High+School

=__Class Management__= This working paper examines best practices that shift classroom management's emphasis from controlling students' behavior to creating "learning-centered" classrooms that foster their engagement, autonomy, and sense of community by giving them progressively more responsibility, under the teacher's careful guidance. - submitted by Page McMullen = = =**__Right-brained Thinking__**= Is the MFA really the new MBA? Bestselling author Daniel Pink and other thinkers are challenging us with that question these days. According to Pink, the United States and other developed countries are quickly moving beyond an Information Age that required essentially linear, logical and analytical skills which could be measured, at least in theory, by SAT and MCAS scores alone. As outsourcing becomes ubiquitous, as computers can do routine, sequential asks far faster and more accurately than the best- educated human being can, and as individuals in an affluent society look for beauty and meaning in their lives, Pink argues that we have moved to a Conceptual Age in which “mastery of abilities that we have often undervalued and overlooked marks the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind.” The abilities that matter most for this new economy are artistry, empathy, passion, seeing the big picture and the transcendent—right-brain skills that we have always associated with learning in the arts. -submitted by Ashley Cochran and Jennifer Hunter

=__**Think-Pair-Share and Peer Instruction**__= A simple solution to help overcome the two problems of not waiting long enough for students to form answers and too few students responding on a regular basis is to use Think-Pair-Share, developed by Frank Lyman. Think-Pair-Share is a low-risk strategy to get many students actively involved in classes of any size. -submitted by Crista Smothers

[|Online Resources for Think-Pair-Share] website with examples and additional resources -submitted by Crista Smothers

A physics professor describes his evolution from lecturing to dynamically engaging students during class and improving how they learn. He shares his experience: "In hindsight, the reason for my students’ poor performance is simple. The traditional approach to teaching reduces education to a transfer of information."-submitted by Crista Smothers

More detailed information on the process that Eric Mazur (from above document) has implemented. Peer Instruction is an instructional strategy for engaging students during class through a structured questioning process that involves every student.Our results indicate increased student mastery of both conceptual reasoning and quantitative problem solving upon implementing PI. Gains in student understanding are greatest when the PI questioning strategy is accompanied by other strategies that increase student engagement, so that every element of the course serves to involve students actively. -submitted by Crista Smothers

The first step toward refocusing the teacher-centered lecture to a learner-centered classroom is to accept that much of the responsibility for learning resides squarely on the listener—not on the lecturer. In a learner-centered teaching environment, the role of lecture is radically shifted to a focus on guiding students through meaningful learning experiences. -submitted by Crista Smothers

=__Just in Time Teaching__= [|What is it?] Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT for short) is a teaching and learning strategy based on the interaction between web-based study assignments and an active learner classroom. Students respond electronically to carefully constructed web-based assignments which are due shortly before class, and the instructor reads the student submissions "just-in-time" to adjust the classroom lesson to suit the students' needs. Thus, the heart of JiTT is the "feedback loop" formed by the students' outside-of-class preparation that fundamentally affects what happens during the subsequent in-class time together. -submitted by Crista Smothers