- How do teachers develop and extend the knowledge and skills of every child, regardless of their starting point?
- How can we support students who have diverse learning needs when we already have so many demands on our time?
- How can teachers be strategic and creative to ensure that we are supporting our students?
In this keynote session, Karen dives deeply into her three key elements to promote deep learning: mastery of the academic side; identity of the individual; and employing creativity.
First off, she explains that if a child doesn’t want to know more, then it’s very hard to get them motivated. They also find it hard to connect what they’ve learned and transfer it into new situations - so we must make those connections for them, and provide the right environment for learning, connecting, and meaning making.
Children only take risks in learning and meaning making when they feel safe.
Karen's mantra is: "I know life is hard out there, but this, the classroom is your safe place."
Karen tells us that we need to learn students' stories. We should be “driven by a profound respect for who students are and what they can be," and can't forget creativity and play in the process of it all! Karen suggests ways to provide a rich and inspiring environment for students to encourage them to engage.
“You need to tell students you have high aspirations for them.” As Karen says, and Stan Grant demonstrated in his keynote Talking to My Country, we will remember forever when a teacher doesn’t believe in us.
When we look at creators like Leonardo DaVinci, they learned from modelling -- from the masters. As educators, Karen tells us that “we are the keepers of knowledge. That needs to be celebrated and valued - and imparted.”
She further dives into how these three concepts for deep learning be applied when it comes to the explicit teaching of writing.
“We should he planning all of our units of work around concepts and big ideas," Karen says.
Conceptual understanding builds a bridge in our brains so we can retain and retrieve our learning - it‘s all connected. She talks in detail about textual concepts in particular. We have two webinars on the subject available on-demand!
Karen goes onto share lots of direct, foundational knowledge to be used for the explicit teaching of writing: “Verbs are the muscles of writing - they can contain layers of meaning.”
She tells us to think about movement, sound, and meaning when writing. Think about “zooming in”, writing like a camera - we have a webinar on this, too! Check out out this on-demand webinar on how to make a movie in your mind and write it - action, perspective, movement.
Next, she explores student exercises and activities via the great book How to Bee by Bren MacDibble. We have a unit of work on this book.
Finally, she reminds us not to forget about the human engagement and human dimension of writing. Read like a writer. Share quality literature.
Overall, this presentation is deeply inspiring - and deeply practical. Karen shared many ideas, approaches and challenges that could be easily integrated into your classroom.
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