Home Bernice's Blog

aboutlearning

Thursday
Mar 28th

Bernice's Blog

National Standards

How is the use of 4MAT aligned with a common set of standards?  Simply because now we can stop arguing and obsessing over WHAT will be taught and get the important business of HOW it will be taught and how it will be CONNECTED to learners. Once we know the entire WHAT, we can get to work creating the concept maps and learner connections that will bring this material to life for kids.

Most States Coming on Board

What should students know when they finish high school? Who should decide? Should we all agree on this? Yes, of course we should. All our students need to know what successful, educated 21st century citizens need to know. So far forty-six states have agreed to tackle this complex task. Missouri, Texas, South Carolina and Alaska may come on board when the common sense aspect of this becomes clearer to them.

As far as we are concerned here at About Learning, Yea! At last teachers can get a good look at what rigor is in major content areas and act accordingly. The list of those who will decide is impressive: ACT Inc., writing college admissions standards since 1959, Washington based Achieve, the New York City College Board, and the Iowa City organization that creates the college entrance test.

The Timing for National Standards

The standards will be presented in grade-by-grade format. The public will be invited to review them as early as July of this year. The experts who will perform this important task will be chosen by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State Officers.

When they are ready, the states will need to adopt them. For us at About Learning and our professional development work, the quicker the better. We will then have the same set of student goals in all content areas to work with as we help teachers cluster and manipulate the standards into strategies and designs that will work for all students in whichever states we are in. The standards must include study skills, job skills and critical thinking.

These “grade-by-grade” standards are set to be completed in draft form in December. A validation committee made up of independent national and international experts in content standards will review and comment on the drafts. Theses standards will be called a common core and will need to represent at least 85% of the states’ standards and be adopted in three years by all states who agree.

One influential organization that has always focused on rigorous subject matter, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, is asking that state officials consider the work they have already done as this work moves forward.

I am waiting to see if appropriate monitoring is built in for reviewing the relevance of the standards from year to year as the knowledge curve moves at a much faster pace than committees and formal lists.

 

More Insights on the flow of a 4MAT instructional design

Karen Aka is working with the Hawaiian Educational Council Change Leadership Group of Harvard University. She works  creating leadership seminars and is well know in Hawaii as a consummate professional educator.

Karen sent us an example of insight on the Learning cycle that is important for all users of 4MAT to understand. The 4MAT Cycle is one complete flow always starting with learner connections and moving to the new knowledge and skills and then back to the learner for personal usefulness. This flow is learning made real. Here is her 4MAT insight recently sent to me.

Mike Zane and Kyle Shodai have been teaching a 4MAT session to a small group of us. (I had my project staff attend so they could learn how to 4MAT our leadership modules.)  Mike had an insight that confirmed the depth of the cycle.

"You know how we started to say the 2R is the outcome imaged or imagined. I have called it the bridge thinking it was the bridge between the concept and the content. BUT Mike's insight is that if 2R is the outcome imaged then the 3R is the bridge being completed and is the outcome being practiced. So the 2R and the 3R should be aligned - 2R imagined, 3R in action. What do you think? Maybe that was always your intent but I didn't make this connection until Mike taught the wheel to the group. I always referred to the bridge as bridging the concept to the content, not fully understanding the alignment between 2R and 3R as the necessary movement from imaged to action.

This is a super insight from Karen and I was delighted to ponder the connection more in depth myself as result. I concur absolutely that the Cycle requires that something must be done with what we learn.

 

Happiness

I am involved in Martin Seligman’s work, first by seeing him on TED and now reading his book Authentic Happiness. ISBN 908-0-7432-2297-6. He works to understand and study happy people in order to improve normal lives. His mission is to enhance and strengthen wellness and the best things in life in ordinary folks.

He has discovered three kinds of happiness:

  1. Pleasure, the attention and savoring of something, enjoyable and exciting, but the drawback is it tends not to last
  2. Engagement, being seriously involved in what you are doing: be it parenting, working studying an so on. Real engagement puts people into flow, they go into the zone, mindless of time, doing and astonished at their own doing, like someone else is there with and in them. “So engaged, his body identity disappears from his consciousness.” (Seligman speaking of Mozart)
  3. Meaning, to be in service to something larger than yourself. The strongest combination being of course, engagement plus meaning. He goes on to say health and productivity follow the same path. Wonderful insights.
 

Why Readers Theater Works

We are now creating Readers Theatres for all the literature units we write. We choose the books to create these complete 4MAT units from lists in our client districts, We are currently  completing the final book for our new Middle School set of eight books.

We found Readers Theatre when Ben Brady, a close friend and founder of Rigby of America and the Children's Literacy Foundation, a video-disc literacy inservice enterprise. Ben handed me a book called The Fluent Reader by Timothy Rasinski, chronically the power of oral reading and suggesting it could make the performance element we have in all our 4MAT units. And indeed he was right.

In Readers Theatre the characters in the book under study are written into a script and the children choose which parts to read (and some to share) as a performance ending in the study of the book.  It’s like old time radio and it is really powerful. The kids can only use their voices to make it all happen, no stage no costumes, no set. The result is amazing. The comprehension of the book and its real meaning emerge at stunning levels. 

Here are a few of the benefits of as listed in Rasinski’s work:

  • oral reading builds confidence,
  • creates community,
  • connects spoken and written language,
  • strengthens decoding skills,
  • fosters fluency,
  • boosts comprehension,
  • allows teachers to view the reading process to better diagnose problems.

Check out the Rasinski book. ISBN 0-439-33208-7 

 

Latest News

4MAT Summer Training

Experience All New Programs: 4MAT for Algebra, Geometry, Biology, Middle School Literature and The Constitution

Visit the Web Site


New Basic Three Day Seminar Design

We have integrated the About Teaching book. Key knowledge sections of About Teaching have been added to the participant materials giving a broader knowledge base and giving our clients the added benefit of a less expensive higher quality learner book.

Read More

About Learning

441 W. Bonner Road, Wauconda, Illinois (800) 822-4MAT