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We will review the purpose of tonight’s workshop, and set the stage for learning and transformation. You will be guided to the general inquiry statement that will frame your work during the session.

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Individual Team Topic Research and Exploration (415-445)

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Individual Team Topic Research and Exploration (415-445)

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You will gather in grade like groups (K-2; 3-5; and 6-12) to be split into larger randomized groups

You will then be numbered off 1-6 to research a topic. You will be given an article to start, but will have time to be curious and explore your topic through discussion, internet research, etc.

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Large Team Concept Development (445-515)

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Large Team Concept Development (445-515)

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You will regroup in your grade level teams to develop a set of routines that will contribute to learning and development. Everybody should share what they discovered in their “expert group”.

Create a visual (or activity): a sketch with a “process map”, a graphic organizer or flowchart, mind map, etc. Be creative, and try to have fun with it.

Identify the setting (time, place, people) and the routine, and explain your rationale.

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Each group will have a maximum 2 minutes to present their visual

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An opportunity to recap things learned and discuss our debatable question.

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Daily routines and structures are shaping and educating our students.

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Fact: How can spaces and activities be designed?

Concept: How can routines and structures in the classroom shape and educate our students?

Debate: Do “student centered” learning environments promote community and engagement in the classroom, as well as a better quality of life for teachers?

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Student engagement is the Mega Millions of education: When you hear about it, it seems so easy to win-and then you read about the odds. The good news is that there are effective strategies for boosting student engagement, and they're considerably more likely to pay off than playing the lottery.

A growing body of research in education and the social sciences suggests that students' curiosity can be stimulated in ways that strengthen their connectedness to lessons, interactions with each other, and willingness to commit to learning goals. There are simple techniques that teachers can use during a lesson to boost curiosity, and thus engagement, among students-especially older ones, who are at greater risk for losing interest.

Boosting Student Engagement

1. Harness the power of mystery and puzzles: As storytellers from Scheherazade to the writers of Stranger Things have known, humans have a compulsive need to find out what happens next. We love solving puzzles and finding sequences and patterns. So introduce your next new unit with a mystery.

Try posing a broad question to groups of three or four students, such as: "What would happen if a butterfly's habitat was suffering a severe drought during the pupa stage?" or "What if Tupac had lived?" Let the groups discuss and present their justifications to the class. The realization students need to come to: Conjecture is a legitimate starting point for learning.

2. Pause after asking a question-and again after getting an answer: Rushing through questions and answers doesn't help most students. We all process information differently, and taking an answer from the first student whose hand shoots up means others may abandon the question before they've truly processed it.

Pause with purpose after every question, and again after every answer. That second pause helps other students reconsider the question and reflect on the first answer.

Remember, too, that choral responses aren't just for younger students: When everyone repeats and responds at the same time, the risk that they're not actively involved in the content is reduced. While we'd all like to see education become as individualized as possible, there's something affirming about being part of the group every now and then, even for older students.

3. Craft fewer-but deeper-questions: One or two thoughtfully phrased questions can lead to a deep discussion. Try using questions that begin with "What if" or "How might," and aim for questions that don't have an undisputed yes or no answer and that don't rely on simple recalling of facts. The goal should be to foster mature thought and collaborative discussion.

4. Introduce controversy: Debating an issue and trying to persuade others are great ways to become invested in a topic. This is true not only in current affairs, but in literary and historical analysis. You might pose questions such as, "Why do you think the character responded as she did?" or "What do you suppose happened to John Smith when the crew accused him of mutiny?" You'll have to be prepared to step in if the exchange of views threatens to deteriorate into an overly emotional argument.

5. Mine the gap: The knowledge gap, that is. A certain amount of background knowledge needs to be delivered by direct instruction; then a combination of guidance, self-direction, and curiosity can propel learning indefinitely. If you can lead a student to recognize that she knows something about a subject, and that she'll be better off if she pushes herself to learn a little more about it, curiosity will kick in and motivate her to make that extra effort.

Ask students what they know about a topic, and then ask what they think they don't know about it. Ask which of the "don't know" items they think are most important for them to learn. Do they seem to be guessing? That's all right-you're asking them to comment on something they've already conceded they don't know. Examining their knowledge and capacity to learn is the whole point.

6. Give students a WIIFM (what's in it for me?): A student who asks, "Why should I know this?" is pointing toward a promising teaching tactic. Students must see why content is important to them. How will they use it later in life? How do people use it in the real world? For instance, you might know how a given subject relates to students' families' quality of life right now. We can give students relevant projects through which to apply and show what they know.

7. Encourage dynamic collaboration: With the right guidance, collaborative small-group work leads students to build social skills while also obtaining knowledge. They learn how individual and group success are mutually dependent, and how to fill gaps in peers' knowledge-and they do this in an environment that's engaging because it's social. Teachers can consistently build in short, informal collaboration techniques such as Mix, Freeze, Pair.

Virtually all teachers already use these techniques to some degree. But they become much more powerful when we view them as part of a coordinated, intentional strategy to boost student curiosity.

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Student engagement is the Mega Millions of education: When you hear about it, it seems so easy to win-and then you read about the odds. The good news is that there are effective strategies for boosting student engagement, and they're considerably more likely to pay off than playing the lottery.

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Teachers have long known that feeling safe and secure in school helps students focus their energy on learning. And the research bears that out: A 2018 study found that when teachers deliberately foster a sense of belonging by greeting each student at the door of the class, they see "significant improvements in academic engaged time and reductions in disruptive behavior."

Edutopia covered that study last year, and we've shared many other ideas from teachers for ensuring that every student in the classroom feels like they belong.

Some of the activities below take less than five minutes. They're divided up among the grades, but many can apply across all of the years from kindergarten to 12th grade.

Elementary School

Shout-Outs: This is a quick way for students to celebrate each other for doing a job well or for attempting something difficult. Shout-outs can be incorporated at any point in a class. First-grade teacher Valerie Gallagher of Providence, Rhode Island, rings a chime when she wants to get the class's attention to ask who has a shout-out.

"It's not just me as the teacher saying, 'You're doing well'-it's a way for them to interact with each other and celebrate positivity," says Gallagher.

Friendly Fridays: Elizabeth Peterson, a fourth-grade teacher in Amesbury, Massachusetts, uses Friendly Fridays as a simple way for students to lift each other and themselves up. Peterson has her students write a friendly, anonymous note to a classmate, practice using positive self-talk, or use storytelling to give a peer a pep talk.

Sharing Acts of Kindness: Fifth-grade teacher Marissa King, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, shares two activities that encourage kindness. In the first, the teacher gives students secret kindness instructions, such as writing an anonymous note to a peer who is struggling in one of their classes.

The second activity revolves around noticing others' acts of kindness: When a student sees a peer tidying up in the classroom, for example, they can post a thank you note on a shared digital "kindness wall." Both activities coach students to be kind to their peers in the hope that they'll begin to practice kindness unprompted.

Middle School

Paper Tweets: To build community in her seventh-grade classroom, Jill Fletcher of Kapolei Middle School in Kapolei, Hawaii, created a bulletin board modeled on Twitter. Students use a template to create a profile, and they enlist at least three followers-a friend, an acquaintance, and someone they don't interact with much.
Courtesy of Jill Fletcher
When the class does this activity-which takes about 45 minutes to set up the first time-Fletcher has them respond to prompts about their current mood or new things happening in their lives, and then their followers respond.

Class Norms: Bobby Shaddox, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at King Middle School in Portland, Maine, has his students develop a set of norms for themselves-adjectives that describe them as a community of learners. Having students come up with their own norms creates "a pathway toward belonging for every single student in that class," says Dr. Pamela Cantor, founder of Turnaround for Children.

"Instead of a top-down list of rules that a teacher gives a class, these are words that we generated together," says Shaddox. "It helps us own the behavior in the classroom."

Group Salutes: A moment shared between two or more students at the beginning or end of an activity, a Group Salute is a teacher-prompted interaction that is a quick, low-prep way to cultivate community. The shared gesture can be physical-like a high five-or social-a teacher could ask students to express gratitude to their group members.

There's some interesting data supporting this idea: Researchers found that NBA teams whose players touch the most early in the season-high fives, fist bumps, etc.-had the best records later for the season.

High School

Morning Meetings: Morning meetings have long been a staple of elementary classrooms, but they can help students in all grades transition into class. Riverside School, a pre-K to 12th-grade school in Ahmedabad, India, uses a version of morning meetings at every grade level as "a pure relationship-building time." Bonding exercises led by teachers or students include physical or social and emotional activities, or discussions of sensitive topics like bullying.

Appreciation, Apology, Aha: As a quick, daily closing activity, students gather in a circle and share an appreciation of one of their peers, an apology, or a light bulb moment. The teacher models the activity by sharing and then asks for volunteers to speak.

"Those types of appreciations and community recognitions can go a long way toward building bonds," explains Aukeem Ballard, an educator with Summit Public Schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"A low-stakes thorn might be 'I feel tired.' Yet many students choose to share more personal items, like 'My thorn is that my dog is sick and I'm really worried about her,'" writes Alex Shevrin Venet, a former school leader at a trauma-informed high school.

Snowball Toss: Students anonymously write down one of their stressors on a piece of paper, crumple it up, gather in a circle, and throw their paper balls in a mock snowball fight. When that's done, they pick up a snowball and read it aloud.

"The idea is that we're moving around. We're able to have fun, laugh, scream, be loud, and then have that discussion about stress," says Marcus Moore, an advisory leader at Urban Prep School in Chicago.

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These community-building ideas for the classroom can help teachers ensure that students in every grade feel like they belong.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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A Chrome/Drive Extension to assist in designing flowcharts/geometric visual aids

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Add some color to your documents, presentations, and websites with easy to create charts and diagrams.

Get it done together
Build charts, layout diagrams, create flow charts, and then easily add them to other documents or embed them on a website.

Care to comment?
Comment on a shape or text box to give context to your discussion. Send an email notification by adding someone to a comment.

Access anywhere, anytime
All your drawings are automatically saved and stored in Google Drive. Access them wherever you go, from any device.

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A free tool for making graphic organizers. Plenty of easy to use templates

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Another tool for making graphic organizers and visual presentations

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Access videos, whitepapers, eBooks, webinars, blogs, infographics, case studies, demos and more in our resource hub to support your success.

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Teachers work harder outside of class, students work harder during class

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Teachers work harder outside of class, students work harder during class

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Our teaching should always be geared toward transformation, not merely compliance. Technology opens up new avenues for transformation.

Tech for efficiency to tech for transformation

Master fewer, simple tools and utilize in a transformative way

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We help educators around the world use technology to solve tough problems.

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Educator Resources & Technology Training - Google for Education

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Discover numerous educator resources including technology training for teachers, courses, certifications and professional development for educators.

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Sign in to the Education Community. Discover great learning resources and learn new skills to become an Apple Teacher.

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Common Sense Education provides educators and students with the resources they need to harness the power of technology for learning and life. Find a free K-12 Digital Citizenship curriculum, reviews of popular EdTech apps, and resources for protecting student privacy.

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High-speed networks, digital devices, and creative applications are revolutionizing education. Students can be empowered to take their learning to deeper and deeper levels while developing essential skills that will prepare them for success in the 21 st century.

For example, our once-isolated classrooms now can connect students to authentic audiences around the world, leading to a deeper understanding of global issues. Powerful yet easy-to-use software tools can empower educators and students alike to create top-quality digital tutorials to contribute and build much more support for all learners. Our students now have access to primary source materials that would have been beyond the imagination (and limited education budgets) without high-speed networks. We can now support our special education students and have them collaborate where they were once isolated. Virtual reality tools allow us to explore objects where a human being could never physically visit, such as the sun or the center of a nucleus. We have technologies that can make abstract concepts accessible and exciting.

Learn from the best innovations in education! Join education thought leader Alan November in Boston July 17-19 for his 20th annual Building Learning Communities Education conference for teachers 2019, where hundreds of K-12 and higher-education leaders from around the globe will gather to discuss the world's most successful innovations in education.

Without question, there is a "wow factor" across all disciplines and grade levels. Every day brings the potential for new opportunity to expand and deepen the boundaries of learning. However, adding technology to our campuses does not automatically contribute to improved learning. There is the problem of what we could label, "the $1,000 pencil - applying new tools to do old work." Research shows that unless we redefine the work we will not be tapping the full power of our emerging technologies. While we must support our educators to learn new tools, the truly creative challenge is to redesign the work and the roles of the learner and educator to tap the potential of our new technologies.

We need leaders who understand how to manage the opportunities of this historic transition. While it is not uncommon to find amazing pioneering educators on any one campus, it is more difficult to find whole campuses that have scaled the innovative practice across their entire faculty. Leadership will make the difference to the rate and distribution of these powerful innovations.

As exciting as these changes are, it is only normal that transformative change will bring some level of resistance from both faculty and students who are used to a traditional design of teaching and learning. One of the most important leadership skills moving forward is to help colleagues manage this shift.

Transforming our education system is not so much an intellectual/intelligence problem as it is an emotional one. For example, many of these emerging technologies represent a shift of control from the educator to the learner. It is not unusual for very gifted educators to feel a sense of professional loss when a new tool, such as the knowledge engine WolframAlpha, allows students to correct their own homework in math, physics, and chemistry and even explore the design of more difficult problems than assigned.

From a management perspective, it is much easier simply to add technology to do exactly what has been done before-the same curriculum, same assessments, same schedule, same assignments-than to fundamentally redesign the work and the culture of learning. While there are benefits to automating certain aspects of teaching and learning, we will need leaders who can create professional cultures of innovation where faculty members feel supported in fundamentally redesigning the work to make it more rigorous, creative, and motivating.

We are in a period of constant innovation that will take decades to absorb. What we need to do is correctly define the opportunity, craft a powerful vision, and develop implementation strategies that scale the improvement in increased quality.
Defining the Opportunity
In defining the problem that technology brings to learning, there are two broad decision trees for leaders:

What are we currently doing within our curriculum that we could be doing better by using technology?

What have we never done before that technology uniquely enables to enhance teaching and learning?

The first decision tree does not require changes to what is learned, but it might change how you approach learning. An example would be the difference between how my two children learned in college. My son, Dan, was able to receive much more support because he could watch lecture videos over and over again, and because he had a social network of fellow students to lean on-and these supports allowed him to learn the same material much more effectively. My daughter didn't receive the same support, only graduating a few years earlier.

The second decision tree involves redesigning learning to take advantage of design concepts our world of paper could not provide. For example, in Bergen, Norway middle schools, students have a much deeper sense of global empathy. The Norwegian teacher is a pioneer in connecting students to journalists, police, prisoners, and native people around the world. Teacher and students fully appreciate that there is no way that a textbook or teacher designed videos could ever come close to providing the level of depth of critical thinking enabled by global communication. As is too often the norm, this classroom also happens to be the only one in the school where students can gain a sense of developing the critical skill of developing a line of reasoning based on authentic conversations. Scaling this successful innovation is the job of the leader.

Both decision trees can lead to improved learning. Since adding technology to existing work is fairly straightforward, this article will focus on the definition of transformation. The questions that leaders should ask themselves include:

1. Are we adding unique value to what we are doing as a school or district when using technology?

2. How can we ensure these changes are scaled throughout the organization?

Crafting A New Vision: 'Transformational Six'
To support leaders to craft a new vision of teaching and learning, I have put together a framework of six key questions that education leaders can use to assess whether technology has brought transformative value to instruction. If you can answer "yes" to any of these six questions, then you're on the right track:

Did the assignment build capacity for critical thinking on the web?

Did the assignment develop new lines of inquiry?

Are there opportunities for students to make their thinking visible?

Are there opportunities to broaden the perspective of the conversation with authentic audiences from around the world?

Is there an opportunity for students to create a contribution (purposeful work)?

Do students own their learning?

Did the assignment build capacity for critical thinking on the web?
Before the Internet, our students accessed sources for learning that had been preselected by a teacher or a librarian. Clearly, the Internet has removed any pretense of control of information. Now that students are choosing sources that have often never been professionally reviewed, it is absolutely vital that we prepare students to make thoughtful decisions about how to select high-quality sources.

We must recognize that with fundamental change there can be unintended consequences. Perhaps our weakest response to the web replacing our libraries as the "go to" source of information for our students, is their lack of preparation to understand how to verify the value of their search results. For example, if you have ever watched a student do research online, you probably noticed that they entered the exact title of their homework assignment as their search query-and then they only looked at the first page of results. Critical thinking and careful evaluation of the reliability of sources can be sorely lacking. Too many of our students believe they know how to use Google effectively. When was the last time any student asked a teacher for help in designing a search? Perhaps more importantly, when was the last time a teacher offered to help? If our students fail at step one-selecting the right information-then they will automatically fail at critical analysis.

We cannot abrogate our responsibility to prepare our students to be critical thinkers in the Internet Age. We need to teach our students how search engines work and how to design a powerful (and effective) query.

Here's an example: Suppose the assignment is to write an analysis of the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Here are two very different search designs in Google:
"Iranian Hostage Crisis"
site:ac.ir "conquest of the American spy den "

It would be normal for students to type the name of the assignment "Iranian hostage crisis" into Google. This will yield only search results with Western sources if the search is done anywhere in North America. If you ask students to review their results and ask them what is missing, many will not know how to answer this question. They cannot imagine that what is missing from the first page of search results are Iranian sources.

If you challenge students to refine their search strategy to find Iranian sources, most will simply add "Iranian sources" on the back end of their original search. This still will not yield any Iranian sources. But it's possible to use the advanced search page to select Iran as the source of your content. Or, you can use the Google operator "site" to switch your search to Iranian sources with the two-letter Iranian country code "ir" (site:ir). If you further want to improve the quality of your Iranian sources you could type: site:ac.ir + "conquest of the American spy den" into the search bar. Now you will find sources that are limited to Iranian universities that deal with what the Iranians called that historic event. This last search query will have no overlap with the original search yielding only Western sources. You will be learning about the Iranian point of view. This can lead to a fascinating set of comparison questions.

It should be the responsibility of all teachers to teach the research skills that lead to high-quality comparative searches. In this case, the teacher could have required two sources from Iran. There should have been a review of country codes and the use of the advanced search techniques to generate results from Iran. Finally, the teacher should have spent some time in class challenging the students to think about their search terms-such as by asking: "What did the Iranians call the takeover of the American embassy?" We need leaders who recognize that it is no longer sufficient to teach students how to read books and articles. We must prepare students to be web literate across the curriculum.
Did the assignment develop new lines of inquiry?
With access to massive amounts of information, including primary sources and different points of view from around the world, comes an opportunity to teach students to ask questions we could never ask in the limited world of paper.

Continuing with the example about Iran, if students discovered Iranian points of view about the hostage crisis, they could develop whole new lines of inquiry that would broaden their perspective of these events. For instance: Why did the Iranians refer to the takeover as the "Conquest of the American Spy Den?" Did the goals of the student-initiated revolution against the Shah align with the goals of the religious leaders who became the leaders of the new government?

In an interview I had with Stephan Wolfram, a chief designer of the computational knowledge engine WolframAlpha, he explains that most of the answers to traditional assignments are available online if you know how to find them. What isn't on the web are the questions. One of the most important skills we can teach our students is how to ask creative, innovative, and even impossible questions. "The new answers are the creative questions," Wolfram says.
Are there opportunities to provide our educators with new insights into how their students are thinking?
We now have powerful new tools that can help reveal what students are thinking in ways we couldn't do before without technology. For instance, tools such as Prism and Verso, can give teachers insight into what students were thinking as they read or watched an assignment.

These tools also help with self-assessment, which research shows to be one of the most important skills that can improve student achievement. And when students know what their peers were thinking about an assignment, they are more comfortable sharing their ideas in class-which can lead to richer discussions.
Are there opportunities to broaden the perspective of the conversation with authentic audiences from around the world?
As mentioned in the Norwegian example, not only are students gaining valuable perspectives that have served to deepen their learning and help them develop new lines of inquiry, but students can also learn critical global communication skills that will prepare them for future success in anything they do-and they are typically fully engaged in their learning. As one student commented, "I will remember these conversations for the rest of my life."
Is there an opportunity for students to create a contribution (purposeful work)?
This might be the most difficult quality to build into assignments, but it's no less important. Many teachers I talk to worry about the decline of student focus, but we can immediately address this decline by adding a meaningful purpose to student work. As author Dan Pink notes in his book Drive, research shows that purpose is a key motivating factor.

A colleague in Istanbul has her geometry students designing the geometry curriculum for blind students by visiting a local center for the blind and working with the students to understand how to build tactile activities to understand the subject. When her students finished their project, they published it to the web for global access. They know they are potentially making a difference in the lives of 1,000's of blind children worldwide.

When I interviewed these students in their classroom in Istanbul, many shared with me that they chose to extend their required 40 hours of design work to more than 200 hours. Some students even continue their work the year after their course ended. Their commitment to their work does not depend on an external reward such as grades, but an intrinsic drive based on making a contribution. It will become increasingly essential to give our students access to a global publishing platform to help build more capacity for student driven purpose.
Are students being challenged to take more responsibility to own their learning?
Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur knows how difficult this is from his own experience. He also knows just how incredibly rewarding it can be for students.

Dr. Mazur has figured out there are seven problems that require the knowledge he used to lecture about in his Introduction to Physics course. But instead of giving those lectures, he now gives his students these seven problems to solve in teams. He gives them the necessary background information, along with other resources, and then he inspires them to solve these seven problems on their own. They now do much better on the course's final exam, because they understand at a very deep level how to apply what they have learned. He had to let go of what he once absolutely loved about teaching - giving a brilliant lecture.
Next Steps
Harnessing the power of high-speed networks and other technologies to transform teaching and learning will require that leaders recognize the opportunities of both automating existing practices and creating new opportunities for learning that we could never do before. As knowledge becomes more available online, we are moving to a new reality where the added value of an educator will be measured less by their ability to transfer their knowledge and more by their ability to inspire students to continuously expand their own boundaries of learning.

As we teach students the lifelong skills of validating content, connecting globally, and applying their knowledge to add value to the world, educators will become more important than ever. The essential leadership skill will be to help manage this transition to redefine the work of both educator and student. It is an amazing time to be in education!

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Crafting a Vision for Empowered Learning and Teaching: Beyond the $1,000 Pencil - November Learning

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High-speed networks, digital devices, and creative applications are revolutionizing education. Students can be empowered to take their learning to deeper and deeper levels while developing essential skills that will prepare them for success in the 21 st century. For example, our once-isolated classrooms now can connect students to authentic audiences around the world, leading to a deeper understanding of global issues.

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https://www.canva.com/design/DADQ4aU_fQI/vUK4Q5CLNAalXB0501UbGA/view?utm_content=DADQ4aU_fQI&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=sharebutton