#TriConf17: Day 5 Keynote

Link to the archive of social media learning by Tri-Association

Keynote: Douglas Fisher

Study skills that work

First, don’t make study skills a separate class!

repeated reading
- When students read the material more than once, learning improves.
- They won’t do it automatically on a test like the SAT unless they are practicing it all year long, and they won’t practice unless teachers guide them into doing so.

notetaking
- Embed note-taking lessons into content lessons.
classroom discussion
- Let students spend the majority of the time talking to each other.
- Who’s doing the talking is probably the one doing the learning!
- We HAVE to reduce the amount of time teachers are talking AT students. Trust your students to talk, think, and develop language.
collective teacher efficacy
- Teachers get together in a PLC to talk about student growth, plan, collaborate.
- That group of teachers believes in their heart that what they do will change the lives of their students.
teacher/student relationships
- It’s super important to have healthy, growth-producing relationships between students and teachers.
- They will learn more when they like you.
- We need to have a conversation about how to help our teachers who don’t have good student relationships. We have to be brave and help our colleagues who don’t have good relationships with our students.

Inviting a guest speaker will have zero impact on the learning lives of your students. UNLESS….you take things back to your school, talk to other people, and believe that what you do changes lives. Showing up at a conference & being an observer/participant does not change lives.

Teacher/Student Relationships

Dr. Fisher also talked a lot about the way we communicate with our students about what they learning. First, he said something that brought me back to my second year teaching, when my principal gave me constructive criticism on my lesson plans. She pointed out that I was writing objectives as activities, rather than statements about what my students should know or be able to do. It really gave me food for thought, and I completely changed the way I wrote my lesson plans. It made my plans be more difficult to write, because I had to sit down and really think about the WHY behind each of my lessons. Why did I care if they could make a poster or write a transitional sentence? I had to start considering why those things mattered. And if I couldn’t think of an answer, guess what? I didn’t do that activity. So, thanks, Dr. Eno, for that piece of advice oh so long ago! 🙂

Surface vs. Deep Learning

I loved that Dr. Fisher talked about the difference between surface learning and deep learning. He acknowledged that both types of learning are important, and he didn’t by any means suggest that either is unnecessary. But what’s important to remember is that we MUST use different strategies for each type of learning. Surface learning strategies (vocab drills, direct instruction, etc.) do not work for deep learning, and deep learning strategies (concept mapping, discussions, etc.) do not work for surface learning. Choose your strategies wisely and with purpose!

Embedded tweets because I took a lot of notes there:

Design has definitely been a major theme emerging this year #TriConf17 #lincolnCRlearns pic.twitter.com/EVML8s8Reb

— Michelle Lampinen (@MichLampinen) October 6, 2017

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