New City School in St. Louis is a treasure: Look at this insightful newsletter (Geography contest for all students)

ONe of the great schools in the USA is New City School.   I vivisted the school in April 2006 and interviewed the principal, Thomas Hoerr.  He writes a column for one of ASCD's journals.

Here's an item that I found in a recent newsletter that the school sends home each week.

From Laurie: For the sixth consecutive year, all 4th, 5th, and 6th grade students participated in the New City Geography Bee. The students compete in teams, first in their classrooms and then in a school-wide bee. The teams work together to answer a series of questions that progressively become more difficult. This year's winning team was from Linda's sixth grade block 2 class and included Emily Hirshman, Eyvind Hovmand-Warner, Allison Ryan, and Corbin Runge. Congratulations to all the students who competed!

I wrote the following note to the principal:

As a high school teacher, I applaud students who can tell me 

1.  the second and third cities of France, India, Germany, China and Australia.   

2.  Name five cities in Brazil.  

3.   Name four rivers in Europe

4.  What languages are spoken officially in Switzerland, Brazil and Canada?  

5.  Name a large city near Rheinfall.

6.  How many countries share Mont Blanc?

7.  Name the countries that share the largest waterfall in South America?

8.  What countries border on Afghanistan?

9.  Name at least three languages that are spoken in Kenya and India.   (That is a vaguely worded question).

How about laterai thinking puzzles?

1. Brain Food: Realistic Lateral Thinking Puzzles - RinkWorks
   www.rinkworks.com/brainfood/p/latreal1.shtml‎
2. Lateral Thinking Puzzles, unlike most puzzles, are inexact. In a sense, they are a hybrid between puzzles and storytelling. In each puzzle, some clues to a ...
3. Lateral Thinking Puzzles - Preconceptions
4. www.folj.com/lateral/
5. Lateral thinking puzzles that challenge your preconceptions. 1. You are driving down the road in your car on a wild, stormy night, when you pass by a bus stop ..

I'm not worried about spelling -- that's what spellcheckers are for, but when my international students meet my high school students (I teach ESOL to kids form Europe in summer school and then invite my high school students to interact with the international students), my high school students shine...  "We thought that U.S. students didn't know geography!" (say the students from Italy).  

Bravo to your school for a focus on geography.

Can you send some Geography questions in your next letter home?

Steve THE EBOOK MAN McCrea

theebookman@gmail.com

Founder, BIBPenpals.com

A service connecting teens across cultures

I hope you have an opportunity to visit or at least visit virtually NewCitySchool.org

The Visual and Active Method (any comments?)

Features of the Visual and Active
Portfolio Method – Steve McCrea

VisualAndActive.com

I came to know that “there is another way” after trying to teach 6 classes of 20 kids, 45 minutes per class. The focus was on presenting the material efficiently and effectively. The Madeleine Hunter method of teaching is the standard of “good teaching.”

The research by Howard Gardner makes it clear that the Hunter method is effective in ensuring that more than one teaching method is used and more than one learning style is given a chance to “latch onto” the material.

However, most people who study Gardner have not gone one step farther. They didn’t read pages 161 and following about how to evaluate the learning.

Even we who have taking the RSA course for CELTA (teaching English to Adults) have a false sense of knowing what to do next after presenting the material of the day. We know we have to check understanding and then move on to connect the material to real examples in English for practice. The effort is designed to ensure that materials are presented to a variety of learning styles.

However, let’s take a moment to breathe and reflect on the purpose of the language school (and on any class): it is not to present an effective curriculum. The purpose of a school is to meet the needs of each individual student. The idea expressed by Gardner and put into action by Dennis Littky is to ensure that teaching changes to meet the needs of the individual student. The steps include:

Adding an element of relationship.
(mobile phone and email contacts, invitations to lunch or snacks outside the classroom)

Building the curriculum from relevance . (What does the student want to know or learn?)

Creating opportunities to learn through action, through performances of understanding and mentoring.

Evaluation is not through written tests but through recorded exhibition so that the student has to feel and see the gaps and know where the next step is. Through feedback from the teacher and (if the student isn’t shy) from the audience (and self evaluation after looking at the video), the student then knows the next layer of learning that needs to take place.

Independent Work Time takes up a larger part of the class schedule. Building a portfolio is more important than running through a check list of grammar and vocabulary (listen, speak, write, read). The expectations of the students are changed, because most people who go to Littky’s school have to be persuaded to see that studying only what you want to study will lead to a rigorous result.

How can effective teaching and “Teaching for Understanding” (the code phrase developed by Lois Hetland, Ed.D, a disciple of Howard Gardner) be accepted by students who have come to expect “traditional classrooms”?

Samples of a portfolio created by other students and standard “packages” showing what students have produced is a good example. Performances of Understanding can be produced at lower levels of proficiency, but this method is more obvious at advanced intermediate.

EVERY PART OF THE CLASS CAN BE VIDEOTAPED for later review (since some students find it difficult to take notes and pay attention). The videos can be converted to a video on CD at a rate of about 2 hours per 700 megabytes.

The key is found by making a parallel set of key standards. The Met Center, Littky’s group, does not teach Math, History, Science and English – they ask students to develop their own goals for qualitative and quantitative reasoning, empirical reasoning and communication. These areas can be supplemented with ESOL or EFL structure and the EFL teacher can restate what needs to be sought by the students. In the Visual and Active Method, the students learn skill areas or interest areas, not artificial "chapters" related to grammar and vocabulary.

(Some students will not accept this functional description of a language class, and they will need to pursue the making of a portfolio based on the structure of the textbook.)

We can see some similarities – and therefore the materials developed by Littky have some relevance to all methods of teaching. The Madeleine Hunter model remains in place (to support students who want structure) and the classes have a textbook and class time (as they do in the Littky school). The key focus is on asking the student to seek outside learning opportunities that are connected to their aspirations. An executive at a power plant in Japan should spend time touring a plant… but do more. He should sit and shadow the mentor. The chapter on Mentoring in Littky’s book shows that there is not always a burden of mentoring… there is a feeling of adding a dimension to the mentor’s job. “I get paid to show another person why I love my work.”

PORTFOLIO
The focus for teachers could be on pushing and guiding students to develop a portfolio to show that students have demonstrated or performed understanding by making presentations. The exit portfolio can be a CD with performances on video showing basic skills of pronunciation and grammar (with students teaching units to the camera). The teacher can then ask students to go out to the “real world” to video themselves in situations with shopkeepers and volunteer situations.

BAD EXAMPLE of mentoring
I was studying Spanish in a small program in Chalchihuites, Mexico near Zacatecas and the program offered an “experience in real Mexico” working side by side Mexican employees. I filed cards for 3 hours in the city hall (no interaction with the staff). After the initial hand signals I didn’t have to talk or listen for the next three hours, yet I was “immersed” in the culture of the work place.

GOOD EXAMPLE of mentoring
One of my students, Johana, said that she loves being corrected by young kids. “They tell you exactly the truth.” The EFL teacher (Mr. Mac) got her the volunteer sheet for Virginia Shuman Young Magnet school and she plans to volunteer two hours next week in a school. That’s using English in a real sense. A photo of that opportunity or a video camera on Johana can be part of her portfolio.

CLASSROOM NEEDS
Small cameras if the student doesn’t have a digital camera.
Burning software on a laptop in the school. It's best that the computer is NOT connected to the network.
Portfolio system (clear plastic sleeves with three punched holes for storage in a three ring binder) needs to be set up to engage the students.
List of potential mentoring and volunteering locations in the area of the school.

SUMMARY
Most students learn another language better in a classroom that is visual and active.
Students can be pushed to create portfolios to show their understanding. (See Gardner, Littky and Hedland)
Students can be pushed to find relationships outside the classroom to pursue interests and build their vocabulary through use in mentorships and volunteering positions.
Video equipment will allow students to bring back information that they want to practice.
Video equipment in their home allow them to practice pronunciation and listening on computers (see the series of CDs that I distribute to my students).

For more information, write to VisualAndActive@gmail.com

VisualAndActive.com

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Adding an element of relationship.
(mobile phone and email contacts, invitations to lunch or snacks outside the classroom)

Building the curriculum from relevance. (What does the student want to know or learn?)

Creating opportunities to learn through action, through performances of understanding and mentoring.

Evaluation is through recorded exhibition so that the student has to feel and see the gaps and know where the next step is.

Independent Work Time takes up a larger part of the class schedule. Building a portfolio is more important than running through a check list of grammar and vocabulary (listen, speak, write, read).

About small schools and computer-assisted instruction

Here's a question to ask politicians: The work of many school reformers points to the need for smaller schools, but effectively run schools. Is your guest aware of the growing influence of schools that focus on computer-assisted instruction? This idea is that computers will frees the teacher to spend more time as a motivator and mentor to students, since the principal activity of "delivery of information" is handled by the computer. Blogs like www.edreformer.com and www.TheStudentistheclass.com advocate more investment in computers and training for teachers to move into this important new role. What is the administration's position on using more computers in classrooms? my phone number is 954 646 8246 and I hope the guest will pass on these educational blogs to the attention of other politicians. Also www.chadphila.org, www.hightechhigh.org, www.newcityschool.org, and www.bigpicture.org, www.metcenter.org -- these websites ought to get more attention if decisionmakers want to implement computers as true aids to learning. The relevant people include Dennis Littky, Dennis Yuzenas (www.Whatdoyaknow.com), Thomas Hoerr, Tom vander Ark, Lois Hetland, and Howard Gardner. Thank you