Cycling - Bike to City Hall and Niagara River Trip

My favorite school event of the year was this past Monday: our school-wide Bike to City Hall event, to support Mississauga's Annual Bike to Work Day.  Hundreds of students from schools around Mississauga participated. This yearly event is a great opportunity to promote bike safety, road safety, the sport of cycling and sustainability. Bike to Work Day is part of Bike Month. Bike Month is a community celebration of cycling that happens across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. Bike Month 2013 begins on Monday, May 27 and continues until the end of June with hundreds of events in the community.

Students arrived early at school last Monday in the cool and pleasant May Morning, with their bicycles and helmets in tow, for the Bike to City Hall event. I, with the other teacher advisors, were the tour guide sweeps, fixing chains, adjusting seats, pumping tires and checking helmets. Nothing that I'm not used to, I help out as a tour guide for Toronto Bicycle Tours. (that's me in the orange, at 57 seconds). That company is owned by my good friend, Terrence Eta.

In teams of 10, we cycled the 10 kilometers from the school to City Hall, where students enjoyed a free breakfast, bike safety check-ups, fun prizes, cycling vendors and a BMX demonstration. The students especially enjoy hanging out with students from other schools, running through the fountains in Celebration Square, thoroughly soaking themselves.

Cycling is a passion of mine, I also helped out guiding a special Educator's Bike Ride to Niagara Falls last weekend.

The Niagara River Recreation Trail meanders through some of the most beautiful countryside in the world. This area is Ontario's only Carolinian forest,  ash, birch, chestnut, hickory, oak and walnut trees abound, a wonderful complement to the pine trees, lakes and rocks of Northern Ontario, which I also dearly love.

The Niagara Recreation Trail, a wide paved trail, runs parallel to the Niagara River from Historic Fort Erie in the south to Fort George in the north.

We made our way through:

• Niagara on the Lake
• Fort George
• Lewiston (stopping by Laura Secord's house)
• the Botanical Gardens
• past the hydroelectric dam, before
• Sampling ice-cream from the famous Reg's Candy Kitchen under the Rainbow Bridge

Not only beautiful, I managed to snap some pictures which I will use in the electricity unit in Grade 9 science. Electricity, and especially electric generation is a focus of this Grade 9 Science unit. These photos will complement the other pictures of solar panel projects I near Peterborough that I took a few weeks ago. It is also entertaining and educational by stopping to read the markers and memorials along the way commemorating events from the war of 1812.

I highly recommend this Niagara Recreation Trail Tour for educators of history, law, geography and science. And here's our team:

This coming weekend, I'll participate in Ride for Heart, cycling the Don Valley Parkway, raising money for the Heart and Stroke Foundation.  Around 13,000 cyclists take part in the event yearly, which raises millions of dollars for the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

TEDTalks - the importance of relationships

There has been some discussion in my department surrounding  TEDTalks. As I mentioned in a previous post, last month I attended the Ignite Mississauga, a yearly youth TedTalks event.

The first TEDTalk I want to share will make you all warm and fuzzy, the speaker is Rita Pierson and she says that every student needs a champion. Her best line is "Kids don't learn from people they don't like." This is especially true for kids with low achievement records. The way to build relationships starts with simple things:

• Trying to understand first before judging
• Apologizing when things are done wrong and,
• A persistent belief in the capability of the students. Yes, even to the point of nagging our students to be the best they can possibly be.

 The second TEDTalk is a bit long with good points at the end. Geoffrey Canada talks about the slowness of our school system to adapt to the needs of their customers. We all know the modern school model:

• Five days a week
• 8 to 3 pm
• Five periods a day
• September to June

Geoffrey's point of view is shaped by the poverty-stricken neighborhoods he serves in Harlem, NYC. Geoffrey offers a customized school model offering services that his community's specific needs:

• Extended-hours charter schools
• A chef who prepares healthy meals
• Health and parenting clinics
• Community centers for children and adults during after-school, weekend and summer hours

He makes good points, especially regarding meeting our students where they are at.

The greatest influence on student learning - John Hattie

What has the greatest influence on student learning?

Yesterday at a professional learning day we looked at the work by John Hattie. Hattie, a Professor of Education at Auckland University in New Zealand has published impressive papers involving meta analysis on student learning. Meta-analysis is commonly found in medicine and epidemiology, where for example, it is used to synthesize the effects of drugs in clinical trials. Hattie uses meta-analysis to provide a birds-eye view of effective education across the world. Hattie’s meta-analysis is fascinating in its sheer breadth. His work draws on "a total of about 800 meta-analyses, which encompassed 52,637 studies, and provided 146,142 effect sizes [...] these studies are based on many millions of students" (Hattie, 2009; 15).

Hattie's bottom line is the "effect size". An effect size of "1" indicates that a particular approach to teaching or technique advanced the learning of the students in the study by one standard deviation above the mean. So an effect size of "1" is very good indeed.

• Reverse effects in red are self-explanatory, and below 0.0
• Developmental effects are 0.0 to 0.15, and the improvement a child may be expected to show in a year simply through growing up, without any schooling. (These levels are determined with reference to countries with little or no schooling.)
• Teacher effects "Teachers typically can attain d=0.20 to d=0.40 growth per year—and this can be considered average"  ...but subject to a lot of variation.
• Desired effects are those above d=0.40 which are attributable to the specific interventions or methods being researched.

You can see in the normal distribution below, that the mean effect size is 0.4 and the desired effect size is therefore greater than 0.4. Very few effects are above 1.0, called the 'very good' category.

I included a detail of the top 20 or so areas with the most pronounced effect on students learning below. Formative assessment (assessment 'for learning' and 'as learning') matters as much as I thought it would, with an effect of 0.9. I know that effective feedback, delivered at the right time and in the right way enables me as a teacher to change I am doing AND helps the student understand their achievement of the learning goals.




What surprised me in the list above, was that student self-expectations rank the highest in effect, with an impact of 1.44, and that study skills appear more than 20 lines down the list with an effect size of 0.59. 


References
Hattie's two research papers, Influences on Student Learning and Teachers make a Difference, explore what it is that really makes a difference to learning in our classrooms, and the difference between experienced teachers and expert teachers. His book Visible Learning synthesised these results. Hattie's webpage brings together the freely available online resources related to John Hattie’s Visible Learning research  http://visible-learning.org/.

The Best of Chris Hadfield

 Astronaut Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to command the International Space Station, is preparing to make the return voyage to Earth after almost five months in orbit. Not only is he a gifted astronaut, he's a remarkable communicator. He tweeted, sang songs, conducted science experiments, and took amazing pictures.

There isn't enough room to list all of Commander Chris Hadfields antics and achievements during his 146-day stay aboard the International Space Station, so here are my favorite social media milestones.

1. Canadarm2 and Dextre debut on new Canadian $5 bank note
2. Chris Hadfield Sings David Bowie's Space Oddity
3. Chris Hadfield and Barenaked Ladies: I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)
4. What happens when you cry in Space
5. Wet Washcloth In Space - What Happens When You Wring It? | Video
6. Puck Drop at a Leafs game from Space, Live on January 21, 2013
7. Inspirational Chris Hadfield - on how to become the person you want to be   

 Enjoy!

Culture Night

Last night our school celebrated Culture Night, an evening is dedicated to celebrating our multi-cultural community. Our school had seven Pavilions representing cultures from around the world, giving the opportunity for visitors to “travel the world” in a single room. Visitors moved from one Pavilion to another having their Passports stamped as they entered each Pavilion. Each Pavilion showcased samples of food:

• Asian  - dumplings and sushi
• Middle East - delicious rooh afza and turkish coffee
• Canada - pancakes and maple syrup
• Europe - meatballs and black forest cake
• Africa - plantain chips
• South Asian - samosas served with several fantastic sauces
• Caribbean - wonderful fried potato cakes

I was an advisor for the Middle East Pavillion. For weeks, these students were dedicated team in creating a wonderful backdrop, a fully decorated table and food representing their culture. They even outfitted me with a hijab and beautiful traditional dress.

Interactive entertainment for children of all ages including dance classes, face painting, campfire photograph postcards, henna, and games such as limbo and a piñata. Great work guys!

Stressed Kids

Last night I was at the Board office, I attended the Mental Health Week initiative, the topic was Stressed Kids. Over 20 community agencies were represented, along with Children's Mental Health Ontario, which sponsors the Change the View video contest. The winning video was by Lankesh Patel from North Park Secondary School in Brampton, Ontario.

One student in the audience told the School Board representative that she wrote her 4 exams during the first 2 days of the exam period last semester. She said it was stressful and said this was not fair. The audience murmured agreement. She's right, it's not fair.  However, it is a reality that exam schedules sometimes fall that way. It's easy to forget as an adult, how a teenager deals with stress. Life experiences teach stress-coping skills.

When I asked my students what stresses them, they were voluble in stressing over final exams, writing tests, presenting in front of people, deadlines, subjects like math or science, fitting in at school, and twitter (sub-tweets).

When I thought of that student's exam experiences and compared them to my own stressors, I realized that in the years since high school, I have become more resilient to stress. As the years pass, my stressors change,  and I change and adapt to them too. Adults have developed an ability to manage stress in many forms.

Teenagers can use help learning to manage their stress. As a teacher I do this daily: I sequence my lessons, chunking topics into bite-size pieces, I review difficult topics, I assist in study skills, I show students how to prioritize their time, I remind them that high school is a passage, not a destination.

These are the four A's of Stress Management:

• Avoid - A lot of needless stress can simply be avoided. Plan ahead, rearrange your surroundings and reap the benefits of a lighter load.
• Alter - One of the most helpful things you can do during times of stress is to take inventory, then attempt to change your situation for the better.
• Accept - Sometimes we have no choice but to accept things the way they are.
• Adapt - The perception that you can't cope is actually one of the greatest stressors. That's why adapting — which often involves changing your standards or expectations — can be most helpful in dealing with stress.

May Clinic on Stress: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/stress-relief/SR00037
Winning video: We Are All Equal -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGXC7xvUD5k

Enlighten us, but make it quick!

I attended Ignite Mississauga on May 1, 2013 with 25 students and two fellow teachers. Ignite events take place in over 100 cities around the world. At Ignite events, presenters share their personal and professional passions in short 5 minute presentations.

The presentations were fascinating, each only 5 minutes long. Ignite is really a mini TED -talks. It's an event for geeks. And as a math/science teacher, I relish in conscious geekdom.

The messages of three speakers spoke to my heart.

The first speaker described the concept of "shadeism". Shadeism is descrimination that exists between the lighter-skinned and darker-skinned members of the same community. I lived abroad for a number of years and work in a multicultural school, so equity and inclusivity is an everyday reality. But still it's hard to comprehend that a single community can actively work at excluding its own members.

A second stand-out presentation involved a young man practicing 22 acts of kindness for his 22nd birthday, giving acts of kindness rather than receiving them. The video is breathtaking, well cut, with an amazing soundtrack. It is effective at highlighting generosity and heartfelt gifts. I played the video for my classes and as we spent time discussing acts of kindness, I could feel the atmosphere in the room soften.

The last remarkable presentation highlighted that Peel Region is a human trafficking hotspot in Canada. Peel Regional Police Detective David van Allen said of the 60 human trafficking cases that have been reported in Canada, 31 have been Peel police investigations. Constable Jim Zucchero, who investigates human trafficking for Peel OPP, said pimps use Highway 401 and the QEW to move women from Windsor up through Montreal. And since human trafficking victims are high school age, ranging from 12 to 22,  I find that I spend more time reflecting on the choices some of my personally "adopted" students take, and further the consequences that these choices may have on their future.

That's it. Five minutes can change your life.

Information
More about shadeism here: http://shadeism.com/, http://vimeo.com/16210769

Random Acts of Kindness video by searching "22 Random Acts of Kindness" on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wskG18saKk0)

Read about Human Trafficking in Peel Region here: http://www.mississauga.com/news/article/1349888--i-d-like-to-see-the-mayor-sitting-at-that-table