To see a "video" version of this slide show complete with music follow this link: http://www.slideboom.com/presentations/374906/Capital-Area-BOCES-S.P.E.C.-Archeological-Dig-June-2011 or just watch the pictures below.
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Here's a video of vocational teachers building a beacon tower out of newspaper, straws, and masking tape. This activity is designed to explore large group process strategies. Groups frequently fail at this activity but the failure helps them focus on developing good strategies for the more authentic problems they will get later. In this case the group had some construction teachers and they nailed the beacon tower. They did a great job. It didn't prevent them however from developing an excellent large group process strategy. I've been working with a group of vocational teachers from the Capital District BOCES in Albany, NY. It reminded me that there is an excellent series of videos created by carpentry teacher Erin Hunter at River Valley Tech Center in Springfield, Vt. Here is a series of five videos based on the characteristics of the Critical Skills Classroom. The view from where we are conducting our workshop. That is the Mediterranean Sea where it is warm enough to swim. The mountains through the haze have snow on them. You can ski in the AM and swim in the PM! Today was the first day of our three-day training. In September we conducted the Part A of our training for three days with two groups of twenty each and now are conducting the Part B portion with another three days of training of the same people. Up until today we have been visiting teachers in their classroom and providing feedback on how they are using the SPEC (Student-centered, Problem-based, Experiential, Collaborative) approach in their classroom. The majority of them are doing a very good job, especially when you consider that they have only had three days of training. This morning, before we checked in with them we had them create rebus name tags. A REBUS name tag is a picture representation of the person's name. It was so much fun to see three different languages at work creating their Rebus'. Using English, Arabic, and French they were very creative in making their name tags. After the check in we put them through a challenge (lesson) where they shared in small groups what the highs and lows of their experiences have been so far and then they created an annotated "map" of their journey to share with the entire group. We also introduced the use of product exemplars to demonstrate how useful they can be in the classroom. In was a fun and very useful exercise. The debrief (based on the question, "what did you learn or relearn about SPEC/EBD?") was insightful. The teachers appreciated the opportunity to review the nuts and bolts of the approach which took the entire morning. In the afternoon we put the students through a number of exercises to prepare them for the big challenge that we gave them later in the afternoon. We used the initiative game "Tower of Power" to explore process and the need for a process strategy. After the completion of that activity we gave them our "process strategy cards" which are eleven cards each containing a process strategy step. These strategy cards were developed by teachers in New England and found useful in planning large group problem solving. We asked the teachers to put them in an order that would work for them. They could discard some, add new ones, or use some as "wild cards". i.e., use them at any point in the process. They efficiently completed the task at which point my Lebanese teaching colleague provided them with a Knute Rockne caliber pep talk before handing them their big large-group challenge. They received it at 2:45 PM and have to present their findings to a outside panel at 11:00 AM tomorrow. It will be a hectic morning tomorrow but I am confident they can pull it off. They did an excellent job of "chunking" the challenge and determining the tasks to be completed and questions answered. They are fun group to work with and it is a real joy to work with them. My Lebanese colleagues Nawal and Maha are great and I am confident that they and their colleagues Nayla and Georgette will continue on with the work we have started. Tonight was restful as we have no special work to prepare for tomorrow. I'll download today's photos and call it a night. Tomorrow is a different story. We'll be burning the midnight oil writing up observations and perhaps even preparing a PowerPoint presentation. There is a great multi-media graphic on the evolution of Bloom's Taxonomy and one person's current vision. Watch it here. (go the the "More" box on the lower right and click "autoplay" for it to play automatically.) It is well worth the time. The Adirondack Curriculum Project recently held their 2nd annual Adirondack Day at the Wild Center in Tupper Lake, NY. Over 100 students gathered to share their Student-centered, Problem-based, Experiential, and Collaborative projects with each other. Leading E.D.G.E. is pleased to have played a small roll in training the teachers and editing many of the challenges on their website. A group of Lebanese middle school students working on a 'Challenge'. This group had a team name, 'Diablo'. Note the devil horns on each student. Today had me riding an hour up to International College's Ain Aar Campus. It is a middle school on on the side of a mountain on the outskirts of Beirut. My driver up, Nicholas, was great. He navigates the morning traffic, and you've never seen morning traffic until you've seen Lebanese morning traffic, like a pro. Car lanes appear to be superfluous to the Lebanese. When there are multi-lane roads most of the time drivers straddle the lanes to have a competitive edge in passing. It is quite hair raising. The other thing that strikes me about Lebanon (at least Beirut anyway) is that the U.S. certainly has no corner on capitalism. I don't think I've ever seen so many billboards and signs promoting things per square foot of space as there are in Beirut. Many of the ads are promoting western clothing, movies, and sporting goods. Anyway, back to my classroom observations. I arrived at the school and was escorted to the teacher's room. Once inside it was like any teachers' room in North America. Teachers milling about preparing for class, talking about the latest news (particularly the events in Syria), drinking coffee (Turkish coffee that you can stand a spoon up in), and sharing teaching ideas. Of course it was slightly different in that they speak two of three different languages fluently (Arabic, French, and English) and mix and match them sometimes randomly. It is fun to listen to even if you don't understand it. One teacher immediately cornered me and asked me to review her challenge (lesson) on the history of soap making in Lebanon. It was a terrific challenge and is part of a field trip they are going on. I loved it when she said, "I don't want them just going on the field trip for the trip's sake. I want them to have an academic focus." That is something we have always advocated. After a quick look at the schedule we went to Colette's classroom. Colette is an administrator but like many administrators outside the U.S. administrators still teach. It is a great way to keep the other teachers from thinking that administrators have lobotomies as soon as they leave the classroom. Colette was teaching a math class. The challenge was written in French and although my ability to read French is about 1,000 times better than my ability to read Arabic it is still abysmal. It was a neat challenge having the students figure out some not so obvious ways to address the particular math issues. (My math isn't much better than my French) As I said yesterday, you don't have to know the language to see whether they are using the tools and techniques you have been teaching them. Colette definitely was. We visited two other classes one focusing on observing decision making through story, and the other was an Arabic class. They both exhibited lots of the things we had taught them. The day flew by. It seem we were either doing observations, meeting with veteran teachers we have trained on earlier trips, or eating. That's right, eating. When I arrived in the morning Narwal made sure we ordered lunch. I encouraged her to order some Lebanese food for me. Later I found out that Colette, as Assistant School Director, provides breakfast for the faculty once a year. This year everything came locally. The vegetables (radishes, mint, lettuce, mini-tomatoes, and scallions) came for teachers' gardens. (the season allows for year around gardening) The cheese and humus (or was it the yogurt?) came from a local convent. The bread looked like pita that was over inflated. (I mean way over inflated) Of course it was delicious and I was stuffed as I trekked off to my next teacher observation. Too soon it was lunch time and it turns out that Narwal had forgotten that we were having the breakfast and ordered me two bowls of Lebanese tabbouleh, (tons more parsley and ton less bulgar than the American version) humus, a chicken wrap kind of thing, and olives. (There are always olives.) I couldn't eat it all. After all our meetings and visitations I rode back with Hussein as my driver. Hussein has been our driver many times and is the nicest guy you will ever meet. When I said that this might be our last visit he encouraged me to come over for recreation and stay with his family. You can't ask for friendlier people. Now I'm back in the apartment and we're getting ready to go out to eat once again. (click on the photos below for captions) An Arabic language class at International College, Beirut, Lebanon Today we visited International College teachers' classrooms who have been through the first three days of our six day SPEC training. We did the first three days of training in September and will do the second three days starting Thursday. I visited classes in the Ras Beirut school (a five minute walk from where we are staying) while Bruce visited Ain Aar campus which is located about an hour from here. It is always fun to see what the teachers are doing and to see if they "get it". Many do, some don't. The students in this picture are studying Arabic language. Their task was to, in groups of four or five, look at a photo of a bluebird and write about it. I'd describe it in more detail but I don't read Arabic very well (i.e., not at all) and my understanding of the task was interpreted to me by one of our wonderful hosts. You don't need to know the language however to see the tools and techniques that we have taught them being put into practice. As I understood it the different groups were to interpret and write about different aspects of the picture. For example one group was to write about what they specifically could see in the picture such as the bird itself, the tree, etc. Another group had to write about how they felt about the picture. The teacher used a nice warm up activity that only took about thirty seconds but got the students' attention. She used a variety of our tools to get the students working in teams, keeping them focused, and producing quality work. It was great fun to see. You can see in the photo that technology is common here in the way of the Smart Board. Tomorrow we trade places and I go to Ain Aar and Bruce stays in the city. Oh by the way....for those of you in the frosty Northeast USA, it was in the low 70's today with bright sun and no wind. I wore a fleece vest to work but it was too hot to keep on. :-) After 19 hours of uneventful travel we arrived safely last night at about 9:00 PM (2:00 PM Saturday afternoon EST). Our travels through Toronto and London went very smoothly other than the fact that we needlessly went through British Customs only to turn around and go back through security to get to our flights. The only problems is that every time I got through security, thanks to my metal hip, I set off alarms and then need a full body pat-down. The Air Canada plane was very plush. First class was exceptionally comfortable looking and was hard to walk through seeing the passengers in full recliner mode and their feet up. Even our class was relatively classy with usb jack to charge our electrical toy of choice and a 110 volt outlet to keep the computer charged. The choice of personal movies was almost unlimited. I watched 127 hours (much better than anticipated) and The Fighter (outstanding). Our flight from London was late and as a result we were late arriving in Beirut. As usual we were exhausted but weren't too hungry as the airlines kept us well fed. We got to our apartment, got a late snack of local tangerines and apples and watched Aljazerra (English version) news to see the latest regarding international events. Certainly news of demonstrations in Syria to the North and Israel's bombing of the Gaza are of concern but not so much that it impacts day to day life here. We were asleep by 10:00 PM. The first sleep in nearly 24 hours was appreciated. I slept through the night, woke up at 8:00 AM had some breakfast of cereal and went back to sleep until 1:00 PM. We then took a walk and bought some groceries and tonight we will go out for dinner with our host Nayla. Tomorrow we do a series of classroom observations. It is always fun to see how the teachers have taken their new found knowledge and skill and applied it. That's it for now.
We head to Beirut Friday for what will probably be our last trip working with the faculty at International College. They have been wonderful to work with and their willingness to embrace the SPEC/Critical Skills classroom model has be wonderful.
It has been a hectic week getting ready for the trip, boiling maple syrup, working with Parent to Parent, the Adirondack Curriculum Project's Adirondack Day, and visiting the Visitor's Interpretive Center to brainstorm possible future projects. April brings lots on new projects. Check back during my trip to see updates. |
Jack Drury's Leading E.D.G.E. Blog
Sharing Observations on Education, Wilderness, and About the AuthorThis blog was created and is maintained by Jack Drury with contributions from Bruce Bonney. Jack and Bruce have been working together since 1984 providing professional development in four areas: Categories
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March 2015
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