Katie Morrison Elder

Module 2 Reading Guide

Chapter 4: Learning Environments

PP. 25-31: Tomlinson uses a 3-sided triangle to describe the key components of a
healthy learning environment. What are the three equally important elements? List
them below on the left side of the table. Then make a few bulleted notes in each
category for reference:

Healthy Learning Environment

Sides of Triangle Key ideas
Teacher  Responsible for learning
 Needs to be secure
 In charge of climate control
 In touch with reality
 Teach academics and life skills
Students  Acceptance
 Held to high expectations
 Look for self-strengths
 Given opportunities
 Needs guidance
 Needs to feel comfortable
Content  Hands on
 Inquiry
 Relevance
 Connections
 Understand
 Authentic

Evaluate your practices:

PP. 31-35: Tomlinson identifies 11 principles that quality teachers adhere to when
establishing healthy classroom learning environments (listed below). After reading
Tomlinson’s descriptions of each area, rate yourself on a scale of 1 – 5, with 1 being
weak and 5 being strong. If you are not currently teaching, reflect on your
experiences as a student teacher for each indicator.

5 The teacher appreciates each child as an individual.

4 The teacher remembers to teach whole children.
4 The teacher continues to develop expertise.
3 The teacher links students and ideas.
3 The teacher strives for joyful learning.
4 The teacher offers high expectations and lots of ladders.
3 The teacher helps students make their own sense of ideas.
2 The teacher shares the teaching with students.
4 The teacher clearly strives for student independence.
Katie Morrison Elder

5 The teacher uses positive energy and humor.

3 “Discipline” is more covert than overt.

What makes some of these principles easier for you to implement? More
challenging?
For the areas I scored myself as a 4 or 5, I feel like I connect with students very
easily. I cherish them as who they are as individuals and I try my best to embrace
their differences. I feel like I create a comfortable rapport with the students so that
they feel comfortable with me as their teacher and as an adult in their life. I focus on
them being kids, but at the same time I hold them to high expectations to help them
grow into a good person later in life.

For the areas I gave myself 2s and 3s in, I feel that I will grow in the longer I teach
and gain more experience. I will learn to let the students help me teach them and
how to create a more fostering academic environment that allows students to
explore in order to learn.

Think back to your chapter on Motivation in the previous module. In what ways do
you see Tomlinson’s principles connecting?
I see that giving students autonomy in their learning and building a relationship
creates a healthy learning environment which motivates students to want to learn. If
they have choice, their personal interests are met, and the students know their
teacher is on their side, learning will take its best course.

Chapter 5: Good Instruction

How do you connect with Tomlinson’s idea of “Hazy Lessons” and your previous
efforts at differentiating instruction? If you are not currently a classroom teacher,
reflect on student teaching experiences.
Hazy lessons are lessons that don’t reach the higher levels of thinking of Bloom’s.
Connecting that “why” in what students are learning is something that sounds easy
but it actually more difficult than someone would think. Allowing students to
inquire information and reach higher levels of thinking will allow them to retain the
information and learn the concept rather than just recalling information and
forgetting it later. Hazy lessons don’t leave a good imprint on students. I have
learned that stations are not quick fix for differentiation. Just because the students
are doing something different at each station does not make instruction
differentiated. Differentiation is scaffolding instruction and making some students
work individually with filling in the blank, or having students work in partners to
learn more vocabulary, or the teacher reading the vocabulary words out loud to the
students and discussing them in small group. Differentiation is arranging instruction
to meet the same result- not giving them something different to do. Another
example of a hazy lesson I did was when I taught a lesson maps to my partnership
Katie Morrison Elder

class of first graders. I taught and reviewed with them what a key was, why we used
maps, etc. At the end of the lesson, I had them map a route from their school to
another destination on the map. The idea was great in my head, but it didn’t really
tie into the lesson very well once it started happening. It didn’t have a good
explanation of why we were doing it.

Tomlinson lists engagement and understanding as two essentials for durable

learning?

When does engagement happen?

When a lesson engulfs the students by captivating their attention and keeping their
mind on the information being taught using creative ways. (hands-on, minds on)

What does understanding mean?

Understanding means to fully obtain the knowledge of information and be able to
use and manipulate it in a variety of ways- not just recalling facts

Summarize your thoughts on levels of learning and the standards:

The levels of learning are important for teachers to understand because personally,
a lot of teachers taught me facts. I wasn’t taught the skills needed to master concepts
and principles, and I definitely wasn’t taught the attitude needed to learn it. I like the
fact that the book says that teacher and administrators need to label standards as to
what levels of learning they belong to. I think this is important because some
standards don’t require deeper learning at early stages, but some do. For exsample,
students need to know what a square is in kindergarten, but they don’t need to learn
the vertices, corners, and sides until second grade. They don’t’ need to know that the
right angle of each corner of the square is 90 degrees until they are doing geometry
in secondary grades. The levels of learning discussed in this book could also be
labeled with the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy to help teachers understand which
standards needs to be taught for facts or for skills.

To ensure effective teaching and learning, teachers need to link tightly three key
elements of curriculum: content, process, and product. Define each in your own
words:

Content: the information the students should learn

Process: how the students learn, engage, and retain the information

Product: how the students display the information they learned (assessment)