AVID Summer Institute - Day 2

Day 2 at AVID SI started in our strands at 8am, then after lunch we worked with our site teams. I felt that today was a very productive day overall and I'm very pleased with our progress.

Here are my take-aways from today:

We started the day briefly discussing Cornell Notes, which is a staple of the AVID program. One of the ideas that was shared was regarding the Curve of Forgetting and how C-Notes can help with retention of material. One of the presenters uses a C-notes review as a warmup activity and asks her students to get out their C-Notes from yesterday's lesson/lecture and with an elbow partner, review/revise their notes. This would also be a good time to work on left-column or summarization.

Whenever we have done a quickwrite, one of the presenters always ends the last 10 seconds with "You have 10 seconds left.. finish your last though.. finish your last sentence.. finish your last word... and stop"

We did a Philosophical Chairs activity today, so I tweeted out asking for ideas on using them in math. I haven't had much response yet.. :(

Marking the text in math - I think I want to get into the habit of "circling key terms and underlining claims". In my class, that would be "circling key information" as in the important details of the problem and "underlining the question being asked". I am hoping that if I get my students in the habit of doing this, it will help them tackle new problems and gather the important information.

Modeling is KEY! I realized today that math teachers do a good job in general of modeling our internal dialogue that occurs when we tackle a new problem. However, in our strand, some of the strategies were used with the thought that we already knew what was going on. I understand that teaching children is different than teaching degreed adults, but modeling your expectations is important no matter what the age of your students.

We ended the day talking about summarizing strategies. I don't know how to use that yet, but one idea I had was to have some sort of gallery walk to illustrate different summary sentences of the same paragraph. When we were writing a one sentence summary for a paragraph of test, I was very anxious about whether I did it right. I know there wasn't a right answer, so I think seeing other sample student responses would have helped me to relax a bit.

One of the ideas for teaching summary skills reminded me of an idea from Embedded Formative Assessment. The presenter mentioned giving several samples of summaries and having students rank them by quality. I don't know if I like this idea or not since it can be very subjective...

Tomorrow is Day 3, then home we go! :) Have a great day!