Day: February 4, 2020

Bringing Variety to the English classroom

Here are 14 ways to use variety in your classroom:

1. CREATE A BALANCE. Structure your lessons with a balance of listening and activity. Young people can listen effectively for about half their age in minutes e.g. if they are 12 they can listen for 6 minutes at one time.

2. USE A SCHEDULE. Make the structure obvious to the students by having a schedule on the board which could look like this: 10 mins teacher talk, 10 minutes paired work, 10 minutes sharing with whole class, 10 minutes recording in work books, 5 minute review and game.

3. Use paired and group activities.

4. GAMES AND SIMULATIONS. Having fun engages our brain and makes the learning memorable. I can still see students keenly learning their times tables to see how quickly they could recite them and beat their own time.

5. ALLOW CHOICE. Give students a say in when and with whom they present their work. Allow them to choose whether they present to the whole class, a small group or to the teacher.

6. ALL STUDENTS ANSWER. Use mini-whiteboards for students to write answers and hold up to the teacher. This approach reduces anxiety for students who fear failure as the answer can be erased, and gives the teacher immediate feedback about how well the students are learning.

7. INCORPORATE MOVEMENT. No one learns best by sitting at a desk or on the floor for long periods of time. Use movement to underscore the learning. Adding movements to learning can enhance and embed the learning. Think about using actions with a song or memory tricks to learn lists of dates.

8. JIGSAW OR EXPERT GROUPS. Students reading and learning a topic then teaching it to a small group.

9. USE MUSIC. It can signal the end of a task, transition time or pack up time. Use music as part of your lessons…as a break, as a movement, to lift the mood or to give students thinking time. Music has the power to change feelings- use it to provide a background to your activities. It can also promote positive relationships through shared tastes and knowledge of songs. Singing is a fantastic transition activity for younger students and could be used effectively with older students who also love to sing.

10. PAIRED AND GROUP DISCUSSIONS. We learn by talking about things and giving students opportunities to discuss the work will help to make it relevant and meaningful. Keep chatting times short and give clear boundaries for the discussions to keep students on task.
11. Give practical demonstrations to make the learning relevant and real.

12. PEER MENTORING. Have students explain content to each other.

13. CLASS MEETINGS. Conduct real life problem solving situations addressing student need e.g. how to develop time management skills or how to deal assertively with bullying behaviour.

14. USE A VARIETY OF RESOURCES. Raid the library to provide students with resources to use e.g. a range of texts, laptops, internet, encyclopaedias, posters, guest speakers, excursions, incursions etc.

Keeping Tabs on the Competition

By Chemeketa SBDC

Want to know what your competitors are up to? It’s important to keep tabs on them so you know what your customers know. It doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money nor time, and you’ll learn a lot.
Your first step is to clearly understand your own company’s goals and strategies, and where you stand in the marketplace. Then, and only then, can you understand how you stack up in comparison to competitors. Get a handle on your own business, then choose a handful of competitors to monitor.
Figure out what really matters to you, and hone in on those factors. Watching competitors often involves paying attention to their motivations (what is driving them?), their revenues or profits (as much as you can tell from the outside), how management is behaving and making decisions, and your assessment of their capacity to meet their goals.
Create a system to gather information and store it (folders in a shared drive that are accessible to anyone in your company for instance). And establish a regular time to analyze the information, perhaps quarterly.
Gathering the intelligence is easier than ever, and thanks to the internet, can be largely automated. Here are some common sources to check in with.
• Your competitors’ websites are a first stop to find out what they’re up to. Make a practice of scanning them. And then look into a free website likewww.WatchThatPage.com that monitors specific pages and sends you an email alert when they’re changed.
• News sources can give you information. Google your competitors, and sign up for email alerts on news.google.com.
• Check public sources like the Corporations Division to see changes in ownership. You can also access unpublished information through a Freedom of Information Act request.
• Ask your employees what they know; you might be surprised what they can tell you. They talk to customers all the time and pick up lots of tidbits along the way.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCzOJDJZHoBttdHAjJsnN9w?sub_confirmation=1

“Think Critically” by guest blogger, Robert Mack, SIS ’12 of PublicRelay

This post is the second in a series on critical thinking and analysis, one of the top skills employers want you to have.   Here, SIS alum Robert Mack tells  how the critical thinking skills he learned here at AU  have been important to his career at PublicRelay.  Robert is currently a Media Analyst and Recruitment Specialist. 
Think Critically, by Robert Mack
Analyze; problem solve; synthesize; think critically. To anyone perusing CareerWeb’s listings, these terms quickly become a dime a dozen. Yet these words appear often for good reason – employers need individuals who can come up with simple solutions to massively complicated problems. As evidenced by a recent survey, 93% of employers highly value critical thinking skills – so highly, in fact, that they value critical thinking skills more than an applicant’s undergraduate major.[i] Writing as an AU alum who now works in a recruiting role, I can attest to the fact that critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills are in demand more than ever and that AU is a great place to perfect them.      
Dan Black, Director of Recruiting at EY, defines critical thinking as “the ability to work with data, to accumulate it, analyze it and synthesize it, in order to make balanced assessments and smart decisions.”[ii] His definition may sound intimidating, but these skills are 100% learnable. Mastering the art of critical thinking just takes time, work, and patience.
For the students reading this, you can find opportunities to improve your critical thinking skills right in front of you. Many class assignments, especially research papers, require the collection, analysis, and synthesis of data in a way that parallels the critical thinking definition found above. Writing research papers, more than anything, teaches you how to think. In 10 years, most of you will probably not remember the specific topics that you covered in your research assignments. What you will remember is the critical thinking approach that you employed when building your arguments and conclusions, an approach that will stay with you for years to come.
At PublicRelay, we tackle the communications challenges facing our clients with our analytical reasoning and critical thinking skills. During the hiring process, we look closely at our candidates’ analytical and reasoning abilities to gauge how they would approach the challenges our clients encounter. We hire individuals who are sharp and want to think big – so much so that there is no one degree that we look for. Our Media Analysts have backgrounds in history, international relations, anthropology, and sociology, among many others. At the end of the day, we need people who can solve problems and think critically.
Since graduating 4 years ago, I’ve taken the critical thinking skills that I learned at AU and applied them to solving a number of complicated problems. Business theories change, Presidents will enter and exit office, but thinking critically will never go out of style.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCzOJDJZHoBttdHAjJsnN9w?sub_confirmation=1

Bringing Variety to the English classroom

Here are 14 ways to use variety in your classroom:

1. CREATE A BALANCE. Structure your lessons with a balance of listening and activity. Young people can listen effectively for about half their age in minutes e.g. if they are 12 they can listen for 6 minutes at one time.

2. USE A SCHEDULE. Make the structure obvious to the students by having a schedule on the board which could look like this: 10 mins teacher talk, 10 minutes paired work, 10 minutes sharing with whole class, 10 minutes recording in work books, 5 minute review and game.

3. Use paired and group activities.

4. GAMES AND SIMULATIONS. Having fun engages our brain and makes the learning memorable. I can still see students keenly learning their times tables to see how quickly they could recite them and beat their own time.

5. ALLOW CHOICE. Give students a say in when and with whom they present their work. Allow them to choose whether they present to the whole class, a small group or to the teacher.

6. ALL STUDENTS ANSWER. Use mini-whiteboards for students to write answers and hold up to the teacher. This approach reduces anxiety for students who fear failure as the answer can be erased, and gives the teacher immediate feedback about how well the students are learning.

7. INCORPORATE MOVEMENT. No one learns best by sitting at a desk or on the floor for long periods of time. Use movement to underscore the learning. Adding movements to learning can enhance and embed the learning. Think about using actions with a song or memory tricks to learn lists of dates.

8. JIGSAW OR EXPERT GROUPS. Students reading and learning a topic then teaching it to a small group.

9. USE MUSIC. It can signal the end of a task, transition time or pack up time. Use music as part of your lessons…as a break, as a movement, to lift the mood or to give students thinking time. Music has the power to change feelings- use it to provide a background to your activities. It can also promote positive relationships through shared tastes and knowledge of songs. Singing is a fantastic transition activity for younger students and could be used effectively with older students who also love to sing.

10. PAIRED AND GROUP DISCUSSIONS. We learn by talking about things and giving students opportunities to discuss the work will help to make it relevant and meaningful. Keep chatting times short and give clear boundaries for the discussions to keep students on task.
11. Give practical demonstrations to make the learning relevant and real.

12. PEER MENTORING. Have students explain content to each other.

13. CLASS MEETINGS. Conduct real life problem solving situations addressing student need e.g. how to develop time management skills or how to deal assertively with bullying behaviour.

14. USE A VARIETY OF RESOURCES. Raid the library to provide students with resources to use e.g. a range of texts, laptops, internet, encyclopaedias, posters, guest speakers, excursions, incursions etc.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCzOJDJZHoBttdHAjJsnN9w?sub_confirmation=1