Learning Cultures and Independent Work Time

Blog Parts...

(I'm still figuring out how to make it so you can click and go to specific parts of the blog, but until I do here's a table of contents for you and you can scroll around)

• Reflection on Mission and Independent Work
• Learning Cultures and how it brings order to some of our chaos
• Theory Connecting UAI and LC - why does LC work at UAI?
• Teacher Feedback and Evaluation - what am I going to be looking at providing feedback on next year?

Reflection on our Mission

The mission of UAI is and has always been to develop strong young women who are capable and willing to do anything they so choose.  To realize this, a major emphasis of our school has been to focus reflection on choices, actions, and outcomes.

Looking back over the last 6 years, everyone at out school has worked hard to execute on this ideal, but that's just the problem.  Too much effort has been that of the adults and not enough from our students.

As it is now, all UAI teachers incorporate independent work time and collaborative group work into lessons.  During these periods, teachers frequently speak with students, helping them with their questions, redirecting their off-task behavior, and conferring with students.  However, we have yet to be able to consistently (across all classes, grades, and subjects) see this level of independent work in regularly executed in classes.  Without a consistent set of independent work expectations, our students continue to fall back on dependent coping mechanisms (e.g. hands waiving in the air for teacher attention) or devolution into off-task behavior.

Learning Cultures

Cynthia McCallister's Learning Cultures brings this needed structure and cohesion to our efforts and moves.  One of the biggest criticisms on our Quality Reviews, from our own staff, and from visitors to our school is that we lacked a unifying vision of instruction.  In the past, Kelly & I resisted these criticisms because we could not find a system that wouldn't subjugate student autonomy, something that we needed to preserve.  With Learning Cultures, students work within structured formats to develop and execute their individually developed plans for meeting course learning targets.  Here are two of our own talking more about their own experiences with learning cultures.  Noam, who joined us as a math teacher in 2007, reflects about the changes he sees in his classroom practice.  Wendy who joins our staff this year as a new 6th grade Humanities teacher talks about her own experiences transitioning to Learning Cultures.

The Theory Connecting UAI and Learning Cultures

Cynthia's thinking in the development of Learning Cultures draws from John Searle and his work around Speech Acts and Intentionality.  As a former studentof Professor Searle, a lot of my own thinking around the development of the mission of the school and developing young women who could reflect on and learn from their actions and choices shared the same influences.  So, it's not surprising to find a natural affinity for Learning Cultures and UAI.

Click Here to Watch the Video

I've been rereading a lot of my old Searle books lately.  If you're interested and would like to know which books I'm talking about they are Speech Acts, Intentionality, and Minds, Brains, and Science.  However, while there are pretty accessible in the spectrum of philosophy texts, the reading is still pretty dense and dry.

Alternately, you can also check out the video here (I'm still figuring out how to embed things, so for now - it's just a link).  This is Part 3 of a three part interview of Searle on Language, Literacy and the Modern Mind.  For a real piece of irony of this suggestion, watch the other parts where he talks about how his students are children of the media generation and the differences between that and the printed word...

Teacher Evaluation

Even though not everyone is doing Learning Cultures, the rubrics will still apply, given the schoolwide focus of independent work and conferencing.  Additionally, the lesson and environment rubrics from Learning Cultures are also germaine to teaching in general.  Here are the relevant rubrics.

• Independent Work Time
• Learning Conferences
• The Classroom Environment
• The Mini-Lesson
• Learning Cultures teachers will receive additional feedback on all the formats (Shares, Unison Reading, Learning Groups)

These rubrics are the result of Cynthia's work and research and are aligned to the Danielson Framework for Teaching. I will be following up my visits with conferences, using the same conference form and format that you guys use in your classes (e.g. the conference will be a strengths/needs/goals chat in reference to the school wide goals and student achievement).  

Together in these conferences we will discuss progress, define professional development needs, and plan goals.  I will be using EduCreations (a great app) to record our conferences, and will share them with you for your own records. Check out Educreations for your flipped learning classroom!


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I feel like this blog was a little choppity chop and super long.  My writing was interrupted by a day of camping at Floyd Bennet Field in Brooklyn, where I slept under the stars and was lulled to sleep by the sweet sounds of aircraft and helicopters.  Actually, it was really quite cool.  It was Kelly's idea to drag us all out there, but I highly recommend it for anyone interested in experiencing urban camping at it's best!

However, it does make for a too-long disjointed blog post.  Sorry - will do better next time!!

Speaking of next time - it won't be for a couple of weeks as I am finally off on vacation on Tuesday!  Look for my next post on 20AUG12!

-k