10 Characteristics Of A Highly Effective Learning Environment

by Terry Heick

Wherever we are, we’d all like to think our classrooms are “intellectually active” places. Progressive learning (like our 21st Century Model, for example) environments. Highly effective and conducive to student-centered learning. But what does that mean?

The reality is, there is no single answer because teaching and learning are awkward to consider as single events or individual “things.” This is all a bunch of rhetoric until we put on our white coats and study it under a microscope, at which point abstractions like curiosity, authenticity, self-knowledge, and affection will be hard to pin down.

So we put together one take on the characteristics of a highly effective classroom. They can act as a kind of criteria to measure your own against–see if you notice a pattern.

10 Characteristics Of A Highly Effective Learning Environment

1. The students ask the questions—good questions

This is not a feel-good implication, but really crucial for the whole learning process to work.

The role of curiosity has been studied (and perhaps under-studied and under-appreciated), but suffice to say that if a learner enters any learning activity with little to no natural curiosity, prospects for meaningful interaction with texts, media, and specific tasks are bleak. (Interested in how to kill learner curiosity in 12 easy steps?)

Many teachers force students (proverbial gun to head) to ask question at the outset of units or lessons, often to no avail. Cliché questions that reflect little understanding of the content can discourage teachers from “allowing” them. But the fact remains—if students can’t ask great questions—even as young as elementary school—something, somewhere is unplugged.

2. Questions are valued over answers

Questions are more important than answers. So it makes sense that if good questions should lead the learning, there would be value placed on these questions. And that means adding currency whenever possible—grades (questions as assessment!), credit (give them points—they love points), creative curation (writing as a kind of graffiti on large post-it pages on the classroom walls), or simply praise and honest respect. See if you don’t notice a change.

3. Ideas come from a divergent sources

Ideas for lessons, reading, tests, and projects—the fiber of formal learning—should come from a variety of sources. If they all come from narrow slivers of resources, you’re at risk of being pulled way off in one direction (that may or may not be good). An alternative? Consider sources like professional and cultural mentors, the community, content experts outside of education, and even the students themselves. Huge shift in credibility.

And when these sources disagree with one another, use that as an endlessly “teachable moment,” because that’s what the real world is like.

4. A variety of learning models are used

Inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, direct instruction, peer-to-peer learning, school-to-school, eLearning, Mobile learning, the flipped classroom, and on and on—the possibilities are endless. Chances are, none are incredible enough to suit every bit of content, curriculum, and learner diversity in your classroom. A characteristic of a highly-effective classroom, then, is diversity here, which also has the side-effect of improving your long-term capacity as an educator.

5. Classroom learning “empties” into a connected community

In a highly-effective learning environment, learning doesn’t need to be radically repackaged to make sense in the “real world,” but starts and ends there.

As great as it sounds for learners to reflect on Shakespeare to better understand their Uncle Eddie—and they might—depending on that kind of radical transfer to happen entirely in the minds of the learners by design may not be the best idea. Plan on this kind of transfer from the beginning.

It has to leave the classroom because they do.

6. Learning is personalized by a variety of criteria

Personalized learning is likely the future, but for now the onus for routing students is almost entirely on the shoulders of the classroom teacher. This makes personalization—and even consistent differentiation—a challenge. One response is to personalize learning—to whatever extent you plan for—by a variety of criteria—not just assessment results or reading level, but interest, readiness-for-content, and others as well.

Then, as you adjust pace, entry points, and rigor accordingly, you’ll have a better chance of having uncovered what the learners truly “need”.

7. Assessment is persistent, authentic, transparent, and never punitive

Assessment is just an (often ham-fisted) attempt to get at what a learner understands. The more infrequent, clinical, murky, or threatening it is, the more you’re going to separate the “good students” from the “good thinkers.” And the “clinical” idea has less to do with the format of the test, and more to do with the tone and emotion of the classroom in general. Why are students being tested? What’s in it for them, and their future opportunities to improve?

And feedback is quick even when the “grading” may not be.

8. Criteria for success is balanced and transparent.

Students should not have to guess what “success” in a highly-effective classroom looks like. It should also not be entirely weighted on “participation,” assessment results, attitude, or other individual factors, but rather meaningfully melted into a cohesive framework that makes sense—not to you, your colleagues, or the expert book on your shelf, but the students themselves.

9. Learning habits are constantly modeled

Cognitive, meta-cognitive, and behavioral “good stuff” is constantly modeled. Curiosity, persistence, flexibility, priority, creativity, collaboration, revision, and even the classic Habits of Mind are all great places to start. So often what students learn from those around them is less directly didactic, and more indirect and observational.

Monkey see, monkey do.

10. There are constant opportunities for practice

Old thinking is revisited. Old errors are reflected on. Complex ideas are re-approached from new angles. Divergent concepts are contrasted. Bloom’s taxonomy is constantly traveled up and down, from the simple to the complex in an effort to maximize a student’s opportunities to learn—and demonstrate understanding—of content.

http://www.teachthought.com/learning/10-characteristics-of-a-highly-effective-learning-environment/

The Importance Of Bed Time Stories

As a parent you probably read your kids bedtime stories like I do. What you may not realize is how important bedtime stories can be. Reading together is an important element to your child’s success in reading and creativity, but this is also a time in which you and your child can spend enjoying each other’s company, and sharing your love for one another. It is a process in which many special memories are created that involve you and your child, as well as a time when children can pay special attention to the story, the characters, the plot, and the lessons that can be learned from the story that they are listening to. Here are some information on the importance of bedtime stories.

Daily Routine

One of the reasons that the importance of bedtime stories is often highlighted by professionals who work with children is that it offers an opportunity to establish a daily routine. Parents and children often live extremely busy lives. There are many responsibilities that must be attended to throughout the day, such as work, school, chores, errands, extracurricular activities, homework, cooking, and similar types of events. Once the day has calmed and is approaching the end, children and parents alike can be comforted by the fact that they get to spend a little quality time together. In addition to this, children need to have some sort of daily routine in their lives. Why not making it reading an intriguing bedtime story?

Bonding with your Child

This is from personal experience. Being there for your child when you start and end the day is a great way to help build a closer bond with your child. As you work to spend time reading a bedtime story with your child, it helps create a unique bond between the two of you. As you read the stories, you can engage in open discussions about the characters that are part of the story, the places in which the stories depict, how the characters interact with one another, the problem and the resolution of the story, as well as any important lessons and values that are expressed in the story. This is a great time to hear the opinions of your child, and for them to hear yours. You can just enjoy a simple conversation while getting to know your child and teaching them your expectations on their behavior and words.

Reading Preparedness

The importance of bedtime stories includes the fact that it assists in reading preparedness. This is especially true if you read to a young child in their toddler years. It is during these years in which the brain is developing and growing the most. Children should be exposed to as many books, words, and sounds as possible so that they will develop into masters of reading and comprehension. By listening to the stories that you read, children can see and hear important sight words, learn how to pronounce appropriately, and expand their vocabularies. All of these elements are absolutely essential to ensuring that your child becomes a successful reader when they reach the appropriate age for this particular milestone in their lives.

Comprehension and Logic 

When children are exposed to bedtime stories and other types of literature throughout the day, it helps them develop comprehension and logic skills that are important to both the communication process and the development of educational skills. Children learn the components of a story, they learn how to predict events that happen in a story, and they learn how to recall events in a particular sequence about stories that they have heard. They can also learn how to make sense of real life situations through the means of imaginative and entertaining characters. By helping your child in the area of comprehension and logic through the means of bedtime stories, you are providing them with a skill set that will be beneficial all through their educational career.

Communication

The importance of bedtime stories also includes instilling important elements of communication in your child. We all communicate through written word, verbal methods, listening, and body language. Reading helps instill a higher sense of confidence in a child that is learning how to communicate effectively. Not only do the actual stories assist in raising awareness to communicating with others, but the conversations that you have with your child about the stories that you share together also helps in this area. You will find that the vocabulary that your child uses advances and that the descriptive phrases that they use to describe what they feel, think, and what to express to you become more in tune.

Morals and Values

Most of the books and stories that are classified as appropriate for children contain important morals and values. These morals and values often reflect how people should treat themselves, how they should treat others, and what is truly important in life. As parents, we expect our children to know and understand our moral expectations that we have for them, and the ways in which we feel that they should act. Considering that their minds are in a state of continual growth at a young age, it is often difficult to explain to them these expectations and the impact that they have on ourselves as well as others. However, a story brings these expectations and explanations to life in the eyes of a child.

Summary

 
As you can see, the importance of bedtime stories is more than just sharing a cute story. There are many advantages to sharing this time with your child. The advantages that you have been introduced to here include the following:

1. Daily Routine

2. Bonding

3. Reading Preparedness

4. Comprehension and Logic

5. Communication

6. Morals and Values

Take advantage of the importance of bedtime stories and incorporate them into your child’s life – you will both be glad that you did!I know I charish every moment.

Kevin – More4kids

http://www.more4kids.info/728/importance-of-bedtime-stories/

Hacking Our Senses To Boost Brain Power

Some schools are pumping music, noises and fragrances into the classroom to see if it improves exam results – could it work?
What did your school smell like? Was it noisy or peaceful?

It might not seem important, but a growing body of research suggests that smells and sounds can have an impact on learning, performance and creativity. Indeed, some head teachers have recently taken to broadcasting noises and pumping whiffs into their schools to see whether it can boost grades. Is there anything in it? And if so, what are the implications for the way we all work and study?

There is certainly some well-established research to suggest that some noises can have a detrimental effect on learning. Numerous studies over the past 15 years have found that children attending schools under the flight paths of large airports lag behind in their exam results.

But general noise seems to have an effect too. Bridget Shield, a professor of acoustics at London South Bank University, and Julie Dockrell, now at the Institute of Education, have been conducting studies and advising politicians on the effects of all sorts of noises, such as traffic and sirens, as well as noise generated by the children themselves. When they recreated those particular sounds in an experimental setting whilst children completed various cognitive tasks, they found a significant negative effect on exam scores. “Everything points to a detrimental impact of the noise on children’s performance, in numeracy, in literacy, and in spelling,” says Shield. The noise seemed to have an especially detrimental effect on children with special needs. `

Shield says the sound of “babble” – the chatter of other children, is particularly distracting in the classroom. Architects that fashion open-plan classrooms in schools would do well to take this on board. “People are very distracted by speech – particularly if it’s understandable, but you’re not involved in it.” This phenomenon is also known as the irrelevant speech effect, she says, adding that “it’s a very common finding in open-plan offices as well.”

Whether background sounds are beneficial or not seems to depend on what kind of noise it is – and the volume. In a series of studies published last year, Ravi Mehta from the College of Business at Illinois and colleagues tested people’s creativity while exposed to a soundtrack made up of background noises – such as coffee-shop chatter and construction-site drilling – at different volumes. They found that people were more creative when the background noises were played at a medium level than when volume was low. Loud background noise, however, damaged their creativity.

This makes sense for a couple of reasons, says psychologist Dr Nick Perham, at Cardiff Metropolitan University in the UK, who studies the effect of sounds on learning but was not involved in the study. Firstly, he says, sounds that are most distracting tend to be very variable. A general hum in the background suggests a steady-state sound with not much acoustical variation. “So there’s not much there to capture your attention – nothing distracting the subjects,” he says. At the same time, the background noise might cause the subjects to be in a slightly heightened state of arousal, says Perham. You don’t want too much or too little arousal. “Medium arousal is best for good performance. So it might be that a general hum in the background gives an optimum level of arousal.” With that in mind, Perham suggests there may be some benefit to playing music or other sounds in an art class or other situations where creativity is key.

Many teachers all over the world already play music to students in class. Many are inspired by the belief that hearing music can boost IQ in subsequent tasks, the so-called Mozart effect. While the evidence actually suggests it’s a stretch to say classical music boosts brainpower, researchers do think pleasant sounds before a task can sometimes lift your mood and help you perform well, says Perham, who has done his own studies on the phenomenon. The key appears to be that you enjoy what you’re hearing. “If you like the music or you like the sound – even listening to a Stephen King novel – then you did better. It didn’t matter about the music,” he says.

However, it’s worth considering that music is not always helpful while you’re trying to work. Trying to perform a task which involves serial recall – for instance, doing mental arithmetic – will be impaired by sounds with acoustic variation, which includes most types of music, says Perham. (Except a few, like extreme death metal.) Songs with lyrics, on the other hand, are more likely to interfere with tasks that involve semantics – such as reading comprehension. “The task and the sound are important, when you have both of them using the same process then you get problems,” he says.

So, it seems that schools that choose to screen out disturbing noises and create positive soundscapes could enhance the learning of their students, so long as they make careful choices.

This isn’t the only sense being tweaked to affect learning. Special educational needs students at Sydenham high school in London are being encouraged to revise different subjects in the presence of different smells – grapefruit scents for maths, lavender for French and spearmint for history.

Less research has gone into the idea of whether scents can help with cognitive performance, although there have been intriguing findings. In 2003, psychologist Mark Moss, at Northumbria University, carried out a range of cognitive tests on subjects who were exposed either to lavender or rosemary aromas. “Rosemary in particular caught my attention as it is considered to be arousing and linked to memory,” he says, whereas lavender is considered to be sedating. Moss found that those who were smelling lavender performed significantly worse in working memory tests, and had impaired reaction times for both memory and attention-based tasks, compared to controls. Those in the rosemary group, on the other hand, did much better than controls overall in the memory tasks, although their reaction times were slower.

Why might this be? It’s perhaps not surprising that smells affect memory, given that the brain’s olfactory bulb is intimately linked to the hippocampus, which deals with learning. But Moss suspected there was more to it. To explore the pharmacological effects of rosemary on the body, he drew blood samples from volunteers who had just undergone cognitive tests in a rosemary-infused room, and found that they had elevated levels of a compound called 1,8-cineole in their blood. Previous research has shown that this compound increases communication between brain cells, which might explain how it improves brain function.

So, as you finish reading this story, take a moment to tune into your senses. Close your eyes and take a few nice deep breaths. What can you hear and smell? The answer, it seems, may affect how much you learnt in the past few minutes.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131022-hacking-senses-to-boost-learning/2

http://www.bbc.com/future