December 6 - Spring Fling
December 10 - Honor Choir Concert
December 12 - PBS team to Cape
December 12 - Leadership Meeting
December 17 - 6th grade faculty meeting 3:00
December 18 - 5th grade faculty meeting 3:00
December 19 - 4th grade faculty meeting 3:00
December 20 - Grade window opens
December 23-January 3 No School - Christmas Break
January 5 - Grade window closes
January 7 - Math training - 6th grade Room 618 3:00-4:00
January 8 - Math training - 4th grade Room 618 3:00-4:00
January 10 - PBIS Day Assemblies: 4th 8:00-8:40, 5th 8:50-9:30, 6th 9:40-10:20 Parties: 4th 11:20-12:20, 5th 12:20-1:20, 6th 1:20-2:20
January 13 - Math training - 5th grade Room 618 3:00-4:00
January 14 - 6th grade faculty meeting 3:00
January 15 - 5th grade faculty meeting 3:00
January 16 - 4th grade faculty meeting 3:00
January 20 - No School
January 21 - PBConnects
January 22 - Intruder Training 8:00 at Kay Porter
January 23 - 6th Math PD
January 29 - District Walkthrough
January 29 - 4th Math PD
February 4 - GreenBear - 4th grade
February 6 - GreenBear - 5th grade
Our last administrator meeting was a walkthrough of Eugene Field Elementary. We met and talked about what we were looking for and then split up and went into classrooms. I walked through several rooms looking for posted learning targets and student engagement. There were "I can..." statements posted in every room I was in. Some wrote them on paper and some had them as part of their smart board display. They had them for every subject and they had them for every station and small group.
Even more impressive than having them posted, I actually heard teachers say them out loud and talk about what it would look like if they were successfully completing the target. It's almost as if they wanted the students to know what they were supposed to be learning. Stating the learning objective was the first theme from Rutherford's 23 themes of the Artisan Teacher. I don't think they are listed in order of importance, but I do think this one is pretty important. I think a teacher should state the learning objective very explicitly during the lesson. I also think they should state it several times throughout the lesson.
The next administrator walk through will be here on January 29th. We will be looking for learning targets, data displays, and feedback.
I have been doing a series of posts about the 23 Themes of an Artisan Teacher. The first 6 themes were related to the "technical" work of a teacher. These were things that teachers are taught when they are learning how to be teachers. They included Clear Learning Goals, Congruency, Task Analysis, Diagnosis, and Overt Responses. I am currently working my way through the themes that fall under the "scientific" aspect of teaching. These themes aren't taught to new teachers, but rather are discoveries in neuroscience that benefit learning. Last time I covered Conscious Attention.
Today, we will learn about Chunking. Chunking is the ability of the teacher to segment the curriculum and learning activities into manageable portions to avoid working memory overload. That sounds complicated, but here's what it really means. We have a limited ability to handle incoming information. Rather than being able to handle an unlimited number of items simultaneously, we can only attend to a few "chunks" at a time. A chunk can be thought of a discrete "package" of information. If you are still reading this and haven't tuned me out completely, send me an email with the code word "chunking" to receive a special prize. Most people can handle about seven chunks at a time. Chunking, then, is the process of combining small chunks into larger ones and building the complexity and sophistication of chunks to increase the quantity and quality of learning.
Working Memory Overload is a state of rapid forgetting induced by a task that exceeds the capacity of working memory. As a teacher, you should seek to avoid this for your students. There are two factors you need to remember when trying to avoid a WMO.
Working memory has a limited capacity. Most adults have a capacity of seven discreet chunks, but can really only manage three or four chunks at once. Children have a smaller capacity. Keeping this in mind, teachers should keep new information demands at or below working memory capacity.
Working memory functions as a serial (one at a time) processor. That means that multi-tasking is a myth. Humans are able to switch back and forth between tasks quickly, but are still only handling one task at a time. As teachers, we need to limit the number of tasks we ask students to do simultaneously. It's difficult to listen to the teacher and take notes, or follow along in a text and spot descriptive words. It seems like those things go together, but they are really different tasks.
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