Teacher resources and professional development across the curriculum

Teacher professional development and classroom resources across the curriculum

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Learner Log

A place to explore teaching and learning

Bringing the Gold to Class: 2018 Winter Olympics

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The year was 1924. From January 25th through February 5th, 10,004 paying spectators gathered in Chamonix, France to witness the first Winter Olympic Games. Two hundred and fifty eight athletes participated in 16 events, ranging from ice hockey to bobsleigh. Norway walked away as the victors, with 17 overall medals. The host country, France, placed ninth (just ahead of Belgium) with three bronze medals.

Fast forward to 2018, where the 23rd Winter Olympic Games are set to take place in PyeongChang, South Korea from February 9th through the 25th. Athletes from 90 nations, including the United States, will compete in 102 snow-filled events!

To celebrate the upcoming Winter Olympic Games, Annenberg Learner has resources available to get you and your students in an Olympic state of mind. Who knows – a future Olympian could be sitting right in your classroom! Ignite the (Olympic) flame in your students with these resources.

For those who use winter break to hit the slopes, Economics U$A’s Graphing Lab follows four friends who want to plan a ski trip, but haven’t assessed the risks or the cost. The lab uses a demand and market supply curve to figure out if the friends can afford the trip.

Pascal’s Triangle and the “hockey-stick” pattern.

Consider Pascal’s Triangle for the hockey enthusiasts who love a little math with their pucks. In Mathematics Illuminated, learn about a curious occurrence, a “hockey-stick” number pattern, which lives in Pascal’s Triangle.

In order for there to be a Winter Olympics, one crucial thing must be present: snow! In session six of Physical Science, take a closer look at why snowflakes have six sides and walk through the process of how snow forms on the molecular level.

Under the Chinese and German languages programs in Teaching Foreign Languages K-12: A Library of Classroom Practices, students talk sports, with a focus on vocabulary around the Olympics. Denise Tanner, who teaches German I in high school, leads her students in warm-up activities, followed by activities that have students make cultural comparisons between Germany and the U.S. Jie Gao, a middle school teacher of Mandarin Chinese, has her students learn the names and characters of eight sports.

The Olympics began as an ancient Greek tradition; it has since evolved into an international display of sportsmanship, honor and pride. In unit 25 of Bridging World History, see how the Olympics often reflect the social and political struggles of the time.

Five Ways to Inspire Creativity Across Disciplines: International Creativity Month

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Image Copyright Krisdog / 123RF

Encourage your students to take the intellectual roads less traveled this year and spur innovative problem solving during International Creativity Month! In addition to Education World’s list of classroom activities to celebrate International Creativity Month, Annenberg Learner has resources for teachers to inspire creative thinking in all subjects, year-round.

  1. In Connecting with the Arts: A Workshop for Middle Grades Teachers, program two, an interactive prompts teachers to identity their students’ needs before selecting which two school subjects they would like to integrate into their teaching. As a whole, the workshop has two goals: communicate using various art forms and identify the benefits of arts integration for early adolescents.
  2. In program five, teachers can build a bridge between disciplines. Creating interdisciplinary lesson plans shows students the importance in cross-disciplinary skills: from using the scientific method in a history setting to approaching a math word problem with literary devices.
  3. Make meaning of our relationship with the natural world – just as the Romantic poets did – in Art Through Time, program 10, “The Natural World.” Art and science may sometimes feel beyond our understanding, but using art to interpret the scientific processes around us has produced some of the world’s most poignant, memorable art.
  4. And there’s art in math, too! Symmetry, understood by mathematicians as a fundamental aspect of group theory, is aesthetically pleasing to the eye. In Mathematics Illuminated, unit 6, “The Beauty of Symmetry,” students can manipulate a wallpaper design to practice common geometric motions like glide and translate.
  5. Brain researchers say that a well-rested mind is more creatively inclined – watch the short clip that explores the connection between creativity and dreaming in The Brain, program 15, “REM Sleep and Dreaming.”

For more resources that inspire a little creative thinking across disciplines, visit our blog post on incorporating arts in all subjects. And as always, share the ways you’ve inspired creative thinking and solutions with us in the comments, on Facebook and Twitter (@AnnLearner).

Talking With Students About Human Rights

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Dinner in Des Moines photo by © Danny Wilcox Frazier of a resettled Syrian family gathering for Sunday dinner.

December 10 marks Human Rights Day. In 1948, The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – a document which proclaims unalienable rights (much like the Constitution) of every single human being, regardless of status. The document is available in over 500 languages and can be found here.

This year’s celebration will start a year-long campaign to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 2018.

Although we have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the world continues to see human rights violations. Some recent examples include the migrant slave auctions in Libya and the Rohingya Muslims fleeing oppression in Myanmar.

Sometimes, making classroom connections between these events proves difficult because Libya and Myanmar are on the other side of the world. But the distance doesn’t take away from the graveness of these situations – and they can become part of the classroom discussion.

In our Essential Lens resource, the collection “Forced Displacement: Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice” highlights the 65 million people globally who have been displaced due to persecution, war, famine, and other conditions. While refugees have fled their home country with no intention to return, internally displaced persons (IDPs) have left their homes but have not crossed a border. The resource also explains the importance of programs that are set up to help refugees and IDPs resettle, ensuring that they have access to food, water, and medical care. Students can engage with photos of the displaced and complete activities that call for close examination of how the media documents the stories of the displaced.

Teaching ‘The Children of Willesden Lane’ includes the classroom video, “Introducing the ‘Universe of Obligation’” where 10th grade teacher Martina Grant prepares her students to read the biography “The Children of Willesden Lane.” The lesson asks students to confront a lingering question: what prompts some people to help others in a time of crisis, while other people turn away? Teachers can bring this question closer to home by asking students to think about September 11th and Hurricane Katrina, and how these events (as well as events from more recent memory) changed our country’s Universe of Obligation. In this same resource, 8th grade teacher Nancy Parrish discusses with students the concepts of “upstanders” and “bystanders”, both as individuals and as nations.

Honoring the First Americans – National American Indian Heritage Month

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Sioux Dog Feast, 1832-1837. Teton Dakota (Western Sioux). Oil on canvas. © Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC / Art Resource (from America’s History in the Making)

Dr. Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca Indian, sought to one day recognize the contributions of the first Americans. The first Presidential proclamation came from Calvin Coolidge, who declared the second Saturday in May as American Indian Day. Seventy five years later, George H.W. Bush approved a joint resolution which designated November 1990 as the first National American Indian Heritage Month.

To commemorate National American Indian Heritage Month, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the National Park Service, and other institutions have exhibits and collections on display, along with selected resources made available for teachers to use as well.

In addition to the aforementioned resources, Annenberg Learner has a handful of sources to supplement teaching Native American heritage in the classroom. Native American history is an important part of U.S. history; the following resources highlight its richness, struggles and triumphs.

The first unit of American Passages: Literary Survey, “Native Voices,” explores the deeply established oral tradition of Native Americans. Learn about prominent Native American authors, like Luci Tapahonso and Simon J. Ortiz (whose Acoma name is Hihdruutsi). Students can use the literary timeline to place when important native texts were published, along with historical contexts for those texts.

After Columbus’s initial arrival to the New World, encounters between Native American and Europeans dramatically altered the natives’ way of life. Use unit themes to specifically address how these changes affected Native Americans in America’s History in the Making, unit 2, “Mapping Initial Encounters.”

The struggles of Native Americans, Asian Americans, and blacks are placed in context of the traditional white Progressive movement in A Biography of America, program 19, “A Vital Progressivism.” The program includes a detailed timeline of accomplishments for minority groups in America, which includes the founding of the Society of American Indians in 1911.

What’s behind the work of the 2017 class of Nobel Laureates?

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Gravitational Waves illustration.

Most of us would be alarmed to receive a phone call at 5:30 a.m., but if you’re a lifelong researcher every October you dream it might be your phone ringing. The call would be from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences congratulating you for being named a Nobel Prize winner. Even sweeter? Sharing the prize with your colleagues.

If the work described in the news stories seems too esoteric, visit Learner.org to understand the basics of the fields of inquiry and see how they connect with what today’s students are learning.

Nobel Prize in Medicine

Americans Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries about the molecular mechanisms controlling the body’s circadian rhythm.  Get into the groove of circadian rhythms by watching video module 13, “Sleep and Circadian Rhythms,” from The Brain Teaching Modules. Hall, Rosbash, and Young isolated a gene in fruit flies that regulates our daily biological rhythm. Learn about the tools used to sift through the massive amount of DNA — even in drosophilae (fruit flies) — to find specific functions of genes in our Interactive: DNA.

Nobel Prize in Physics

The Nobel Prize in Physics was shared by Rainer Weiss, the team of Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne ” for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.” Read about the propagation of gravitational waves and how they are detected in the online text of Physics for the 21st Century. Take a look down the 4-kilometer arm of the LIGO interferometer, one of the two detectors of elusive ancient gravitational waves in the video “Gravity,” guided by Dr. Nergis Mavalvala, a MacArthur genius grant awardee. (Start video at 14:30 min.)

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, and Richard Henderson won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution.”  Students are familiar with the stick-and-ball models of chemicals, and while more detailed models have been developed using computers, these do not tell us how different molecules interact. Using cryo-electron microscopy, “researchers can now freeze biomolecules mid-movement and visualize processes they have never previously seen, which is decisive for both the basic understanding of life’s chemistry and for the development of pharmaceuticals,” according to nobelprize.org.

Check out the Rediscovering Biology website to better understand the complexities of protein-protein interactions and how these understandings can lead to more targeted drug design. Then, follow the case study activity Designing Cancer Drugs: Development of Gleevec to understand the process of drug development from the research phase of targeting specific proteins to drug testing.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Richard H. Thaler of the University of Chicago “for his contributions to behavioral economics.” Behavioral economics blends insights from psychological research and economic decision making. “A behavioral perspective incorporates a more realistic analysis of how people think and behave when making economic decisions, providing new opportunities for designing measures and institutions that increase societal benefit,” according to nobelprize.org.

Early in his career, Thaler worked with Daniel Kahneman, another Nobel Economics Prize-winning researcher. Both Kahneman and Thaler study the way individuals make decisions based on what they believe is rational thinking, but can often be erroneous. In “Judgement and Decision Making, “ program 11 of Discovering Psychology, this way of thinking is illustrated by risk and reward scenarios.

A further illustration of how individuals view financial risk taking can be found in the behavior of casino gamblers. “Probability Models,” from Against All Odds: Inside Statistics reveals that while the house advantage over the gambler is less than 1%, casinos make their money on the volume of people who place small bets.

Nobel Peace Prize

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize goes to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a coalition of non-governmental organizations from nearly 100 different countries. “The coalition has been a driving force in prevailing upon the world’s nations to pledge to cooperate with all relevant stakeholders in efforts to stigmatize, prohibit, and eliminate nuclear weapons. The organization is receiving the award for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons,” the award announcement said.

Read about the science and engineering behind uranium enrichment, which is required for nuclear power plants. It’s also the process by which nuclear weapons are made. The online text from The Habitable Planet, unit 10, “Energy Challenges,” explains the environmental impacts of nuclear power plants such as storage of spent radioactive nuclear fuel, the concern over nuclear accidents, and the potential for nations to create nuclear weapons.

Making The Connection To Your Classroom

Whether you would like to help your students become better decision makers, to understand the behavior of sub-cellular molecules, or to encourage nations to work together for a safer world, Learner.org can help you connect the work of Nobel Laureates to what you students are learning today and inspire them in the future.

Image Copyright: forplayday / 123RF Stock Photo