The Origins of Easter Celebrations

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Δημοσιεύτηκε στις Δευτέρα, 21 Απριλίου 2014 13:17

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Since it's Easter Time, let's have a look at an article about its origins...

The Origins of Easter Celebrations

By Mary Bellis

The meaning of the many different customs observed during Easter Sundayhave been buried with time. Their origins lie in both pre-Christian religions and Christianity. In one way or another all the customs are a "salute to spring" marking re-birth.

The white Easter lily has come to capture the glory of the holiday. The word "Easter" is named after Eastre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring. A festival was held in her honor every year at the vernal equinox.

People celebrate Easter according to their beliefs and their religious denominations. Christians commemorate Good Friday as the day that Jesus Christ died and Easter Sunday as the day that He was resurrected. Protestant settlers brought the custom of a sunrise service, a religious gathering at dawn, to the United States.

Who is the Easter Bunny?

Today on Easter Sunday, many children wake up to find that the Easter Bunny has left them baskets of candy. He has also hidden the eggs that they decorated earlier that week. Children hunt for the eggs all around the house. Neighborhoods and organizations hold Easter egg hunts, and the child who finds the most eggs wins a prize.

The Easter Bunny is a rabbit-spirit. Long ago, he was called the "Easter Hare", hares and rabbits have frequent multiple births so they became a symbol of fertility. The custom of an Easter egg hunt began because children believed that hares laid eggs in the grass. The Romans believed that "All life comes from an egg." Christians consider eggs to be "the seed of life" and so they are symbolic of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Why we dye, or color, and decorate eggs is not certain. In ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and Persia eggs were dyed for spring festivals. In medieval Europe, beautifully decorated eggs were given as gifts.

Are you Teaching Content or Thought?

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Δημοσιεύτηκε στις Δευτέρα, 21 Απριλίου 2014 07:36

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Another article that I have found worth reading...

Are You Teaching Content, Or Teaching Thought?

by Terry Heick

Thinking is troublesome.

For one, it is an intimate act splicing time and space. It is done right here, but it spans moments in the pasts and reaches out uncertainly towards moments in the future. Put another way, you think in a singular, precise space about plural, imprecise times.

It also resists uniformity (and education loves uniformity). Thought hinges on schema (familiar forms and patterns we then impose unfamiliar data to make sense of it), and emotion (in part, our internal response to the former). It is as diverse as character, experience, and affection. It?s like defining art, establishing criteria for beauty, or causing love

And whether it knows it or not, education has a thinking problem.

The Nature Of Thinking

Part of it is due to thinking?s oily skin.

What does it mean to understand, show curiosity, or think? We have tests to try to measure, but the assessment of thought isn?t the priority, but rather grasp of content?and this is another problem.

Priority.

One common response is to choose a handful of actions that indicate thinking??power verbs??that we hang on the wall. We then form short response questions asking students to ?Analyze,? and ?Evaluate,? and feel bloody well that we?re rigorous.

But in this circumstance is thinking useful, or critical? Think about the fact that we promote ?thinking strategies,? which makes as much sense as a five-star restaurant promoting ?cooking strategies.?

Shouldn?t a school fail to function without urgent and divergent thinking? Shouldn?t a classroom fall flat on its face when it?s not there? The way education is currently designed, the answer is no. We reteach, intervene, and remediate. Einstein?s definition of insanity seems apt here.

If our job is to teach skills, facts, and concepts?crystallized intelligence?then thinking is simply a tool, and our curriculum is content.

If our job is to teach critical thinking, design, and problem-solving?fluid intelligence?then thinking is our collective circumstance, and our curriculum becomes thought.

So, which is it?

If Curriculum Is Content

As an industry, our collective performance is far too mediocre to dabble here and there. When we make content proficiency our goal, all of our resources are applied there. Every unit we plan. Every walkthrough observation. Every PLC meeting we attend. Every PD we have the pleasure of experiencing. Every piece of technology we buy. Every grant we write.

We align everything in pursuit of that goal.

If our curriculum remains content, then we simply need to decide what our terms of success are, and continue to experiment until we turn all the little bar graphs that display all the data from all the assessments from red and yellow to green and blue. Or change our terms for success?new cut scores, softer assessments, etc.

Either way, critical thinking is necessarily secondary?a pathway rather than a destination or playground. And that?s okay as long as we?re on the same page here. As long as that?s what we want.

But if our curriculum is thinking?if our job is to, excuse the convenient phrasing, teach thought?then the classroom floor beneath us tilts right and then left, and our goals as educators change in important ways.

To learn to think, students need powerful and inspiring models that reflect the design, citizenship, creativity, interdependence, affection, and self-awareness we claim to want them to have.

To teach careful, creative, and truly innovative thinking, students need creative spaces and tools, and frameworks to develop their own criteria for quality and success.

They need dynamic literacy skills that they practice and build upon endlessly.

Not projects that have creativity and design thinking added on, but projects that can?t function without them.

And they need control of it all.

Units?if we use them?aren?t planned backwards from standards, but thinking habits, self-direction, and intellectual urgency. If our curriculum is content, these are simply a means to a different end. Not priorities, but feel good phrasing we add to school mission statements and casually drop in parent conferences.

As teachers, we have an intimidating?borderline overwhelming?index of academic standards that every student needs to master. But as both an industry and a culture, we complain that students ?can?t think for themselves.?

So which is it?should we teach content, or teach students how to think? This isn?t a false dichotomy; we can teach both thinking and traditional curriculum?teach one through the other?but it just might be that we?re trying to serve two masters and failing both.

Changing Curriculum Forms In Response To Changing Times

How would curriculum change if our priority was on critical, creative, and collaborative thinking?

What role would existing content play?

How would it change the kinds of interactions students have with ideas?and one another?

Would this be easier to assess, or more difficult? Would assessment continue to be central to how we drive learning, or would something else act as the catalyst?collaboration, creativity, ideas, models, etc.?

What does the reality of the modern age of information?this age of Google?suggest that we ?teach??

Do students need teachers less in such a context, or more than ever?

How should curriculum respond to a new world? Can we simply ?update? things as we go, or is it time for rethinking of our collective practice?

What would you want for your own children?a curriculum of content, or a curriculum of thought?

And is it up to educators to decide? Where are parents and communities? Do they understand these shifts? Shouldn?t they? What?s at stake if they don?t?

Teachers are forced to squint at 21st century learning frameworks, Ken Robinson videos, Common Core standards, technology initiatives, and dozens of other ?pushes? and make sense of it all with students increasingly numb to their efforts.

So let?s be clear once and for all where our priority lies.

Published at TeachThought: http://www.teachthought.com/

Tips for Updating Your Teaching.

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Δημοσιεύτηκε στις Δευτέρα, 21 Απριλίου 2014 07:27

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Something to think about...

8 Tips For Updating Your Teaching

by Mike Fisher

In the first week of April, I participated in a Twitter chat for the ASCD Leader to Leader initiative, hashtag #ASCDL2L, on the role of the modern teacher. As the conversation unfolded, it caused me to think more deeply than I have before about what elements teachers might consider on their path to developing a more modern version of their current role.

In Digital Learning Strategies: How Do I Assign and Assess Digital Work, I challenge teachers to think about several questions as they seek to modernize instruction, though this is just a slice of what being a modern educator means. Using digital tools is essential, certainly, but I want to extend the message of the book to include other aspects of modern learning.

8 Tips For Updating Your Teaching To Something ?Messier?

1. Embrace change

It is inevitable that the world will change. Your world will change. Our children will live in a different world than we grew up in. Change happens. The energy we expend fighting against change could be used to make the change work for us. Embracing change means embracing personal growth. Make new paths. Travel new roads. New destinations bring new expertise. Be open to that.

2. Be a willing collaborator

Your students will benefit from what you model. Your professional practice will improve when you invite the perspectives and expertise of your colleagues into what you do. The entire culture of a school can be upgraded when people work together toward common goals.

3. Build a toolbox

Don?t limit yourself to what you?ve always known. Build a toolbox of resources and opportunities, both digitally and physically.

Participate in professional development that enhances your toolbox and adds expertise to what you are able to choose from when making curricular decisions. There are tons of websites and apps that would be great for instruction, and there are tons of print resources and physical products that need to be in your toolbox should the opportunity arise for their inclusion in instruction. In the 21st century, toolboxes of opportunities, resources, web tools, and apps are extremely important.

4. Invite the kids into the curriculum conversation

The role of teacher is changing. It?s not about being the sage on the stage anymore so much as it?s about becoming the coach on the sidelines. What the kids value is important and sometimes it?s important to give them a chance to voice both the ?how? of learning and the ?why? of learning. On Twitter, a member of my Digital Learning Network tweeted that he told his students what standard they would be working toward next and asked them to suggest ways to meet the goal.

If the ideas were good, he included them in his lesson plans. This is huge! Teamwork yields great results. Ask the kids what they think. Students are your partners in education, not just the objects to whom you teach.

5. Let student explore

Look for places in the curriculum where direct instruction can be replaced by deep student-centered inquiry and exploration. The kids need a toolbox, too! Let students discover the answers to questions.

Now that information lives everywhere, students have the access to knowledge. What they don?t have is an understanding of how to select from those knowledge resources, decide which resources are relevant and useful, and which resources will be the best to provide evidence for supporting their thinking.

6. Give students the gift of discernment

Always hold students accountable for their rationale. They should be able to articulate why they chose a particular resource or why they used a particular tool, website, or app. Reflection on learning and reflection on the tools and resources with which we learn are extremely important. We need to know that students ?get it? on a conceptual level, rather than just a recognition level.

7. Seek opportunities to extend the classroom

In the 21st century, the teacher should not be the student?s only audience. Understanding multiple perspectives comes from experience with multiple perspectives. Students should regularly interact with students in other countries around the world and should regularly be publishing their work online for the sake of global feedback before the teacher ever sees it.

This is called ?amplification??students amplify their work and reap the benefits of critical perspective analysis. It gives them opportunities to think of things that they would not have otherwise considered.

8. Let it go

Be critically aware of the traditional aspects of instruction and what is timeless and what is mindless. Educator comfort with past learning modalities should not be a factor for defending their use in the modern classroom. Traditions that build solid foundations are still important, like traditional print literacy and basic literacy skills, but other bastions of education, like lectures and popcorn reading, were irrelevant modes of instruction two decades ago and certainly are not strategies that work for 21st-century students.

?The way we?ve always done it? is no longer an excuse teachers can use. Let it go. Ask yourself how much work you?re doing versus how much work your students are doing. Shift the balance. Your students should be doing the work, and that work must be as meaningful, relevant, and authentic as possible.

Extended-Quote-As-Conclusion

The modern classroom is like a Jackson Pollock painting. It?s messy, integrated, interesting, abstract, creative, engaging, rich, invigorating, student-centered, and immersed in technology. It is not like the classrooms we remember as kids. It is not like the classrooms depicted in popular media. It is not filled with compliant students who smile a lot and do well on assessments just because we ?taught it.?

The modern classroom is constantly evolving. It is innovative and challenging, while also being inviting and valuing the voice of the child. The children. All stakeholders. The modern educator is a conductor of a symphony of awesome possibilities and a conductor of the train of excellence.

Upgrade yourself. Upgrade the way you do what you do. If you put the students first, how does that change your perspective? If you put aside biases and move forward with risk-taking behaviors, how does that benefit your students? Take a look at yourself in the mirror. Are you, as Heidi Hayes Jacobs says, preparing kids for 2025, or 1982?

Published at TeachThought: http://www.teachthought.com/