Based Learning 3: CBL – Competency/Connections-Based Learning

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Competency-Based Learning:

Competency-Based learning refers to systems of instruction, assessment, grading, and academic reporting that are based on students demonstrating that they have learned the knowledge and skills they are expected to learn as they progress through their education.

Competencies Support Learning by:

1. Focusing learning on the critical competencies needed for success.
2. Providing standards for measuring performance and capabilities.
3. Providing the framework for identifying learning options/curriculum/programs to meet individual and organizational needs.
4. Supporting effective forecasting of organizational, as well as project-related learning requirements.
5. Providing standards for determining how well learning has occurred, both at the individual and organizational level.

Advantages:

1. Competency-based learning changes the dynamic of time and it rewards students for skills acquired rather than time spent in a seat. It expects the same level of mastery from every student.
2. In higher education, competency-based education models can break the “iron triangle,” expanding access, affordability, and quality for more students, especially when it is combined with new technology to deliver and assess learning.
3. In K-12, it allows students to move at their own pace, sailing through what they can learn quickly and slow down and get more support from teachers when they struggle.
4. For all students, it opens the possibility of multiple pathways to college readiness and college completion.

Connections-Based Learning:

Connections-based Learning is an approach to teaching and learning that leverages the connected world we live in. It's about changing the question from "How can we learn this?" to "Whom can we learn this from?" With Connections-based Learning, making meaningful connections drives the learning activities.

Connections-based Learning focuses on students making meaningful connections with teachers, experts, organizations, community and each other. The development of this approach has been birthed out of a desire to create learning experiences in a connected world with connected students.

Connections-based Learning sees the importance of students making real-life connections with both the local community and the globe.

Connections-based Learning contains 2 Parts:

Part 1: Share the Process

1. Connection Criteria:

The desired criteria is shared with the students and they are encouraged to ask themselves: are there people in the community, organizations or experts that can help us do something about this topic?

2. Learning Proposal: Students answer questions such as:

• Who in the community, what organizations or which experts will help us do something about this topic?
• What information are we hoping to find?
• What solutions are we hoping to offer?
• What innovative ways to connect and present learning are we planning?

3. Collaboration Reflection:

• What skills and strengths does each group member have to accomplish the task?
• How are you going to divide the work load?
• What roles and responsibilities are assigned to each member?
• What rules do you want to have regarding your collaboration?
• What will you do if the rules aren’t followed?

4. Progress Check-Ins:

• Offering assistance as the students make their connections
• Develop questions to ask experts and organizations
• Develop ways to share what they have done.
• An important question for the teacher to ask oneself is: What connections do I have that can move the group forward?

5. Process Sharing:

• This provides yet another feedback opportunity as students, teachers, principals or parents either make meaningful comments or ask questions.
• When a process is focused on, setbacks do not mean failures. The process and learning can still be shared and celebrated.
• Innovative ideas that take risks can still be approved, honored, and supported because everyone can share their process.

Part 2: Feedback Meaningfully

1. Develop Commenting Skills:

• Ask questions
• Add ideas
• Share your story
• Offer other opinions
• Questions to Teachers:
• Has time been taken to have students learn how to feedback meaningfully?
• Are students given a chance to "ask questions, add ideas, share stories, offer other opinions" during student presentations and on student digital portfolios?
• Are comments on digital portfolio entries deemed important for learning or simply an add-on?

2. Enable Multiple Feedback Sources:

• Inviting parents, principles, other classes to student presentations
• Asking parents, other teachers, and other students to comment on students' blogs
• Sharing out student learning through social media
• Questions to Teachers:
• Have all the possible sources of feedback through classroom connections been leveraged?
• Does the classroom have a culture of safety and freedom to share?
• Are we experiencing such a community as educators ourselves?

3. Leverage Student Response:

• When a question is asked, an answer is expected.
• When a comment is made, the student is expected to acknowledge it.
• Questions to Teachers:
• Have students been given an opportunity to respond to the feedback received from the teacher and others?
• Has this response been leveraged for learning?
• Does the students' understanding of their feedback get clarified?

4. Guide Self-Assessment:

• What competencies/content did I address?
• With whom did I connect to address these competencies/content?
• What did peer and reader/listener comments focus on?
• What did I learn about the content and competencies given?
• What further learning needs to take place?
• Questions to Teachers:
• Have students been given the time to self-assess?
• Are students' self-assessments well informed with feedback from the community of learning?
• Is the student self-assessment recorded in a genuine way?

Characteristics of Connected Students:

1. Are more inclined to voice their opinions because they believe that their voices matter.
2. Practice online collaboration and communication skills for audiences beyond their teachers.
3. Understand how technology can connect them to experts and authors and have the confidence to reach out to them.
4. Utilize social media to create positive digital footprints.
5. Recognize the power of social media to make a difference, change the status quo.
6. Gain an understanding of other cultures and perspectives by building relationships and friendships with people from outside their own communities.
7. Know that there are many people who can help them solve a problem and many different ways to do so.
8. Are more engaged in school.

Ideas for Connecting your Students:

1. Connect with another class in your District.
2. Skype in the classroom is a great and simple way to begin to connect your students.
3. Google Hangouts and Google Communities.
4. Twitter hashtags and your Twitter community can help make those initial connections.
5. Padlet, Kahoot, Todays Meet, Google Docs, and Google Slides: Basically, any tool that allows your students to participate online can also become a shared platform for local or global collaboration.
6. Harness the power of blogs

Resources to Implement CBL:

1. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ964s7ITlk
2. Sean's Blog: http://seanrtech.blogspot.ae/
3. Google: https://plus.google.com/communities/105990227223931221485
4. PowerPoint: http://seanrtech.blogspot.ae/p/connections-based-learning-101.html
5. Edmodo: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/based-learning-3-cbl-competencyconnections-based-learning--384705/

Based Learning 2: BBL - Brain-Based Learning

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Brain-based learning refers to teaching methods, lesson designs, and school programs that are based on the latest scientific research about how the brain learns, including such factors as cognitive development—how students learn differently as they age, grow, and mature socially, emotionally, and cognitively.  This is a new paradigm which establishes connections between brain function and educational practice. In a nutshell, brain-based education says, “Everything we do uses our brain.”

BBL Basics, Principles, and Strategies:

1. Physical education, recess, and movement are critical to learning.
2. Social conditions influence our brain in multiple ways we never knew before.
3. All educators should know the brain can and does change every day.
4. Chronic stress is a very real issue at schools for both staff and students.
5. Schools are pushing differentiation as a strategy to deal with the differences in learners.
6. New evidence suggests the value of teaching content in even smaller chunk sizes.
7. The role of the arts in schools continues to be under great scrutiny.
8. Humans have the remarkable capacity to display many emotions, but only six of them are “hard-wired,” or built in at birth.
9. Innovations suggest that special education students may be able to improve far more than we earlier thought.
10. The recent brain/mind discovery that even memories are not fixed.

Practical School Applications:

1. Support more, not less physical activity, recess and classroom movement. It raises the good chemicals for thinking, focus, learning and memory. Students need 30-60 minutes per day to lower stress response, boost neurogenesis and boost learning.
2. Do not allow random social groupings for more than 10-20 percent of the school day. Use targeted, planned, diverse social groupings with mentoring, teams and buddy systems. Work to strengthen pro-social conditions. Teacher-to-student relationships matter, as do student-to-student relationships.
3. Give teachers a mandate of 30-90 minutes a day and 3-5 times per week to upgrade student skill sets. Teach attentional skills, memory skills and processing skills. Progress requires focus, “buy-in” and at least, a half-hour a day.
4. Teach students better-coping skills, increase student perception of choice, build coping skills, strengthen arts, physical activity and mentoring. These activities increase a sense of control over one’s life, which lowers stress. All of these can reduce the impact of stressors.
5. Make differences the rule, not the exception at your school. Validate differences. Never expect all students to be on the same page in the same book on the same day. Allow kids to celebrate diversity, unique abilities, talents and interests. Give them the skill sets, relationships and hope to succeed.
6. Teachers should teach in small chunks, process the learning, and then rest the brain. Too much content taught in too small of a time span means the brain cannot process it, so we simply don’t learn it. Breaks, recess, and downtime make more sense than content, content and more content.
7. Make arts mandatory and give students the choice of several, and support with expert teachers and the time to excel at it. Arts support the development of the brain’s academic operating systems in ways that provide many transferable life skills.
8. Teachers must teach appropriate emotional states as life skills (e.g. honor, patience, forgiveness and empathy) and it’s important to read and manage the other emotional states in the classroom. In good states, students learn well and behave better. Insist that teachers build social skills into every lesson. The better the social skills, the better the academics.
9. Make sure all teachers learn the latest in dealing with special education learning delay recovery.
10. Teachers should review the content halfway between the original learning and the test. If content is taught Monday and tested on Friday, then a review should be on Wednesday. Teachers should mediate the review process with students through structured reviews such as written quizzes or group work that ensures quality control. Otherwise, the material is more likely to get confused and test scores drop.

 Resources for Implementation:

1. Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/edutopia/brain-based-learning/
2. Edutopia: http://www.edutopia.org/blogs/beat/brain-based-learning
3. Edmodo: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/based-learning-2-bbl-brain-based-learning--385103/
4. 10 Great Brain Breaks: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/10-great-brain-breaks--383579/
5. Useful Brainstorming Techniques:  https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/25-useful-brainstorming-techniques--384895/
6. Build Students' Brains with Thinking Skills Apps: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/build-students-brains-with-these-thinking-skills-apps--385139/

Based Learning 1: ABL - Art-Based Learning

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1. What are “arts-based teaching and learning” practices?
2. How are arts-based teaching and learning practices implemented?
3. What are the effects of arts-based teaching and learning practices?

Arts-based learning for business provides the crucible for creativity, innovation, and transformation that helps us thrive in a world of change.

At the community level, arts-based teaching and learning may focus on improved outcomes for special populations or for the community as a whole.  To affect knowledge of the arts, for example, schools may provide instruction in visual arts, music, dance, or drama, perhaps integrating these four disciplines.  Classroom models bring art activities to students in a regular classroom setting. An “artist-in-the-classroom” or “artist-in-residence” works cooperatively with the students’ regular teacher to plan and implement art or arts-based lessons. 

Effects Attributed to Arts-Based Teaching and Learning:

1. At the community level, arts-based teaching and learning improves relationships and, therefore, cooperation among partners.
2. Arts-based teaching and learning improves classroom and school climate.
3. Arts-based instructional practices improve teacher quality.
4. The literature describes both affective and cognitive benefits for students who participate in arts-based learning.
5. Arts-based instruction increases interest and motivation; increases self-esteem and willingness to try new things; develops learning abilities; develops thinking skills; develops neural systems.
6. Social development may be related to arts-based learning.
7. Arts-based learning generalizes to other learning.
8. Arts-based teaching may be particularly effective with diverse learners.
9. Academic development may be related to arts-based learning.

Positive relationships between arts and academics as follows:

1. Drama develops higher-order language and literacy skills.
2. Music enhances language learning.
3. Music enhances spatial reasoning.
4. Art experiences develop writing skills.
5. Arts experiences develop literacy and numeracy skills.

Recommendations for the Implementation of Arts-Based Teaching and Learning:

1. Teach teachers arts-based instructional strategies to engage learners.
2. Give the arts a permanent place in education.
3. Provide an interdisciplinary curriculum.
4. Support co-teaching to implement interdisciplinary curricula.
5. Connect with the community.

Resources to implement ABL:

1. Music in the Classroom: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/music-in-the-classroom--351907/
2. Music Theory Lessons: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/music-theory-lessons--383995/
3. Music Matters: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/composing-a-melody--379021/
4. Drama in the ESL Classroom:  https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/drama-in-the-esl-classroom--384729/
5. Drama Tool Kit: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/drama-tool-kit--384731/
6. Drama in the Classroom: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/drama-in-the-classroom-activities--384733/
7. Teaching Drama to Kids: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/teaching-drama-to-kids--384735/
8. Creative Drama Classroom:  https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/creative-drama-classroom--384737/