“Divergent thinking: Imaginative thinking, characterized by the generation of multiple possible solutions to a problem, often associated with creativity. The concept was introduced in 1946 by the US psychologist J(oy) P(aul) Guilford (1897-1987) and is one of the five different types of mental operations in Guilford’s cube.”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
OK, very quickly, here is a glossary of terms for teaching phonics, if you can use it.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
While I have found Stanley Milgram’s studies on obedience to authority fascinating (and the “lost letter experiment” is also interesting), I do understand that it isn’t exactly high school material. That said, I did, in 17 years of teaching now, have one kid ask about Milgram. Furthermore, I am aware that many of Milgram’s contemporaries and colleagues expressed serious ethical qualms about the methods Milgram used.
Nonetheless, here is a short reading on Dr. Milgram’s study along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Social Sciences, Worksheets
Tagged building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge, cognition/learning/understanding, diction/grammar/style/usage, philosophy/religion, professional development, questioning/inquiry, readings/research, social-emotional learning
“What type of apples did you buy?
They are cooking apples.
What are those people doing in the kitchen?
They are cooking apples.
This example may seem unusual, but many, if not most, sentences have more than one grammatically correct interpretation. A classic example is “Time flies like an arrow.” Most people interpret it metaphorically—time moves quickly, as an arrow does. But it could also mean that a particular type or insect (time flies) feel affection for arrows. Or “time” could be a command, with the sentence meaning I want you to assess the pace of those flies, and I want you to do it in the way you would assess the pace of an arrow. There are actually at least two other grammatically acceptable interpretations of this sentence.
Grammatically acceptable, but not acceptable to common sense. There’s not a variety of flies called “time flies.” And who would tell someone to get out their stopwatch and time some flies in the same way they would time an arrow? Who times files or arrows? Just as in the “eating apples” example, readers bring knowledge to bear on the sentence, not just grammar, to arrive at the correct interpretation. But in those examples, the knowledge is not provided in the text. The reader had to know it before reading the text.
The influence of meaning on the processing of a sentence is most obvious when grammar renders the sentences ambiguous, but meaning also has an impact on the speed and ease of processing even if the grammar is ambiguous. For example, the sentence “I cut up a slice of cooked ham” will be read more slowly when it is preceded by a few sentences describing the protagonist getting dressed, compared to a context where the protagonist was described as in a kitchen. That slowing can be avoided by adding one word at the start of the sentence: “Later, I cut up a slice of cooked ham.” So clearly, we’re not just extracting meaning from sentences, we are coordinating the meaning of sentences with the meaning of what we’ve read before, and we’re doing that as we process each sentence.”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
Here is a lesson plan on intelligence. You’ll need this short reading and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. If you’d like slightly longer versions of these documents, click here.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Saxon math: A mathematics program that relies on explicit, incremental instruction. The series was created by John Saxon, a former mathematics teacher and U.S. Air Force officer who believed that he had found a superior way to teach mathematics, based on the step-by-step instruction that he had encountered in the military. Each day, students work on a limited number of concepts, solving problems until they have mastered each concept and then moving on to the next. Every new assignment is a cumulative review of previously studied materials. The Saxon textbooks are popular with homeschooling families and some charter schools, but are shunned by many school districts because they do not teach discovery and inquiry methods.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
“Classroom Interaction, Classroom Behavior: Describes the form and content of behavior or social interaction in the classroom. In particular, research on gender, class, and ‘race’ in education has examined the relationship between teacher and students in the classroom. A variety of methods have been used to investigate the amount and type of ‘teacher-time’ received by different groups of students. Much of the research has then sought to relate this to different educational experiences and outcomes among particular groups. For example, some studies showed that boys received a disproportionate amount of the teachers’ time, sat in different places in the classroom, and were more highly regarded by teachers, which may go some way towards explaining the educational differential between men and women. More recently, focus has shifted to examining the role of the school as a whole on student experiences as well as behavior outside the classroom, such as bullying and racial and sexual harassment.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
On a chilly Wednesday morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on tabula rasa, which is an educational and epistemological concept from John Locke.
So I must ask: do students arrive in our classrooms as blank slates, as Locke claimed, or do they have basic cognitive frameworks for understanding the world? I imagine that entire academic careers may still depend on the discourses this question raises.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
If you follow this blog regularly, you are likely aware of my obsession with handwriting. That mania extends to typefaces as well, and I have read, over the years, that the much-hated Comic Sans makes reading easy for students who struggle with the written word. I’ve always meant to test this. This morning, offhandedly, I performed that test with this short questionnaire on font styles.
To my surprise, most of my students told me they prefer Times New Roman. So, in the final analysis, I don’t know what to think.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Children rarely [are provided work in] redefining what has been encountered, reshaping it, reordering it. The cultivation of reflectiveness is one of the great problems one faces in devising curricula: how to lead children to discover the powers and pleasures that await the exercise of retrospection.”
Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
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