Last night after watching countless hours of basketball, I settled in to watch a movie with my husband. We were flipping channels when we came across an old black and white movie about the life of Thomas Edison. At first I didn't want to watch it, but as I did watch I realized that this movie was growth mindset at it's finest. Thomas Edison spent many, many years trying to make an electric light. He tried every form of metal known to man. Scientist of his day said he couldn't do it. He lost his financial backing and even some friends but he never gave up. Each time the light bulb didn't work, he just looked at what he had done and tried something else. At one point in the movie one of his friends said, "You have tried over 100 times, let's give up!" Thomas Edison said, "I don't care if I have to try 1000 times, I know I can do this." He did do it. He figured out a way and as soon as he did, he started to work on the next thing. Thomas Edison did not do well in school and his mother had to homeschool him. He was hard of hearing and was usually working on many things at one time. But he understood the fundamental ideas of taking responsibility for his own failure or success and to not believe that everything should go his way. As a teacher who works with gifted children, I have to constantly push myself to make sure that they are having opportunities to try harder things. That they are able to say, "I failed", but I will try again. I know this is never easy for any children. But as my school embraces the growth mindset you can present these ideas in a way that helps children articulate and express both their frustrations and their ability to keep trying.
At the beginning of each day my students write a goal for themselves and think of what they want to work on. One second grader wrote that he would persevere. And he did. He worked through a difficult problem and then wrote about his process. But in order for him to feel successful he had to know that perseverance was important and necessary and that by working hard and not giving up he would find the right answer. These are not only math lessons, they are
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Happy Valentine's Day! Today we had 1.5 hours of staff development about reading to children. I have always loved reading to children and remember fondly my very first audience, a group of preschoolers, where I learned to slow down and show the pictures. But todays staff development took the read aloud reading experience to an all new level. In order to do this the way we are being asked we must spend time with a book before we use it as a teaching point. We must look at the vocabulary and prepare our listeners for unfamiliar words and ideas. We must look for confusing statements that might derail meaning. We must teach our listeners to think and to think deeply about the story and most importantly we must teach them to have conversations about the stories that ask them important questions like, "How do you know?" and "Why do you think that?" So today I gave it a whirl...I read a book, the same book, to two different groups of kindergarteners. The book was short. Maybe 20 pages. Normally, I would of read it in 5-7 mins. and moved on. But with these new strategies in place I was able to do a read aloud for 30 mins. and on Valentine's day no less. The children were so engaged. I made my objectives clear. I told them that we would not look at the pictures on every page, but that I wanted them to develop a picture in their heads. We discussed vocabulary, and motive and supported all our answers with textual support. It was amazing! It was fun! But most of all I learned something new, I put it into practice and it worked! Another interesting aspect of this lesson was that I read to a group of mostly English speaking kindergarteners and then I read to the dual language immersion kindergarteners. I didn't change my lesson much, but I was thrilled that both classes were engaged and enjoyed the lesson. Both classes had lots of student participation and both left me feeling successful that I had achieved my objective. That is a good feeling! As the K-2 gifted specialist in my school I will spend the next 6 weeks doing these kind of read alouds with kindergarteners and I couldn't be happier. Isn't it wonderful when you are given the time and support to learn something new and that something new is really something you can do! Today I used a great technology tool with First Graders to create a literary guide for Kindergarten Teachers when they are selecting their books for the 100th day of school. I was going to make a simple paper guide and was sharing my ideas with the school media specialist when he suggested educreations. (Isn't collaboration wonderful!) I was not aware of this tool for the computer and in this case for the ipad, but I quickly was able to work my way around the site and saw great potential for my project. The educreations site allows you to take pictures of about anything and then record your voice or the voice of your students right over the picture. You can also use a pencil tool to draw right on the screen. It is so quick and easy and in 10 mins. my students had a great product. They are going to share their literary guide during a special lunch with the Kindergarten teachers later this week. The First Graders at the other school I work for also are making a literary guide. They had the benefit of watching the first groups educreation to inspire their work. They will be sharing their creation with my students here. It is also really easy to share educreations with parents and other teachers. Whether you are looking for a way to publish a class project or to jazz up an interactive board project, I think educreations is a great technology tool. Today I will teach a lesson to a class of first graders about the importance of how they approach a problem and that by having a positive attitude they can do amazing things. Growth mindset is a big idea in education right now. It is the belief that every child has areas of growth and that the attitude we have toward each child as a learner is crucial in helping them find their potential and grow it. It is also the idea that we can change the message children give themselves when they face challenges. And the idea that we as educators value effort as well as demonstration of understanding. This morning this video was on my facebook page and it really struck me how powerful this man's message is. When the whole world tells you you can't and you say, "I can." I watched as Arthur fell time and time again yet he didn't give up. At one point he said, "I didn't do it today, but I will try again tomorrow." Wonder if our students felt this way when faced with a difficult task? What is it about school that makes some kids want to try and try and others to just give up? I sometimes wonder if part of the problem isn't the speed at which we rush through units and cover material. Are we giving children a chance to redo, try again, figure it out? Do we make sure that if a problem or situation is too easy that there is something more challenging available to the children who need that challenge? And do we celebrate all students accomplishments, not just the ones that are right or the ones that were the best? These are questions I am going to reflect on this weekend. I think in many ways elementary school teachers do this naturally. We see so much growth in our students. But how do we portray that in a report card or progress report? How do we share our students accomplishments with our administrators or fellow teachers? So often at the end of the year it is all about scores and tests. A recent toe injury has had me feeling pretty bad about my ability to walk or exercise, but this short movie has inspired me to start again. To never give up! Thanks Arthur for sharing your experience!
As a gifted education specialist in two large elementary schools I spend a lot of time not only working with small groups of children, but also advising adults, both teachers and parents, about children. Both parents and teachers will come to me with frustrations and sometimes confusion over why a child is not succeeding in school. Outside my office door in one of my schools there is a quote by Alice Walker, "The most important question in the world is why is the child crying?" I love this quote because it forces me to ask, why is the child doing for better or worse what he or she is doing? Some people hate this quote because it means you have to look at the why and they don't want to know the why, they just want to place blame. But for me this quote reminds me every time I see it that we have a responsibility to find out why a child is not succeeding at school. When I was a young teacher, I attended a 6 week course on the work of Marie Clay. Marie Clay developed the Reading Recovery Intervention program that is widely used in New Zealand and around the world. I was so inspired by her techniques for teaching reading, but more importantly I learned that every child has a starting place. Every child, no matter what their abilities or background has strengths. As a kindergarten and first grade teacher I sometimes had to dig deep to find those areas in some children, but I always found them and when I did, it was magical. The children that cross my paths in my job today are usually underachieving or twice exceptional gifted children. These children can be some of the worst behaved in class, they cause teachers a lot of frustration and parents often don't know what to do about their level of motivation. Sometimes a test, like the Naglieri test we just recently gave in our schools, will show a strength in a child. Sometimes a conversation with a parent about how the child is at home will reveal the strength. Sometimes a conversation with a child will open the door. But no matter how much we gather data and develop new curriculum, nothing is more important than asking "Why is the child crying?" As I get ready to leave school after a busy Monday I know that I have one more day of hard work and then Thanksgiving break will be here. Because it is Thanksgiving I feel that it is appropriate to give thanks for so many things in my school life. I am thankful that I am a teacher who can make a difference in the lives of the children I work with each day. I am thankful for the many teachers I work with who give their all and then some for the children they work with. I am thankful for my supportive family who understands when I go back to work at night or have to be out the door before they are out of bed. I am thankful that I work a job where no two days are ever the same. Where the children bring so much joy to my life. I had an extraordinary accountable talk with my second graders today. We sat and discussed "The Red Balloon", their talk was so engaging and they all were so respectful. I enjoyed every minute of it. Later in the day I taught 8 bright kindergartners to work as partners on how to solve a multistep math problem. I had many wonderful collaboration sessions with teachers, planned for my lessons after the break, and read a great article about gifted students with ADHD. All of these wonderful aspects of my job make me thankful that I am just the teacher I am at this precise moment in time. Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! Today I taught a lesson and it was a complete failure and that was exactly what it needed to be. Over the past few months we have been talking to students about having a growth mindset in school. That with determination and perserverence they can grow and change as a learner. We have been telling our students that if something doesn't work the first time, we should try again! Every classroom in my school has a beautiful poster on the wall that says, "Grow Your Brain" and then it contains a handful of phrases that help children understand that we all are learning and that failure and mistakes is part of the process. But what about us teachers? Do we want to fail? Do we step back from a lesson that went terribly and reflect and evaluate and make the changes to make it work next time? Or do we blame the students? Do we blame the system? Do we share our failure at our PLC meetings? Do we tell the students that we so badly confused? Here is what happened to me... I had a group of 12 wonderful, bright first graders. On a pretest these students did not know how to use a table to show their thinking in a multiple step problem. I was all prepared to teach them in two quick lessons. We would have tables done! Finished! Move on! This was going to be great! In our first lesson we collected data. Each child recorded numbers about themselves. I then collected all the data and made a category for each group. On our second lesson I had my objective posted: Today we will learn to make a table to show the data we collected in our math about me work. I modeled what a table was. I labeled all the parts. I told the children that they would work in groups. I passed out the markers, the large sheets of construction paper. I secretly wished the principal would walk in and see these wonderful groups of students working in teams. I was the guide on the side. This lesson was going to be great! Well.....it wasn't! I probably don't have to explain what happened next but to say the least not a single group had any idea what I wanted them to do. Several of them made a table of exactly what they saw on the board. They didn't understand what I wanted. "Start again!" I rapidly went around turning papers over. One little girl made a hundreds chart. She held it up proudly with the numbers 1-20. "Is this what you want?" Oh no, I thought. Why can't they just make a table. Because I only have these students for 30 mins. I had to stop the lesson. We were all relieved. I then used the rest of our time to talk to the students about a growth mindset. I told them that I was proud of their work today. I told them that I far more value a student who gives their best effort than one that gets the right answer. Finally I told them that I had not thought through this lesson enough. That I had to go back and start again. But that I was not going to give up. We would try again next time and that we would succeed. Yes, after 23 years of teaching, I am still growing as a teacher! Thank goodness! Project Based Learning seems to be a really important part of the direction our schools are going in. I work in two schools and they have both taken a very different approach to PBL. I feel that no matter what the approach is, it is a complex process that must be done strategically and with thought if it is to serve it's purpose. My job as a GES is to help facilitate planning, provide resources and be imbedded in the project when needed. I have successfully used PBL to teach kindergarten for several years. I have worked closely with university professors who train new teachers in PBL, and have read countless books, attended trainings and even presented at a conference on how to use storyboards in PBL. Still when I sit in PLC's. (Professional Learning Community) trying to facilitate, provide or embed myself in projects that are being planned, I often feel frustrated and unheard. I think part of the problem is that it is difficult to have others seen the value of PBL when to them it is just another thing they have to do. I love the creative planning part of developing curriculum. The give and take of ideas. The opening of minds that were maybe previously closed. But this does not seem to be happening for me in the role I play as a gifted education specialist. I know the importance of having that driving question, of making the project purposeful and how to use checklist and rubrics to keep the project moving and to do formative assessment. The teachers I work with often feel confused, overwhelmed and resistant to PBL and do not see it's value overall. I think that I have to look at this year as a learning year for myself. I also hope to do some reflective thinking...like this blog entry... to figure out how I can better help the teachers and the students I serve. Until then this puzzle is not fitting together very well. As a gifted specialis who works in two schools and serves hundreds of children every year, I find that there are many myths about gifted children and when those myths are allowed to exist it only hurts the children I work so hard to help. It is also because of myths such as these that I became a gifted specialist so that I could better understand the students in my class and my own son. One of the most effective staff development opportunities I have ever lead was one in which my co-gifted specialist and I asked our faculty to demystify gifted education. It was a very eye opening experience for both the teachers and the two of us. Some of the myths the teachers had to admit they believed in and the whole experience led us to a great conversation about gifted students and how we serve them. Here are a few examples from that professional development. 1. Gifted students are model students who: thoroughly complete all assignments, follow all of the rules, and are generally teacher pleasing students. This myth is false. Gifted students are not perfect all the time and many of them do not please teachers. Gifted children have intense interest and some suffer from over sensitivity and emotional intensity that can cause them to be very difficult to teach. If a child has a learning disability in addition to being gifted (Twice Exceptional) this too can lead to a very frustrated student. There are also underachieving gifted students who for one reason or another have stop trying at school and perfectionist, who will not try anything unless they are sure it is just right. All of these unique quality of a gifted child makes it very hard to describe exactly how a gifted child should look. 2. A gifted student excels in both math and reading. Many teachers who have students that are identified in a gifted program believe that if a child is identified than they are intellectually gifted in both areas of literacy and math and should perform well above their grade level peers. It is so important for gifted specialist to help teachers use pretest and other tools to determine the differentiation needs of high learners. Just being identified by a program does not result in high skills in all areas of academics. Again, this often happens when a child has a learning disability. I had a student who was being compacted in math because he was identified in our program. This student was identified based on his reading and writing ability, but struggled terribly in math. As each day passed and he could not complete the challenging math problems, he became more frustrated and eventually stopped performing in reading and writing as well. It is so important that classroom teachers know their students and use data to drive instruction. 3.Since gifted students are suppose to be smart, they can do most of the work on their own. Unfortunately this is something that teachers often feel is true. I too was a classroom teacher for many years and loved when I could let my highest students work independently and to some extent that can work independently, but they need instruction before they do the independent work. They long for time with the teacher and need teacher modeling and expectations before starting on an independent assignment. Many times gifted children will feel their work is busy work and not purposeful if the teacher is not involved in the instruction and the process. Most gifted students who love to read will treasure time alone to devour a good book, but they also love a great conversation and the questioning needed for deep comprehension to push them to better understanding. 4. Because of the identification,gifted students automatically receive all 4s or all A's on the report card. Again, many teachers may feel that because a child is gifted and has gone through the process of becoming identified as determined by the school and the district than the parents and the principal will expect all 4's or A's. The truth is that 4's or A's should be set by a predetermined set of criteria and should only be determined by data combined with teacher observation. Our district is very focused on growth right now. In order to see a child grow, you have to know where they started. If you always are "given" good grades, no matter what you do, you will not want or desire growth. Of course, if you have earned all 4's then that is what you should get. 5. Gifted children have the answers so they should be paired with children who are struggling so they can teach them. Although some experts might disagree with me on this myth, it has been my experience that most elementary students do not have the skills to teach other children. When put into partnering situations where one person knows and the other doesn't, the gifted child will usually do all the work and then feel resentful toward his partner. In the same way the partner will check out of the assignment to allow the other student to do the work. If you are going to group heterogeneous group, it is crucial that there is a lot of work done ahead of time about being a partner or working with a partner. I find a much more effective method is to group children based on interest. This approach works particularly well when doing project based learning. Then children come to the table with an equal amount of enthusiasm for what they like to do. There are many more myths that apply to gifted students. If you are a classroom teacher and feel confused about exactly how to work best with your students or if you are a parent and feel your child's teacher does not understand your child, learning more about gifted children and all their complexities will be very helpful. Let me know what you think! Today's film is not about an academically gifted student, but more about an artistically gifted child. Billy Elliot is a heart warming film about a small boy who is an extremely talented dancer even when no one, especially his family supports his gift. It just takes one incredible teacher to see that Billy is very talented and to help him realize his dream. This movie touched my heart as well as my funny bone. It is beautifully done and shows a side to giftedness that we Gifted Specialist don't always get to see. Enjoy! |
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