PRINCIPLES OF LEARNING

Lauren Resnick

Organize for Effort    Hard work replaces aptitude as a measure of success.  Everything is organized for the student to work as hard as they need to achieve high standards.

Clear Expectations      Student, parents, school, and community know and understand benchmarks that mark each stage of learning.  Students participate in setting goals and evaluating progress.

Recognition of Accomplishment         Recognition of accomplishments that takes the form of celebrations of work that meet standards or intermediary expectations.  Families, community members or peers take part in these celebrations.

Fair and Credible Evaluations          Assessments are not based on the normal curve, but students are evaluated on their progress towards absolute standards.  Assessments are connected to and imbedded in instruction.

 Academic Rigor in a Thinking Curriculum        “Knowledge-Based Constructivism” means that students are engaged in thinking a solid base of knowledge-process and content are linked.

Accountable Talk        Student-to-student questioning, probing, and questioning appropriate to the discipline uses evidence and appropriate knowledge to develop ideas.

 Socializing Intelligence        By calling on students to use intelligent thinking—problem-solving, reasoning, and using their ability to make sense of the world—educators can teach intelligence.

 Learning as Apprenticeship        Students engaged in “authentic learning”. Apprenticeship learning can be done through the use of extended projects and presentations of finished work to an interested and critical audience.  Learning strategies are overtly modeling and discussed..