Getting Outdoors! Why it's important and why schools should care.

With growing obesity rates, record-breaking summer temperatures and a population of youth increasingly more "wired in" to technologies that keep them indoors, the amount of time students spend outdoors is dramatically lower than it was when I was growing up. Let me start by saying, I'm not that old. I'm only in my 30's and I remember a time when I sat in the classroom and pined for the outdoors. I remember anxiously awaiting 3:00pm so I could rush home and ride my bike or go skateboarding with my friends or play in the creek nearby. The most dreaded punishment was to be grounded! To be confined to my bedroom while I watched my neighborhood friends play outdoors. And it wasn't the lack of video games. I had a video game console in my bedroom. We had the Atari, the Odyssey and the Nintendo. They were just as compelling then as video games are now. So why are kids not getting out to the detriment of their health? Why do modern youth seem less and less interested in the outdoors?

There are a lot of reasons, some of which are easier to tackle than others. But one thing we can do, to start making a difference, is in the schools! Now, more than ever, there is a need to expand the learning opportunities outdoors! To inspire interest in the world outside that 5 inch touchscreen and to demonstrate the value of nature, outdoor recreation, and physical activity we have to provide students with opportunities to learn outdoors that are fun, active and recreational in addition to be educational. No one says learning should be boring...even math can be taught outdoors! Why teach the Pythagorean theory on a power point? Why not teach it outdoors using rope and pegs...at least as an alternative once in a while. Why teach elementary students the phases of plant growth using paper cups in a classroom....why not let them dig holes, build a garden, get dirty?! Why teach your students about the difference between absolute distance and relative distance...why not play games outside to demonstrate the concept? There are many many creative ways to incorporate the outdoors; to encourage students to value the outdoors over being inside. If your a teacher, put yourself in your student's shoes for a moment. 8 hours a day, they sit in orthopedic desks designed to force them to sit up straight, face forward and stay still. When they come into our classrooms, we ask them to be quiet, to listen to us talk, to do their work, and to stay in their seats. Everyday, 8 hours a day! And we wonder why our students act out. Why they get defiant, aggressive, frustrated, and ambivalent. All of us have an opportunity to make a difference and a moral obligation to ensure the health and well-being of the next generation. Let's be good stewards of our world and the students whom we are entrusted to teach and push for more activities outdoors! Get 'em out as often and as much as you can! In my next post, I'll share some lessons plans that get students outdoors...stuff that you'd think might belong in a PE class...but really help students grasp complex and abstract concepts.

The Fishbowl: How to Teach Critical Thinking Skills (click on title to view video)

One of the biggest challenges of education today is how to create a viable curriculum for tomorrow. A curriculum that provides students with the experiences to develop the skills that are in demand in the workforce. One of the greatest concerns of business leaders, community stakeholders and the government is how well students are prepared to think critically and creatively. To interact with other collaboratively and effectively without breaking down lines of communication. These skills are critically important now and are an essential part of a student's toolbox of skills that will help them be successful in the future. I encourage administrators and teachers to embrace a real and more meaningful approach to teaching critical thinking skills to students. There are many resources available online for free to help teachers accomplish just that. Here is just one of them from the folks at Edutopia. Please click on the title to view the video.

Utilizing Local Resources in Education

There are A LOT of resources out there for teachers and many of them, are no further than your own city. Many socially-conscientious community organizations and businesses recognize the importance of education and offer free curriculum, education resources and often, free materials and facilities for teachers and their students. With budget cuts an ever present reality, the key word is "FREE".

But "FREE" is not the only benefit to utilizing local resources for education. For one, utilizing community resources connects students with local employers and provides practical experience that students will need when they graduate high school. The school should not be a cloistered institution but a vibrant and actively contributing member of the communities in which they serve. Tapping into the "funds of knowledge" present in any given community gives students a sense of pride in their communities and helps them see, with greater clarity, the value of the people and organizations that live and work around them. J. Gatto, an education critic from Pittsburgh, argues that the community itself is the most effective classroom for any student.

In this blog, I would like to highlight Jumpstart! Jumpstart is a local theater troupe with a keen eye for arts-based education. They offer the following curriculum for FREE to teachers who want to incorporate the arts into their teaching. One of the saddest realities of the streamlining of education has been the de-emphasis on the arts. But even if your school no longer offers jewelry making, theater arts, or photography, doesn't mean you can't use these artistic forms of expression in your classroom to teach. Engaging students in learning through the arts is one of the most effective ways to motivate students to learn while easing the transfer of complex concepts and objectives. Feel free to browse Jumpstart's arts-based curriculum. Hopefully you will find some ideas that you can use in the classroom to motivate your students to learn. I personally recommend the "ecological mural". It's a great way to incorporate arts and creative/critical and evaluative thinking into a science lesson design.

Education Week's Digital Directions

As schools begin to adapt to the educational needs of the digital age, districts nationwide are beginning to incorporate digital communications technology into the mainstream curriculum. Digital Directions is one of the best ways to stay abreast of recent developments and trends in educational technology. There are many links to resources and articles regarding technology in education of value to educators interested in incorporating technology into their classroom. Some schools are requiring that students take at least one online course in high school in an effort to teach students the "21st Century" skills that have become the focal point of education reform. I encourage interested teachers to check it out!

Lesson Study: A Collaborative Approach to Professional Development

One of the primary complaints of teachers is the lack of meaningful and useful professional development. Many formats are quick fly-by-night lectures intended to inundate teachers with valuable information and leave them struggling to make use of it. Don't get me wrong, I've gotten some really good ideas from a 30 min lesson, particularly a well presented one. Nevertheless, true and meaningful professional development is gradual, experiential, self-motivated and collaboratively supported. Most Japanese schools use a tried and tested lean manufacturing model of process improvement known as "Kaizen". Kaizen basically means, "change" or "change for the better". The purpose of Kaizen, or "lesson study" as it is known in the field of education, is to collaborate across departments and levels of experience, to brainstorm, test, and evaluate new methodologies and measure improvement. Methodologies and lessons that are proven to work well among a group of teachers, are adopted and new ideas are incorporated. Some American schools, particularly in California, Virginia, and North Carolina, have begun using Lesson Study, or variations of it, with a great deal of success. If you are interested in learning more about Lesson Study, I ecnourage you to look into Kaizen Lean Management and Japanese Lesson Study methodologies and bring it up with your administrator. With support, Lesson Study can be an excellent tool for professional development, and the answer to the long-standing complaint that educator development is spotty and haphazard.

Arts-Based Curriculum for Social Studies: Using "Synthetical Moments" as a Scaffolding Device for Learning

Don't discount the Arts just yet. A trip to the Museum of Modern Art can have profound implications for student learning across disciplines. In fact, it was through my exposure to Art that I became intimately and emmotionally connected to the past and the world around me and found my niche in social studies and science education. As a social studies or science teacher, do not deprive your students of the uniquely personal oppurtunity to be connected emotionally with their learning.

So what is a "synthetical moment"? William Pinar and Madeline Grumet (1976) first referred to a "synthetical moment" as a perception altering experience. A student may never truely understand what it was like to be Jewish in Poland during the Holocaust, but various artistic renditions of the events that capture the intense emmotion of the time can alter a student's perception and capacity for empathy. Art, in many ways, is a reflection of the culture and perception contemporaneous to its creation. Everything from Greek, Renaissance, modern, and post-modern Art has an intended (or unintended) aesthetic that reflects a unique human experience. Knowing how to capture these "synthetical moments" with students and turn them into learning opportunities provides a critically-important dimmension to student's educational experience. Interacting with art can be very personal and not all students will experience synthetical moments, but, in my opinion, we have an obligation to provide students with the opportunity to.

By the way, synthetical moments do not have to be restricted to traditional mediums like canvas or sculpture, they can also be mediated through literature, poetry, music and film.

Why just Tell students that Jews and Gypsies were persecuted during the Holocaust? Why not Show them? Here's an example of how music can teach a concept of how shared experiences can unite diverse groups of people together in shared expressions of sadness and joy.

Tips for applying inquiry based strategies in Social Studies

Most people associate inquiry-based learning with the science classroom. But experimentation and real-world problem solving does not have to be limited to science alone. There are many inquiry-based applications specifically relevant to the social sciences. Here are some tips on how to facilitate inquiry-based learning:

1. Present students with real-world problems. The best problems are connected to their daily lives in one way or another.

Example: "Mapping the Impact: TEKS-relevant Geography Lesson" Pass out mini-candy bars to your students, ask them to keep the wrappers. Split them up into groups based on their candy brand and ask them to list all of the ingredients. You can have them look at the label or use taste alone to determine ingredients. Next, ask students where they think that each ingredient came from and what was involved in it's manufacture. Finally, have students trace each ingredient back to it's source and the resources used to produce it. For example: peanuts in snicker's bar came from a peanut farm that used water, land, fertilizers, etc.


2. Find ways, short of actually "telling" students, to scaffold their learning. Use hands-on as much as possible. Actually getting students outdoors or at least, out of their seats, is ideal. Barring that, however, technology is a great resource to provide student learning experiences that help mediate their knowledge about a given topic.

Example (hands-on): The Web of Life: Understanding the Importance of Biodiversity (TEKS- relevant for Geography).
Give each student a picture of an animal or plant. Have student tape the picture on the front of their body. Take students outdoors and have them stand in a tight circle. Take a roll of yarn and hand it to one student. Whatever they are, ask them to pass the yarn to someone whose plant/animal is either consumes them or is consumed by them. For example, if they are a deer, they could pass it to the grasslands (they consume) or to the wolf (consumes them). Continue until there is a complex web that connects each and every student to someone else. Ask students to spread the circle out to make the web tight. Randomly remove a few resources from the web. Ask students if they noticed any change in tightness. If only a few are removed, only a few will notice. Remove more resources. Students will begin to detect a real difference and will loose their connections to other and no longer be able to survive. This lesson can also apply to Geographic issues of income distribution and resource management.

Example(technology-mediated): Internet Sluething. There are some great pre-made internet resources for "piecing together" what really happened using a variety of sometimes conflicting primary documents and asking students to figure out what really happened. One great example is the "Do History" curriculum from George Mason University --> http://dohistory.org/ <--. You can also use a WebQuest or WikiQuest to create your own by collecting a series of primary resources and asking students to piece together actual history.

3. Give students an oppurtunity to experiment with ideas, make mistakes without reprecussion, express openly their thoughts and recieve feedback from both yourself AND their peers.

Example Strategies: 5E Inquiry, Graffiti, Classroom Discussions/Debates.

4. Finally, collaborate with your peers for instructional support and don't be afraid to reach across departments. The best inquiry-based teaching extends concepts across content areas. Geography and Science is a great connection as is History and Literature.

Below are some on-line resources to help you design inquiry-based instruction:

EdTeachers: http://thwt.org/USinquirysites.html

WebQuest: http://www.webquest.org

QuestGarden: http://questgarden.com

Geospatial Revolution

GIS is fast becoming an important part of the way we live. It pertains, in many ways, to our daily lives. From iPhones to Google maps, most of our students have not known a time when these sophisticated applications were not a part of daily life. Many teachers, however, are not keen on how to utilize GIS in the classroom. No worries! There's help at your fingertips! Penn State has a great GIS curriculum with videos, Resources, inter-actives and lessons that cover a wide range of GIS information for students of all grades.

SAWS: From Rain to Drain

Have your students ever wondered where the water we use comes from and where it goes after it disappears behind the drain? In San Antonio, Texas we are lucky to have water that is primarily sourced from the Edwards Aquifer. Like all waters sources however, it is a limited resource and how we manage this resource will implications for ours and future generations. SAWS (San Antonio Water System) is an excellent educational resource for teachers and offers FREE educational services and field trips that take students on a tour of the city of San Antonio that follows the water cycle from the Edwards recharge zone to extraction and treatment sites. The educational tour is aligned with the TEKS and, if your register in advance, is FREE! Some age restrictions do apply. For more information call (210) 233-3631 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays or e-mail gwukasch@saws.org or visit http://mayorcastro.com/event_details.php?URL=the-rain-to-drain-field-trip

SAWS also offers free TEKS aligned curriculum for science and civics teachers from Elementary to High School. You can find those FREE resources at the following website: http://www.saws.org/education/h2o_university/index.cfm