In this episode we interview Keri Ewart who has just started as a Modern Learning Resource Teacher, so we ask her about her experiences in the classroom and how she empowered her modern learners.
What’s New in the World of EML?
- Amit shared his story of Dylan Cockell who is starting a podcast up at Humberview Secondary School
- Jim shared stories of success from teachers using SeeSaw to help connect with parents as well as Google Forms to help with their informative assessment
Links from the Interview with Keri Ewart
Shares for the Week
- Amit shared this PSA that was created by Burger King to bring attention to standing up to bullying:
- Amit also challenged schools to empower their learners by having them create their own PSAs to combat bullying in schools. Please feel free to share those with us if you create them; we’d love to share them out to the community.
- Peel Board Resources for Bully Prevention and Intervention
- Jim shared a MindShift article entitled The Emotional Weight of Being Graded, for Better or Worse and highlighted a few key parts that resonated with him:
“Whether the grade is good or bad, you’re taking the student away from focusing on intrinsic interest and tying their experience to grades,” Immordino-Yang explained. Under such circumstances, genuine interest in learning for its own sake wilts. “Grades can be an impetus to work, and can be really satisfying,” she said. “But when emotions about the grade swamp students’ emotions about a subject, that’s a problem.”
Once considered obstacles to thinking, emotions are now understood to be interdependent with various cognitive processes. A better way to think about emotion’s centrality to learning, Immordino-Yang writes in Emotions, Learning, and the Brain, is this: “We only think about things we care about.” When kids care mainly about grades, they’re devoting more mental resources to the assessment than to the actual subject matter.
Starr Sackstein is also interviewed:
“Grades have the ability to make kids feel stupid or smart, and that’s a huge power,” [Sackstein] said. Teachers are human, she added, and will respond emotionally and sometimes arbitrarily to different kids and various types of work. When students define themselves positively or negatively by those judgments, they cede control over their well-being to someone — a teacher — who may not understand them.
