Consultation
Visits and Workshops for Schools
Judy Lightfoot, PhD
(Résumé)
(Brief biography)
"Intelligence is not just what people are born with
but also how they use what they have."
|
"A good academic program will show students
how to use their minds as well as possible."
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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 (Washington, DC: National
Research Council, 2000), a study of the learning process in children
and adults that is grounded in current research. The most important resources
for what I do to improve instruction have been thinking-centered teaching
strategies developed by Harvard's Project Zero (Cognitive Skills Group)
and by the nationally celebrated Interdisciplinary Writing
Program at the University of Washington.
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