FUNtervals

Fun and games make for better learners -- ScienceDaily

Four minutes of physical activity can improve behaviour in the classroom for primary school students, according to new research by Brendon Gurd.

A brief, high-intensity interval exercise, or a "FUNterval," for Grade 2 and Grade 4 students reduced off-task behaviours like fidgeting or inattentiveness in the classroom.

... FUNtervals involved actively acting out tasks like "making s'mores" where students would lunge to "collect firewood," "start the fire" by crouching and exploding into a star jump and squatting and jumping to "roast the marshmallows" to make the S'more. Each activity moves through a 20-second storyline of quick, enthusiastic movements followed by 10 seconds of rest for eight intervals.

I would expect this to become rote and lose some of its effectiveness after a few weeks or months, but retain some for years...it seems somewhere in between the adult-structured "games" of a gym class on the one hand, and the kid-structured play that Peter Gray talks about. I'd also think that it might be possible to keep it from becoming rote by having some of the eight activities be chosen by groups of kids, and at least one of them developed by those groups as replacements for the original set.

On Being a Student (Temporarily)

I'm not sure how much effort this blog deserves, at this point; I was letting it die without ever really deciding to do so, but it's possible that saving brief notes or at least clips on educational practice and progress will be useful in future, and I do scan blog posts anyway. So.... Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns - The Washington Post

I have made a terrible mistake.

I waited 14 years to do something that I should have done my first year of teaching: shadow a student for a day. It was so eye-opening that I wish I could go back to every class of students I ever had right now and change a minimum of ten things – the layout, the lesson plan, the checks for understanding. Most of it!

This is the first year I am working in a school but not teaching my own classes; I am the High School Learning Coach, a new position for the school this year. My job is to work with teachers and administrators to improve student learning outcomes.

As part of getting my feet wet, my principal suggested I “be” a student for two days: I was to shadow and complete all the work of a 10th grade student on one day and to do the same for a 12th grade student on another day....

It's an interesting story, and perhaps all teachers should do that... one or two days per year? There's a postscript to it on Wiggins' blog, at A PS to the guest post on shadowing HS students (and the author revealed) | Granted, and...

I was the first teacher in my school – in 1978 – to tape myself. I thought: well, coaches watch game film; why don’t I? Yikes! I was horrified. I had thought of myself as a good teacher and I was praised for being one. But the tape told a different story. My manner was a bit off-putting; I was a tad sarcastic; I was using phrases like “Well, it’s obvious that…” and “So, anyone can see that…” and I was not as skilled as I thought I had been in checking peripheral vision. I had missed 5-6 kids making a timid attempt to enter the discussion. Without my noticing and imploring them in, they fell back to more passive distanced listening...

It occurs to me that every class minute is a minute of "public" behavior by the teacher; perhaps webcams, available for view by parents, should always be on. (Or perhaps every teacher would immediately quit.)

Common Core Test "Failure"

Edublogger Grant Wiggins writes Failure: the 8th grade NYS Common Core Math Test | Granted, and...

As I have often written here, the Common Core Standards are just common sense – but that the devil is in the details of implementation. And in light of the unfortunate excessive secrecy surrounding the test items and their months-later analysis, educators are in the unfortunate and absurd position of having to guess what the opaque results mean for instruction. It might be amusing if there weren’t personal high stakes of teacher accountability attached to the results.

So, using the sample of released items in the NY tests, I spent some time this weekend looking over the 8th grade math results and items to see what was to be learned – and I came away appalled at what I found.

I'm not sure how far I'd go with this; I basically think that the idea of "high stakes testing" is fundamentally flawed, that it necessarily distorts teaching by forcing an overemphasis on the parts of learning that are amenable to whatever tests you can design. I doubt that his demand for greater transparency and better-written tests would help a lot with my concerns. Still, he's an actual teacher...