Announcements

·         November 4^th: Final Unit Plan for STARS due – We will be given time on Monday to grade ourselves with the rubric Orlando e-mailed us.

·         November 25^th: STARS Report due

·         December 1^st (and possibly December 8^th): Presentations – Everyone needs to send April an e-mail on their preference for the presentations.  One option is to have a one minute teaser to encourage classmates to check out your tri-fold poster or option two is to all do a 7 to 8 minute powerpoint/keynote presentation.  The third option is a compromise between the presentations, we can have half the class do option one and the other half do option two.

·          Reminder: Tuesday November 11^th no STARS (no school)

·         Homework: This week we have a choice and are to choose two readings.  There are four categories for the readings: race, gender, multiculturalism, and disability; you and your partner are to choose two each.  Then once you read your two readings, write your critical synthesis and send it to your partner.  This week you are not sending your papers to blackboard.  Your partner will read and grade your critical synthesis and bring you paper to class on Monday, November 3^rd.  This way each person will then know the information from four of the eight readings.

Mike DuPre – A Matter of Style

Mike DuPre gave a great presentation on learning styles by the Silver-Strong Learning Style Model as a Tool for Differentiation.  The information we learned will be very beneficial for our classrooms.  This could be an activity to start the year off.  This would give a teacher the baseline for what learning styles are present in their classes.  The four learning styles in this model are: sensing-thinking (ST), intuitive-thinking (NT), sensing-feeling (SF), and intuitive-feeling (NF).   Then you can modify your teaching instruction to include more activities and labs for the dominate learning style.  This does not mean to only teach to the dominate learning style.  Students are able to learn in the other three learning styles, you teach to a students’ profile not just their dominate learning style.  A students profile is the combination of all the results in the four categories.  To complete this exam in your classroom, it will be about 3 dollars a student.

                To prepare for Mike DuPre’s presentation we had to fill out a worksheet.  The at the beginning of class we were given a post-it note to write our scores for the our worksheet.  These were then posted on the front board in the quadrant we had the most points for.  Then at the beginning of the presentation we were each give a packet including his powerpoint slides on them.  There were blank spaces on most of the slide, so you could fill in the important information on the slide.  This was a nice way to take note, you are still adding the important information to the slide but you do not have to rush to make sure you copied everything down.  This creates a lot less rushing and frustration for students and they will be able to pay more attention to the lesson instead of worrying about their notes.  Then while describing the perception and judgment functions, examples that would be familiar to the students were given for examples but Mike’s are just about out of date.  Good examples to use for explanation would be popular cartoons or tv shows. 

http://weblogs.newsday.com/entertainment/tv/blog/jerry_seinfeld1.jpg

                Once the functions were combined into the learning style quadrants, their TEMPO(S) was discussed.  T=Thinking Goal  E=Environment conducive to learning  M=Motivation supporting each style  P=Processing approach: how each works  O=Outputs or products S=Sickness (psychologically speaking!)  The processing approaches for each of the learning style are: ST = step-by-step, NT = doubt-by-doubt, SF = friend-by-friend, and NF = dream-by-dream.  This information would be great to know about the individual students.  A teacher would be able to create an activity that could reach out to their students.  One activity that we were given to try is a Task Rotation.  You are really creating a small menu for the student for one activity.  This gives the students a choice to choose a questions or assignment from their learning styles.  Even if you are not sure which learning style your students fall under, you could still use a task rotation to give the option to the students on the type of assignment they have.  Another resource we were given is a worksheet with examples of the assessments for each of the learning styles.  A teacher should make sure to incorporate different types of assessments to reach all students, instead of repeating the same type of assessment over and over again that only reaches one type of learning style.  Mike’s presentation relates to the readings that were due on October 27^th.  By incorporation many methods of assessment you are assessing their understanding, not just memorization.  This makes the assessment process more authentic when a student has the choice of the type of assessments they complete. 

                We could complete the task rotation and send our work to Mike for him to check it over.  He gave us his e-mail, if anyone needs the e-mail address contact me.  Mike is a great resource; make sure you have his contact information!

Reminders

·         Series of three lessons do not have to be our three assigned lesson on NOS, community, and inquiry

·         We need a 30 minute video of our teaching on one or more days of our series of three lessons to hand in with our action research

·         We only need one Warner lesson plan by the end of November

·         The modified version of the Warner lesson plan has been sent out in an e-mail, if you need the modified version contact me and I will forward the e-mail to you

I will continue to pass the scribing touch around my group to Suzanne.  Feel honored to have joined the group of scribes for theories and methods.

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