What do we mean by

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What do we mean by

• College Readiness

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What is College Readiness College Readiness can
be defined as the level of preparation students
need in order to enter and succeed without
remediation at a post secondary institution that
offers a baccalaureate degree
Do you have the skills, tools, work habits, and
determination to graduate with a 4-year degree?
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How is College Different From High School?

• College Courses are Different
• Pace much more rapid
• Professors expect their students to
• Make inferences
• Interpret Results
• Analyze conflicting explanation of phenomenon
• Support arguments with evidence
• Solve complex problems that have no obvious
  answer
• Reach conclusions and offer explanations
• Conduct research
• Engage in give and take of ideas

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How is College Different From High School?

• College Courses Typically Require
• Students to Read 8-10 Books
• Write multiple papers in a short period of time
• Papers must be well reasoned, well organized, and
  well documented with evidence from credible
  sources
• Well developed writing skills, research
  capabilities, high level thinking skills

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How is College Different From High School?

• Skills Required to be Successful College Students
• Ability to work in small groups inside and
  outside of the class on complex problems and
  projects
• Ability to make presentations and explain what
  they have learned
• To be an independent/interdependent learner that
  is self-reliant, recognizes when they are having
  problems and knows when and how to seek help from
  professors, students and other sources
• A tremendous work ethic

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• What Do We Mean By Rigor
• Organized around complex interrelated concepts

• Concerned with central problems in the discipline
  that challenge students previous concepts
• Able to arouse strong feelings
• Focused on symbols and images packed with
  multiple meanings

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Educational Focus
Secondary Schools focus on skills
Colleges/Universities focus on the Habits of mind
Elementary Schools focus on skills
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Habits of Mind

• Habits of Mind are demonstrated through learning
  activities and tasks that are deeply embedded in
  a course
• These habits develop over time

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Habits of Mind Measurement

• 5 Key Dimensions
• Reasoning
• Argumentation and Proof
• Interpretation
• Precision and Accuracy
• Problem Solving and Research

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Habits of Mind Measurement
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Persistence

• Students often give up in despair when the answer
  to a problem is not immediately known
• They give up because they have a limited
  repertoire of problem solving strategies. If
  their strategy doesnt work, they give up because
  they have no alternative

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Managing Impulsivity

• Effective problem solvers have a sense of
  deliberativeness They think before they act.
  They follow directions.
• Reflective individuals consider alternatives and
  consequences of several possible directions prior
  to taking action

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Listen to Others
Listening is the beginning of understanding
Having the ability to listen to another person,
to empathize with, and to understand their point
of view is one of the highest forms of
intelligent behavior
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Thinking Flexibility

• Flexible people are the ones with the most
  control
• They consider alternative points of view or deal
  with several sources of information
  simultaneously
• Flexible thinkers are able to shift at will,
  through multiple perceptual positions
• Flexible thinkers display confidence in their
  intuition
• Flexible is the cradle of humor, creativity, and
  repertoire

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Thinking About Our Thinking(Metacognition)

• The ability to know what we know and what we
  dont know
• Metacognition is our ability to plan a strategy
  for producing what information is needed, to be
  conscious of our own steps and strategies during
  the act of problem solving, and to reflect on and
  evaluate the productiveness of our own thinking

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Striving For Accuracy and Precision

• Craftsmen take pride in their work and have a
  desire for accuracy as they take time to check
  over their work
• Craftsmanship includes exactness, precision,
  accuracy, correctness, faithfulness, and fidelity
• Craftsmanship requires a deep personal caring
  about the work one produces
• Craftsmanship

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Questioning and Posing Problems
Effective problem solvers know how to ask
questions to fill in the gaps between what they
know and what they dont know
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Apply Past Knowledge to New Situations

• Intelligent human beings learn from experience.
  Too often students begin each new task as it were
  being approached for the very first time
• Episodic grasp of reality each experience is
  encapsulated and has no relationship to what has
  come before or what comes afterward

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Thinking and Communicating With Clarity and
Precision
Enriching the complexity and specificity of
language simultaneously produces effective
thinking. Language and thinking are closely
entwined, they are inseparble
Intelligent people strive to communicate
accurately in both written and oral form taking
great care to use precise language
When you hear fuzzy language, it is a reflection
of fuzzy thinking
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Gathering Data Through All Senses
To know a role it must be acted to know the game
it must be played to know the dance it must be
moved to know a goal it must be envisioned
Intelligent people know that all information gets
into the brain through the sensory pathways
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Creating, Imagining, and Innovating

• ALL students have the capacity to generate novel,
  original, clever, or ingenious products,
  solutions, and techniques if that capacity is
  developed.
• Creative people take risks, push the boundaries,
  intrinsically motivated, open to criticism,
  uneasy with status quo, constantly strive to make
  whatever is better

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Responding With Wonderment and Awe

• Effective people not only have a I can
  attitude, but also an I enjoy feeling
• They seek problems to solve, they enjoy figuring
  out things by themselves, and continue o learn
  throughout their lifetimes
• Intelligent people feel compelled, enthusiastic,
  and passionate about learning, inquiring, and
  mastering

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Taking Responsible Risk

• Flexible people seem to have an almost
  uncontrollable urge to go beyond established
  limits
• They are uneasy with comfort they live on the
  edge of their competency
• They seem compelled to place themselves in
  situations where they do not know what the
  outcome will be. They view set backs as
  interesting, challenging and growth producing
• Their risks are not compulsive. Their risks are
  educated

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Laughter liberates creativity, and provokes
higher level thinking skills such as
anticipation, finding novel relationships ,
visual imagery, and making analogies
Having a whimsical frame of mind, they thrive on
finding discontinuities and being able to laugh
at situations and themselves
Finding Humor
Laughter transcends all human beings
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Problem solving has become so complex that no one
person can go it alone. No one person has
access to all the data needed for critical
decisions no one person can consider as many
alternatives as several people can.
Working in groups requires the ability to justify
ideas and to test the feasibility of solution
strategies on others
Cooperative humans realize that all of us
together are more powerful, intellectually and
/or physically than any one individual
Thinking Interdependently
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Academic Behaviors Associated With College
Readiness
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• Self monitoring a form of metacognition
  awareness of ones current level of mastery and
  understanding of a subject, including key
  misunderstandings and blind spots
• Ability to reflect on what worked and what needed
  improvement
• Ability to persist when presented with a novel,
  difficult or ambiguous task
• Ability to identify and employ a range of
  learning strategies
• Ability to monitor, regulate, evaluate, and
  direct their own thinking and learning
• Self discipline to spend significant amounts of
  time outside of the class to achieve academic
  success
• Study skills to encompass a range of active
  learning strategies that go far beyond reading
  the text and answering homework questions
• College ready students have the ability to manage
  their time, prepare for taking exams, use
  informational resources, take class notes, and
  communicate with professors and advisors

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What Schools and Students Can Do To Foster
College Readiness
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Create a Culture Focused on Intellectual
Development
Elements of Intellectual Development 1. Students
interact with appropriately important and
challenging academic content. Focus on the Big
Ideas of each content. Then teach those ideas
by exposing students to a series of enduring
and supportive understandings that creates an
overall intellectual and cognitive structure for
the content
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Create a Culture Focused on Intellectual
Development
Elements of Intellectual Development 2.
Structure the content so that it is the context
in which key habits of mind are developed over a
sequential more challenging progression. These
cognitive skill sets will affect college success
more than common knowledge
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Create a Culture Focused on Intellectual
Development
Elements of Intellectual Development 3. The
academic program should be structured to cause
students to demonstrate progressively more
control and responsibility for their learning.
This would be observed in how well students
worked independently and interdependently outside
of the classroom on extremely complex projects
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Reflection How can we develop this repertoire of
problem solving skills in students who dont
possess them when they come to us?