Beth

NaBloPoMo #11 Twitter Chats


One of my favorite forms of professional development are Twitter Chats. I've mentioned them before. The online chats are teacher driven, just-in-time information, and invigorating!

This week on Monday, Algebra teachers joined online for #alg2chat! We meet every other week right now. We had been on a hiatus, and returning this past Monday was awesome! We talked most about our current curriculum and ideas for engaging students in the work. This past week using videos in class and for tutorial support was a big topic! How do you use videos in your work? Do you make them yourself? Do you use a particular series online? How does that work for your students?

Last night, #eduread was hopping! We decided to step away from reading a single article a week to tackling Marzano's book, The Highly Engaged Classroom. Last night was Chapter 1 so there is plenty of time for you to join in! My take-aways from our discussion last night include this tweet/retweet via @druinok ... "Best way to learn is to DO." "We move to restart our brains." "The person talking is thinking!" I'm writing these short statements on chart paper for our classroom this morning!

In this first session, I learned that engagement is different from being attentive. Attention is about emotions and energy. Negative emotions and low energy prevent learning from getting into working memory. Engagement on the other hand is about relevance and a sense of efficacy. If students don't believe the information is necessary or if they think they can't do the work, their brains will reject the learning - and the information will not stay in working memory long enough to make a difference. Marzano uses these four questions ...

  1. How do I feel?
  2. Am I interested?
  3. Is this important?
  4. Can I do this?
I want to find a way to teach these questions to students ... it's important that they understand how their brain works!
This has been an amazing week for professional development, starting with the Google Lesson Plan Jam, and then the Twitter Chats! My brain is full to overflowing! My next task is to apply this good stuff to my classroom! And then to share out!

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