It's About Time
Written by Dr. Lynell Burmark
Associate Thornburg Center for Professional Development

As we approach another academic year, that familiar fear grips our gut:
"How am I ever going to get everything done?"

Diverse Learners
The so-much-to-do, so-little-time syndrome is compounded by the wide range of ability and experience levels of the students in our classrooms. So you're teaching fourth grade this year? With 24 students, you have three who are reading at 9th grade level or above, seven who can almost read at grade level, ten who read at 2nd grade level, and four who speak no English and cannot read in any language at all. You tutor some of the kids before school, some during recess, more during lunch and another group after school. You send extra work home for the parents to do with the kids at night, and you try to get volunteers to come in for more individualized work while you do breakout groups in the afternoon. You have fifth graders coming in for cross-age tutoring as often as their teacher allows. Are you sure today isn't Friday?

Mandates from Above
And it's not just the lesson planning for an increasingly diverse student population that's a challenge. Well-intentioned bureaucrats and politicians (many of whom haven't been in a classroom for anything but a photo op in the last 30 years) are doing their best to change education from a way of empowering teachers and students to a system of enforcing mandates and policies. The testing and standards movement has created a ravenous monster, consuming already sparse time and resources. Even Robert Marzano, a leader in the standards movement, admitted in a 2001 interview, "To cover all the content in the standards identified so far, you would have to change schooling from K-12 to K-22."

Or enhance your science lessons by taking your students on a virtual trip into space with A Closer Look at the Moon. And then experience for themselves the sights and sounds of animal behavior and clearly understand the threats to survival in Animal Adaptations. By using video for classroom demonstrations on Changes in the Properties of Matter, students can gain lasting insight into conductivity, magnetism, and combustibility in the space of only 20 minutes.

Whatever you need to teach, start with the visuals. We cannot think until we have an image on which to hook the thought. Imagine. That's how the brain works. Without the image as a file folder, the brain has no place to store the thought. And the images go directly to long-term memory where they are etched, indelibly, on the brain. This explains why students perform 35% better on tests over illustrated textbooks than books with text alone. Cramming for the test? Hook that content on some good, relevant images!

From Long-term Memory to Instant Replay
In one of the interviews Texas Instruments recently conducted with students from the Plano Independent School District, Plano, Texas, a middle schooler explained that now that her teachers are using data projectors and video, she is doing much better on tests, because when she sees a test question, she just replays the video in her head and she gets the answer right!

So, this year, give your students a test (and learning!) advantage by using more images in the classroom. Teach the way this generation learns. And make it easy on yourself by using quality educational videos that are designed to teach all the basic concepts mandated in your curriculum.