Tweets I Wish I'd Tweeted: Teachers College Invitational

Once again, I was invigorated and inspired after attending the TC conference in March. As I become more familiar with Twitter (still a novice!), I've realized that it’s a helpful way of publicly taking/sharing notes on key points when I attend workshops. Unfortunately, halfway into my first workshop, a Q and A with Jon Scieska, my phone ran out of juice and I didn’t have my charger, (Fie on you, Droid!) so I had to resort to pen and paper. Now that I’ve finally gotten around to going over my notes, in the spirt of public notetaking, I’d like to share some nuggets that are TLFT (Too Late For Twitter).

Jon Scieszka talk
He likes Kafka, Borghes, and Tristan Shandy: “the original meta fiction”
He like to "mess with the idea of what a book should be"
Look for an upcoming YA novel
Guysread inspired by his son who had to read LH on the Prairie as a 3rd grader and found it tortuous
Technology—lagging in the children’s book industry
Favorite letter from a student: “We’re supposed to write to our favorite author, but Roald Dahl is dead, so I chose you.”
Kids should know there are lots of different ways to be authors and illustrators
“The main thing I learned was how not to get in kids’ way…and to really respect them for who they are as learners.”
“What I learned as a teacher was to listen.”

Stephanie Harvey on "mini inquiries"
Laying down a foundation for inquiry—kids’ questions matter
“One of the great things about inquiry is we find things we didn’t anticipate.”
The great thing about inquiry is that it leads us to more inquiry: “the more we know, the more we wonder.”
#1 way to teach inquiry is to model our own curiosity.
“Wisdom begins in wonder.” –Socrates

Linda Darling Hammond Closing Key Note
“Testing without investing” setting standards without putting resources in place
School to prison pipeline: “We choose to incarcerate rather than educate”
8 states spend more on incarceration than schools
“A war on teachers becomes a war on children.”
“We can’t fire our way to teaching excellence.”

The power of modeling once again!

I was taking a webinar with Sharon Taberski (great experience!) and Solana was out of school on break. Since the webinar was an hour long and I had come into the office to take it, I wanted Solana to be occupied, so I put her on a web site with videos of one of her new obsessions, “the Swat Kats.” Every so often, she would come over to my desk to see what I was doing, and I would glance back to make sure she was okay. I had my notebook out and was jotting notes and ideas down from the session. When it was time to leave, I noticed that Solana had been taking notes on her video (see above). “How cute,” I thought and showed it to my husband that night. He immediately pointed out the power of modeling. This was just another reminder to me about how important it is to model with our students.

We can also make use of modeling by referring to series such as the Magic Tree House, where we see the main character taking notes from nonfiction texts. Since so many students have read the Magic Tree House series, this is something to draw on when we model notetaking for older students. Some fantasy books, such as How to Train Your Dragon and Dragonology (dragons are popular in our house!) also have notetaking pages: even though they're on a fantasy subject, you can make the analogy to notetaking for research.