sponsored by the Humanities Division Basic Skills Committee at Fullerton College
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Carol Dweck, an educational psychologist at Stanford University, has developed a way of understanding how our mindsets (our beliefs about intelligence) affect our outcomes in school and in life. This idea has taken roots in education at all levels. Here is a short and relatively accessible journal article that you can use to learn about the mindset concept: Dweck's "Brainology". This article can also be shared with students. It's helpful at the start of the semester to read and discuss this and use it as a touchstone throughout the semester (when you hand back graded work, you might preface passing back their work with discussion questions like "how would a students with a fixed respond if they received a grade they weren't satisfied with? How would students with a growth mindset respond?").
For more in-depth explanation of the mindset concept, check out Dweck's book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. In it, she talks about mindset in many contexts from teaching to parenting to the business world.
This short video is a good place to start as well, and it can be easily shared with students. In it, Dweck sums up the key difference between fixed and growth mindsets.
Remind 101 is a website that allows teachers to send students text messages from the Remind 101 website or app. Teachers create an account for each class, print a page that tells students how to sign up, once students sign up, teachers can see the names but not the phone numbers of students. Teachers can then send text messages to the students signed up for a class. Messages can be sent right away or scheduled for later.
www.remind101.com or Remind 101 in the App Store
In this short video clip, Basic Skills Instructor, Angela Henderson, explains the pedagogical purpose for using motor imaging as a vocabulary development strategy.
There has been a lot of buzz lately about the flipped classroom. But what exactly is it? Is it something we should be doing? Read this helpful article from Education Next.org.
"Don’t use technology in the classroom, use it before and after, outside of the classtoom. Classrooms were never designed for technology.... Flip the classroom. Assign the short talks for homework, THEN use the classroom for the application of the concepts. The net result is that you humanise the classroom. It becomes a place primarily for learning, not teaching. Simple, but like most great ideas - brilliant." Read more at: Donald Clark Blog: Flipped Classroom
The activity linked below, from Skip Downing's On Course Workshop (On Course Workshop), leads teacher and students through a discussion of choices, expectations, and roles for the semester. It can be done as a first-day icebreaker, but it can also be a nice refresher of class rules or a way to discuss roles in depth a couple of weeks into the semester. It offers an eye-opening view of what students expect of professors and where expectations between students and professors may not match up.
