Learning+Community+Main+Page

=﻿Welcome to the Learning Community Page!=

===**Here you will find information to support the teaching and learning going on in your classroom. Most of what is here are things you already know or do; you may find an updated twist to some strategies, a new reproducible to execute a strategy, or you even may have something great to share with the community! You may utilise the discussion board to exchange ideas on how to better aid students to achieve! The goal is to promote the best educational practice possible in the service of our students.**=== =__How Learning Works 7 Researched Based Principles for Smart Teaching__=
 * By Susan A. Ambrose, Michale W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, Marie K. Norman**
 * This is a great book published in 2010 by John Wiley and Sons inc. that lays out 7 great strategies to keep in mind and useful actions we can take:**
 * 1. Students' prior knowledge can help or hinder learning.**
 * **Brainstorm with students to ascertain what they already know and identify any misinformation they may have.**
 * **Remediate insufficient knowledge**
 * **Link material to previous learning from other courses or units.**
 * **Help students learn when applying previous learning is appropriate to current study.**


 * 2. How students organize knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know.**
 * **How we as "experts" in our discipline organize our knowledge is not how students who are learning the information will organize their knowledge. Make your knowledge map explicit to provide an organizational framework for students.**
 * **Utilize contrast and compare analysis to create deeper knowledge structures.**
 * **Make connections between concepts explicit**
 * **Have students create categories for information.**
 * **Have students create a concept map.**


 * 3. Students' motivation generates, directs and sustains what they do to learn.**
 * **Help students connect material to their interests.**
 * **Create real world tasks that show how abstract information is really practical.**
 * **Show how learning is relevant to their future.**
 * **Maintain alignment of learning outcomes, assessments and instructional strategies to provide students with the big pictre of what they are learning; this promotes confidence and provides students a sense of control.**
 * **Provide appropriate level of challenge.**
 * **Use rubrics to communicate expectations as well as articulating them directly to students.**
 * **Encourage a growth mindset: intelligence is about effort**
 * **Share power in the classroom by being flexible and allow students the opportunity to make choices so as to feel a sense of control over their learning**
 * **Have students become reflective practitioners as learners.**


 * 4. To develop mastery, students must aquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what they have learned.**
 * **We must help students avoid context dependence by using knowledge and skills in multiple contexts.**
 * **Students need to know not only the what but the why of their learning.**
 * **We must specify skills and knowledge and ask students in which contexts the may be used as well as the reverse.**


 * 5. Goal directed practice coupled with targeted feedback are critical to learning.**
 * **Students need multiple opportunities to practice with new knowledge or work with new skills.**
 * **Utilise scaffolding by providing supports early in the learning and then gradually withdraw them.**
 * **Help students to estimate a realistic amount of time required to complete an assignment.**
 * **Provide models of what a quality end product should look like as well as indicating what you do not want.**
 * **Provide feedback on the class level as well as the individual level.**
 * **Develop the opportunities for peers to give each other feedback.**


 * 6. Students' current level of development interacts with the social, emotional and intellectual climate of the course to impact learning.**
 * **Make uncertainty safe and promote positive risk taking.**
 * **Set up healthy ground rules for class**
 * **Facilitate active listening**


 * 7. To become self-directed learners, students must learn to assess the demands of the task, evaluate their own knowledge and skills, plann their approach, monitor their progress, and adjust their strategies as needed.**
 * **Prompt students to analyze their study strategies**
 * **Help students do cost benefit analysis of their own as well as new study strategies; students will not make any change until they recognize the benefits out weigh the costs.**
 * **Help students learn how they learn.**
 * **Model reflection in the context of your teaching**