking except for Cornell provided by Monica Escobar | Questioning | Thinklink | Newspaper | PBL Criteria