60:52 minutes (13.93 MB)

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, these seven teachers:

• Chris Sloan (Utah)
• Margaret Simon (Louisiana)
• Monika Hardy (with an Inovation Lab student, Cristian) (Colorado)
• Scott Shelhart (Indiana)
• Cynthia Shidner (Alaska)
• Paul Allison (New York)
• Fred Haas (Massachusetts)

meet in a Google+ Hangout to talk about our classrooms, about http://youthvoices, and more! Monika Hardy also talks about the BIF Summit http://businessinnovationfactory.com/bif-7 that she recently attended with students as well as developments at the Innovation Lab.

Enjoy!

66:16 minutes (15.17 MB)
On this week’s Teachers Teaching Teachers, we have some of our current and former students on the podcast to talk about the high school-college transition. We are also joined by a couple of National Writing Project teachers who have been involved with the “Framework for Success in Post-secondary Writing” that came out a few months ago. These frameworks include this amazing list that we invite you to explore:

Habits of Mind

The Framework identifies eight habits of mind essential for success in college writing—ways of approaching learning that are both intellectual and practical and will support students’ success in a variety of fields and disciplines:

• Curiosity: the desire to know more about the world.
• Openness: the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world.
• Engagement: a sense of investment and involvement in learning.
• Creativity: the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas.
• Persistence: the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects.
• Responsibility: the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others.
• Flexibility: the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands.
• Metacognition: the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge.

Our guests on this podcast include:

• Lennie Irvin (who recently completed his PhD), is the Co-Director of the San Antonio Writing Project. In addition to working with the above frameworks, for the past four summers, Lennie has facilitated an open institute, Crossing2College where they’ve been asking:

Every year, we have far too many students like Ian. They aren’t the AP kids (though they might be), and they aren’t the students who fail our classes. They do OK, even sometimes receiving excellent grades in our high school classrooms. But when they get to college, they place into Developmental English classes, or worse (like Ian) they crash and burn and drop out of college. They fall off the bridge between high school and college. This site is devoted to local efforts to help more students graduating from high school place directly into college level writing classes, and importantly—do well in freshman composition. It is meant both as a resource and a professional community of practice dedicated to doing more to prepare our students for college and for helping these students do well once they are in college, for “college readiness” and “student success” in college are really two sides of the same coin.

• Kirsten Jamsen whose affiliations include being the co-director of the Minnesota Writing Project. Kirsten presented on the “Frameworks for Success in Postsecondary Writing” at the National Writing Project’s Annual Meeting in November, where she discussed the statement’s purpose, and recounted the process of composing it. We’ll ask her do some of that again. We’ll also use some of her questions from that session to guide our discussion on Wednesday evening: “What is your response to the statement? How might you use it to promote effective writing instruction at your school? How could this statement help you design thoughtful professional development?”
  
  
• David Pulling whose students at Louisiana State University, Eunice, have been posting on Voices on the Gulf this year. David is the Director of Continuing Education at LSU Eunice, and will share his insights into what it takes to be a successful college writer as well. David is also an active member of the The National Writing Project of Acadiana.
  

Enjoy!

Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.

65:15 minutes (14.93 MB) We had a lively conversation on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers .

• Meet Erick Gordon the new director of the New York City Writing Project and the founder of the Student Press Initiative.
• Enjoy the perspectives of a couple of the digital photographers who are in Chris Sloan’s school in Salt Lake City, where they had just published their student magazine, the Bulldog Press on MagCloud for the first time.
• Warm to the thoughts of David Pulling from LSU-Eunice who gives us an update on how his students I-Search papers. In particular we invite you to take a look at this one by Vonda Guidry: “Potential Health Effects of Food Contamination From the BP Oil Spill.” Paul Allison’s high school students and Vonda had a productive dialogue in the comments under her discussion post.
• And of course you don't want to miss Margaret Simon's elementary school students  who have publishing on Voices on the Gulf — and who now have other ideas, as Margaret explains:
  

  Things are good and busy.  Our gifted students present a historical play each year for first graders in the parish at The Shadows, a plantation home on the bayou.  There is much involved in preparing and performing, so little else goes on.

  My student Kaylie is working on making Clover the Plover a book.  She is illustrating it using Paint on the Promethean board.  I hope to publish it on Lulu as a fundraiser for the Gulf.

And more! Why don’t you drop by too? We invite you to join us every Wednesday at http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA (World Times).