EDCT 5696 - Are They Thinking? Simple Strategies to Change Your Classroom Culture
Course Description
This course will change the way you think and interact with your students. It will give you the tools to change the way your students think and will help you to create a culture of thinking with simple strategies you can use today. Thinking is at the heart of learning but is not often explicitly taught, valued, and nurtured in our students. It is difficult to know how to encourage and engage students in high-level thinking without explicit strategies and techniques. Throughout this course you will evaluate your current teaching practice and increase student engagement, interest and learning with simple, effective thinking strategies you can implement right away in all content areas. You will work out of two excellent texts: Creating Cultures of Thinking and Making Thinking Visible.Grade levels: K - 12
Learner Outcomes
This course will support teachers in:
- Evaluating their current practice
- Understanding and establishing Thinking Routines
- Creating an action plan
- Analyzing and understanding the impact of expectations, language, time, routines, modeling, student opportunities, interactions, and learning environment on student thinking and learning
- Creating an environment where thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted.
Notes
This course is available for variable credits. Please check section information to ensure you are registering for the desired number of credits.Testimonials
“The combination of assignments, questions and personal reflection, and the books which are amazing resources, were the perfect fit for someone like me who really hadn’t heard much about thinking routines and visible learning. By the end of this course I have plans and a way to begin implementing thinking routines in my classroom this fall, which is in less than a month! My goal was to find ways to be a better teacher, more effective, a teacher whose students are doing the talking and thinking, I become a facilitator. This course helped me do just that.” —TINT Student“I would say the most beneficial part of the class was that the prompts were written for a teacher! They made me reflect and think on my actual practice-- through the assignments I could take time to put the information from the readings into actionable practice by designing systems of thinking to use and try out. Much appreciated!” —TINT Student
“What I found to be the most beneficial aspect of this class is that it gave me new ideas to try in my classroom. Last year I really disliked how much my students were not connecting to one another. This was something that I really wanted to change moving forward. This class definitely helped create ideas as to how to combat this issue. This class definitely exceeded my expectations especially as there were many examples that were directly applicable to the subject that I teach.” —TINT Student