Consultation Visits and Workshops for Schools
Judy Lightfoot, PhD
(Résumé)
(Brief
biography)
Email: judylightfoot@earthlink.net
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PERSPECTIVE
Students often resist showing initiative in school. Some view their education as skills and knowledge that can simply be absorbed, not as changes in themselves that require their active engagement and exertion. Others fear that thinking independently will bring low grades that could jeopardize future opportunities. And some very successful students succeed by assiduously imitating, without understanding, the kinds of moves that generally earn A's.
However, a teacher who knows how people learn can help students take the initiative in developing their minds and can imbue their students with authentic motivation for the task. This is because knowledge of recent research on learning will generate a pedagogy that both challenges and guides students, giving them the "thinking and learning tools" they need for intellectually independent endeavors. This research on learning also provides reliable frameworks for mapping an existing curriculum and for improving its coherence and effectiveness.
One research-based program that I designed for a new secondary school and that I helped teachers implement and map in detail is summarized on my Curriculum Design page. My work at that school and others draws on thirty-five years of award-winning classroom practice and on compelling new research from the cognitive sciences.
Participants in my workshops learn how to promote active, independent,
strategic habits of mind in their students by using a basic scientific
understanding of how novices and experts think and operate. A recently
published influence on my ideas is How People Learn: Brain, Mind,
Experience, and School (
INDIVIDUAL WORKSHOPS
"Teaching Subjects As Methods of Mind"
Academic subjects are called disciplines because they are systematic ways of thinking that organize the mind and provide structures for inquiry. It is true that systems of thinking in the different disciplines sometimes overlap, individual disciplines evolve over time, and specialists in a given field (especially in humanities fields) can argue about what the fundamentals of their subject should be. Nonetheless, even in hotly contested or rapidly changing academic areas, the "thinking tools" employed in studying events and texts form identifiable, usable patterns. Students who use the core methods and concepts of math, science, English, and history deliberately, in order to operate and think like professionals in each of those fields, demonstrate that intelligence is not just what students were born with but also how they use what they have. This workshop will teach an entire faculty how to help students use individual subjects as "power tools for the mind," and how to revise existing programs by using school-wide concepts that support active inquiry and critical thinking.
"Literary Thinking"
The subject of English is distinctive not just because of its typical content—its genres, texts, and topics. Like the other academic disciplines English is a particular system of mental operations, a set of "tools" for effective thinking and questioning. When learning in English classes is consciously approached as the task of learning what the subject's most powerful intellectual tools are and how to wield them, students at all levels of ability can use their minds more successfully and independently, becoming better critical thinkers about any text or topic that will come their way. And when all members of the English department teach their subject as particular ways of questioning and conceptualizing, students can build on their learning in the subject as they move through the grade levels, developing habits of mind that will help them thrive in college and in life. This workshop introduces faculty to ways of teaching English as a distinctive system of inquiry and thought.
"Designs for Active Learning"
In a well designed class or course, students express their present understanding of a subject, encounter material that challenges that understanding, and work with the new material in ways that move them toward deeper understanding and better thinking. Teachers who present their classes as deliberately designed experiences of this kind can readily draw students into the task of shaping course content, goals, pace, assignments, and assessment. And when the experience of students is the explicit focus of classroom time, we can watch them do major learning in our presence, which lets us see how their minds work, as well as how thoroughly they understand the topic under study. Finally, students in this kind of environment must take responsibility for active learning, but they will not flounder because there is a design or deep structure to guide them. The approaches that teachers learn in this workshop are especially effective for (though not exclusively intended for) extended class periods.
"Assessment as a Model of Mind"
"Assessment publishes a model of mind," says American educator Dennie Palmer Wolf. The forms that assessment takes in a school derive from and heavily influence the community’s unconscious ideas about learning and intelligence. Assessment practices that reward the accurate display of remembered information and procedures unintentionally encourage novice behavior in students by suggesting that expertise means knowing the answers instead of knowing what one needs to learn and how to learn it. Under the influence of this model of mind, many students try to look competent by concealing the gaps in their knowledge. However, assessment practices that reward the practice of open, strategic questioning to strengthen mastery will help novice learners grow more expert. This workshop will help teachers think critically about assessment and revise their assessment practices.
"Turning Writing Into Thinking - Across the Curriculum"
At even the best schools, assignments to write formal papers resemble conventional tests and exams in that they require students to exhibit knowledge in an academic artifact such as the research paper, the poetry explication, and the familiar essay. A “testing” emphasis is dominant even in many classes in which teachers discuss the writing process and provide descriptions or models of the final product. This workshop starts with the assumption that the purpose of writing papers should be less to evoke displays of information and skills than to develop students' minds and their expertise in a subject. The session will help teachers turn all aspects of writing instruction, even technicalities like editing, into teaching that makes students more capable, strategic critical thinkers. Thus writing assignments will become more integral to courses of study and more effective instruments of instruction.
"Thinking Outside the Edtech Box"
Most discussions of educational technology are locked in a box with two compartments: "Better use it!" and "Better not!" Endorsements are generally as sweeping as objections, and many strategies for teaching with technology seem intended just to make sure it gets used. Thinking critically about technology means thinking outside the edtech box, and beyond questions of logistics and teacher training, too. It means analyzing the educational gains and losses of using a particular tool to fulfill an articulated objective in a course, unit, or lesson. The outcomes of this kind of critical thinking are worthwhile. Technophobes develop a professional interest in available technologies, while technophiles become more thoughtfully strategic, less dazzled and undiscriminating, in their choices. Best of all, technology becomes a professionally motivating presence for teachers, continually prompting them to analyze and assess their practice, and classroom focus remains where it belongs: on the subject matter and how students think about it.
"Mindful Grammar"
From this workshop English teachers will learn how to teach grammar as an integral feature of thought by giving students practice in six basic syntactical patterns and four forms of cohesion. Students who work in this way develop a more vital and natural sense of grammar, apply it more usefully to reading and writing, understand arguments more fully, appreciate English prose more deeply, and edit their prose in ways that more effectively communicate and complement their thinking.
"Teachers of Any Subject Can Teach Editing for Better Thinking"
Two principles of syntactical clarity and coherence that focus on logic rather than correctness will help teachers in all subjects address sentence-level problems in student writing efficiently, and more effectively than they can by marking errors—a practice shown to be largely a waste of time for both teachers and students.
“An American-Centered Curriculum for World Literature”
Today, the available range of worthy literary works from nations around the globe is a challenge as well as a resource for anyone planning a world literature program. Covering the subject is impossible, but creating coherence through selection is difficult. Participants will outline a world literature curriculum organized around a strong core of American works, one that will allow teachers some individual choice, and will learn how to design courses and units in which teachers unfamiliar with non-Western literatures can learn about them along with their students.
"Impromptu Performance in the English Classroom"
This workshop shows how to turn works as diverse as Kafka's "The Judgment," Ellison's Invisible Man, Eliot's The Waste Land, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and short poems such as Frost's "Once By the Pacific" into brief, informal dramas, scripted and staged on the spot by students, which help them understand and appreciate literature more deeply. These strategies are especially useful for longer class periods.
"Teaching Poetry Without Killing It"
The study of poetry best begins with the truth that poems are speech acts. This starting point lets students use their comparatively mature understanding of fiction and drama to keep a poem alive while coming to understand it. The approach also helps students resist making premature leaps into discussing theme and imagery, which are moves that tend to degrade and deaden analysis. Other topics of the workshop include using prose poems to pave the way for study of more traditional forms while helping students develop their own bolder, more expressive prose style; using collaborative cognitive frameworks and visual strategies to assist analysis; and helping students learn more about how poems work by writing imitations.
SAMPLE WORKSHOP
SEQUENCE:
"FROM NOVICES TO EXPERT LEARNERS: DESIGNING A STUDENT-CENTERED
CURRICULUM"
This is a version of a two-day series of workshops I conducted for middle and
upper school faculty at Prague's International School in the Czech Republic, in
March 2001. I also created an Internet page of resources to meet the school's
needs, a website that will be permanently available on-line for faculty.
Session 1 – Introduction: ‘Novice Learners and Experts’
Concepts from John Bransford, et. al., How People Learn: Brain, Mind,
Experience, and School
Concepts from Samuel Wineburg, Historical Thinking & Other Unnatural
Acts
Session 2 - 'Principles of Instruction for Active Student Learning'
Designs for Active Learning
Writing as a Technology of Mind Across the Curriculum
""Anyone Can Teach Editing for Better Thinking" - 2 Mini-Lessons
in Clarity & Coherence
Session 3 - 'Assessment as a Model of Mind'
Assessing Student Thinking Across the Disciplines: Stages of Expertise
Assessing Stages of Student Writing
Session 4 - 'Expert Learners in English'
"So What?" - Turning Summary Into Argument
Teaching Grammar as Style, Style as Thinking
A Student-Centered Literature Classroom
Note: I can design sessions for English teachers alone, for history and English teachers together, or for an entire school faculty. All-day workshops are possible, as are consultations with individuals during an ordinary working day followed by an after-school plenary session. Workshop content will be carefully adapted to departmental and school needs.
Curriculum
Design by Judy Lightfoot
To Lightfoot's home
page
To Lightfoot's
résumé
Email:
judylightfoot@earthlink.net