Conference Day 2 and 3 ....

My brain is very full after two very intensive but wonderful days at the conference.  The last two days were very intense and I left with lots of old and new ideas to keep my mind ticking for a while.  I was lucky enough to participate in two sessions with Grant Wiggins, the second half of the Understanding by Design team.  The first focused on making meaning through inquiry and dialogue and the second on transfer of understanding.  Grant presented in a very passionate and direct manner, opening with the statement, 'High school is boring.  I wouldn't want to be a student in today's high schools.'  I was glad I wasn't a high school teacher in the audience, particularly a high school Maths teacher, they got torn apart.  His main message in the first session was that teachers need to stop front loading students with information and knowledge and begin engaging them with essential questions to debate and discuss as a group, hence making meaning.  

In the second session, Grant presented some alarming statistics from the high stakes testing in America.  After the analysis of one particular round of tests, students were interviewed about why they may have got certain questions wrong.  On a writing question which asked students to choose what kind of text the example was, many students commented that it wasn't an essay because it didn't have five paragraphs.  Who says that an essay must have five paragraphs?  American school teachers, apparently.  Hence, the need for a greater focus on 'transfer'.  Grant continually reinforced the idea that students need to be able to solve real problems on their own.  He also talked about students needing to see the purpose of the knowledge, skills and strategies that are being passed on to them, therefore 'Why do we have to learn this?' is a valid question that teachers should be able to answer.  

I also attended a session on interactive white boards (IWB) and 'clickers'.  The session was very energetic and interactive, the excitement of the teachers playing with these tools made it easy to see how much fun they would be in the classroom.  The clickers were particularly fascinating.  For those of you who don't know what they are .... clickers look a little bit like a remote control and they are used by students to answer questions and provide feedback to teachers.  For example, the teacher can ask a multiple choice question and students respond using the clicker.  The results can then be displayed on the IWB for all to see (anonymous, of course).  Students can also use the clicker to text short responses.  Pretty cool stuff.  I'm still not 100% convinced of their educational benefits but they are a fun and novel tool to use.

My last session of the conference was about Differentiated Instruction (DI) and UbD.  Most of the UbD information was old news to me  but it is always good to revisit ideas with a different perspective.  DI seems like common sense teaching to me but it was good to put more of a formal spin on what most primary school teachers already do quite well.  The main point that I took away from Carol Ann Tomlinson's (DI guru) discussion was the idea of 'planning for flexibility' and 'refining for reality'.  'Planning for flexibility' means making time in the curriculum for opportunities to provide students with differentiated instruction.  Then, during the actual teaching time, the teacher is able to 'refine for reality' - use those opportunities to provide for the specific needs of the individual students.