LIBRARY ORIENTATION SCHEDULE

The Library and the Instructional Media Center (IMC) are closely collaborating with the educative community in the use of Learning Resource Center (LRC). The Orientation Program aims to help the students in familiarizing the Library and IMC vision-mission, objectives, policies, programs and services.

June 21, 2010 (Monday)	June 22, 2010 (Tuesday)	June 23, 2010 (Wednesday)	June 24, 2010 (Thursday)	June 25, 2010 (Friday)
	7:20-8:20 III-Prudence	7:20-8:20 II Dedication		7:45-8:45 I Knowledge
	8:20-9:20 III-Sobriety		8:10-9:00 III-Fortitude	8:45-9:45 II Diligence
9:50-10:50 II Fraternity	9:50-10:50 III-Justice	10:50-11:50 IV Loyalty		10:15-11:15 I Understanding
10:50-11:50 II Zeal	12:50-1:50 II-Determination		10:20-11:10 IV Generosity	10:05-11:05 I Wisdom
			11:10-12:00 IV Service	2:05-3:05 III-Temperance
			1:50-2:40 I Courage
	3:10-4:10 IV-Availability	3:10-4:10 I-Counsel

What is Understanding by Design?

Understanding by Design (UbD) is a framework for improving student achievement. Emphasizing the teacher's critical role as a designer of student learning, UbD works within the standards-driven curriculum to help teachers clarify learning goals, devise revealing assessments of student understanding, and craft effective and engaging learning activities.

Developed by nationally recognized educators Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, and published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), Understanding by Design is based on the following key ideas:

• A primary goal of education should be the development and deepening of student understanding.
• Students reveal their understanding most effectively when they are provided with complex, authentic opportunities to explain, interpret, apply, shift perspective, empathize, and self-assess. When applied to complex tasks, these "six facets" provide a conceptual lens through which teachers can better assess student understanding.
• Effective curriculum development reflects a three-stage design process called "backward design" that delays the planning of classroom activities until goals have been clarified and assessments designed. This process helps to avoid the twin problems of "textbook coverage" and "activity-oriented" teaching, in which no clear priorities and purposes are apparent.
• Student and school performance gains are achieved through regular reviews of results (achievement data and student work) followed by targeted adjustments to curriculum and instruction. Teachers become most effective when they seek feedback from students and their peers and use that feedback to adjust approaches to design and teaching.
• Teachers, schools, and districts benefit by "working smarter" through the collaborative design, sharing, and peer review of units of study.

In practice, Understanding by Design offers:

• a three-stage "backward planning" curriculum design process anchored by a unit design template
• a set of design standards with attendant rubrics
• and a comprehensive training package to help teachers design, edit, critique, peer- review, share, and improve their lessons and assessments.

Read more about the article. Click here.

Stress Management: : how to reduce, prevent and cope with stress

from Helpguide.org

Stress management starts with identifying the sources of stress in your life. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Your true sources of stress aren’t always obvious, and it’s all too easy to overlook your own stress-inducing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Sure, you may know that you’re constantly worried about work deadlines. But maybe it’s your procrastination, rather than the actual job demands, that leads to deadline stress.

To identify your true sources of stress, look closely at your habits, attitude, and excuses:

• Do you explain away stress as temporary (“I just have a million things going on right now”) even though you can’t remember the last time you took a breather?
• Do you define stress as an integral part of your work or home life (“Things are always crazy around here”) or as a part of your personality (“I have a lot of nervous energy, that’s all”).
• Do you blame your stress on other people or outside events, or view it as entirely normal and unexceptional?

Since everyone has a unique response to stress, there is no “one size fits all” solution to managing it. No single method works for everyone or in every situation, so experiment with different techniques and strategies. Focus on what makes you feel calm and in control.

Dealing with Stressful Situations: The Four A’s

Change the situation:

• Avoid the stressor.
• Alter the stressor.

Change your reaction:

• Adapt to the stressor.
• Accept the stressor.

Stress management strategy #1: Avoid unnecessary stress. Not all stress can be avoided, and it’s not healthy to avoid a situation that needs to be addressed. You may be surprised, however, by the number of stressors in your life that you can eliminate.

• Learn how to say “no”
• Avoid people who stress you out
• Take control of your environment
• Avoid hot-button topics
• Pare down your to-do list

Stress management strategy #2: Alter the situation. If you can’t avoid a stressful situation, try to alter it. Figure out what you can do to change things so the problem doesn’t present itself in the future. Often, this involves changing the way you communicate and operate in your daily life.

• Express your feelings instead of bottling them up.
• Be willing to compromise.
• Be more assertive.
• Manage your time better.

Stress management strategy #3: Adapt to the stressor. If you can’t change the stressor, change yourself. You can adapt to stressful situations and regain your sense of control by changing your expectations and attitude.

• Reframe problems.
• Look at the big picture.
• Adjust your standards.
• Focus on the positive.

Stress management strategy #4: Accept the things you can’t change. Some sources of stress are unavoidable. You can’t prevent or change stressors such as the death of a loved one, a serious illness, or a national recession. In such cases, the best way to cope with stress is to accept things as they are. Acceptance may be difficult, but in the long run, it’s easier than railing against a situation you can’t change.

• Don’t try to control the uncontrollable.
• Look for the upside.
• Share your feelings.
• Learn to forgive.

Stress management strategy #5: Make time for fun and relaxation. Beyond a take-charge approach and a positive attitude, you can reduce stress in your life by nurturing yourself. If you regularly make time for fun and relaxation, you’ll be in a better place to handle life’s stressors when they inevitably come.

• Set aside relaxation time.
• Connect with others.
• Do something you enjoy every day.
• Keep your sense of humor.

Stress management strategy #6: Adopt a healthy lifestyle. You can increase your resistance to stress by strengthening your physical health.

• Exercise regularly.
• Eat a healthy diet.
• Reduce caffeine and sugar.
• Avoid alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs.
• Get enough sleep.

Read more...

The Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) has announced that 8,045 elementary teachers out of 43, 086 examinees (19%) 26, Accelerated Teacher Education Program (ATEP) graduates out of 146 examinees (18%) and 10, 792 secondary teachers out of out of 38, 339 examinees (28%) successfully passed the Licensure Examination for Teachers (LET) given by the Board for Professional Teachers on October 4, 2009 in 23 testing centers all over the Philippines.

Want to discover the teachers who passed? Just click the blackboard to know who they are.

Learning beyond the four walls of the classroom

by Dr. Lilian Leynes-Juadiong(Manila Bulletin)

Children cannot develop in an optimum manner unless their physical needs are met. That includes providing them with proper nutrition, clean air and a secure environment. Apart from these needs, the child must be surrounded by adults who are caring and available to help them meet these basic needs. Children also need a learning environment that will encourage them to explore and experience the world, which is the child's source of knowledge aside from the classroom. Every child is naturally inquisitive. When the child is curious, he investigates his own little world. You give him a ball, he squeezes, bounces and smells it. In the process of carefully studying the ball (investigation), he discovers answers to questions about the ball (final product - knowledge). For children, the learning process is more important than the final product.

Cultivating a curious attitude

• Consider the child's developmental level. Give them activites and materials that they can handle, thus avoiding frustration and strengthening their self-esteem.
• Avoid telling the children the best way to do things. Let them discover for themselves. While curiosity enhances the cognitive development of children, we should also consider their socio - emotional development manifested through helping, caring and sharing behaviors. All children have the ability to be affected deeply by other people's emotional state. Adults can teach children the value of helping, caring and sharing.
• Make your environment as nurturing as possible like taking care of pets and plants.
• Foster self-esteem. Children with high self-esteem can be caring for others because they are not pre-occupied with their own perceived inadequacies.
• Assist children in defining their own feelings, positive or negative, towards others. Children can't empathize with the emotions of others until they understand their own.
• Welcome children's help and show how much you appreciate even the smallest effort. They should help because they want to, not because they expect rewards.
• Let children know how much you value helping, caring and sharing and be a good role model to them. The most important role of parents is that of a behavior model. Children tend to mimic what adults do more often than what they say. The ways that you communicate, solve problems, relate to others coupled with an enriched learning environment form a powerful tool for how your children will learn and behave beyond the four walls of the classroom.
  

Teaching with the brain in mind: The Learning Styles approach

by Henry S. Tenedero (Manila Bulletin)

It was always been a dilemma for an educator to analyze the way he teaches his class, "Am I being as effective as I want to be a as a teacher?" Honestly, you don't have to ask yourself if you know the basic questions in a child's learning that is, "How do my students learn as exclusive and unique entities?" Perhaps after reading this article you would actually consider yourself not a teacher but a medium for your students' distinct learning style.

The research on learning styles explains why, in the same family, certain children perform well in school whereas their siblings do not. It demonstrates the differences in style among members of the same class, culture, community, profession, or socioeconomic group, but it also reveals the differences and similarities between groups. It shows how boys' styles differ from girls' and the differences between youngsters who learn to read easily and poorly. However, more important than the documentation of how conventional schooling responds to certain youngsters and inhibits the achievement of others, the research on learning styles provides clear directions for either how to teach individuals through their styles or how to teach them to teach themselves by capitalizing on their personal strengths.

Everybody has strengths, although parent's strengths tend to differ from each other's, from their children, and from their own parents'. Thus, mothers and fathers often learn differently from each other and from their children. However, a common parental practice is to insist that children study and do their homework as those adults did when they were young. That is not likely to be effective for at least some of the siblings because, in the same family, members usually learn in diametrically opposite ways.

UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENCE
The terms analytic/global, left/right, sequential/simultaneous, and inductive deductive have been used interchangeably and tend to parallel each other. Analytics learn more easily when information is presented step-by-step in a cumulative sequential pattern that builds toward a conceptual understanding.

Globals learn more easily when they either understand the concept first and they can concentrate on the details, or when they are introduced to the information with, preferably, a humorous story replete with examples and graphics. However, what is crucial to understanding brain functioning, is that both types reason, but by different strategies. Thus, whether youngsters are analytic or global, left or right, sequential or simultaneous, or inductive or deductive processors they are capable of mastering identical in formation or skills if they are taught through instructional methods or resources that complement their styles. Processing style appears to change; the majority of elementary school children are global. However, the older children get, and the longer they remain in school, the more analytic some become.

DIFFERENT STYLES, DIFFERENT NEEDS
What is fascinating is that analytic and global youngsters appear to have different environmental and physiological needs. Many analytics tend to prefer leaning in a quiet, well-illuminated, formal setting; they often have a strong emotional need to complete the tasks they are working on, and they rarely eat, drink, smoke, chew, or bite on objects while learning.

Conversely, globals appear to work with what teachers describe as distractors; they concentrate better with sound (music or background talking), soft lighting, an informal seating arrangement, and some form of intake. In addition, globals take frequent breaks while studying and often prefer to work on several tasks simultaneously. They begin something, stay with it for a short amount of time, stop, do something else, and eventually return to the original assignment.

Neither set of procedures is either better or worse than the other, they merely are different. Globals often prefer learning with their peers rather than either alone or with their teacher, and also often prefer to structure tasks in their own way; they tend to dislike imposed directives. What is interesting is that, with an IQ of 145 or higher, most gifted children are global. On the other hand most underachievers also are global. The difference between the high IQ and underachieving global students tend to be motivation and perceptual preferences.

It is understandable why the motivation levels of underachievers are lower than those of achievers, but what may separate the two groups is the biological development of their auditory, visual, tactual, and kinesthetic senses. Although we currently do not know how to intervene in their biological development, learning styles have been successful in teaching them through their existing perceptual preferences.

WHAT TEACHERS NEED TO KNOW
No doubt, teachers need to learn how to teach both analytically and globally. There are several easy-to-follow sources for learning how to do that. However, global students often require a different environment from the conventional classroom. They also appear to need more encouragement and short, varied tasks because of their lesser motivation and persistence levels.

Most children learn more easily when lessons are interesting to them, but globals require that new and difficult information be interesting , related to their lives, and permit active involvement. These are requirements for all youngsters; without doubt, they are necessary if globals are to master school requirements.

Back to school for students with ADHD

by EDITHA R. MARTELINO (Manila Bulletin)

In a week’s time, the longer periods of sleep and leisure time will be over. Students will have to go back to the regular grind of transporting from home to school (and back), doing assignments, submitting projects and reports, preparing for exams, etc. This transition can be difficult to all children, most specially to those with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD.

But if some students may seem excited with the opening of classes (new school items, classmates and teachers) children with ADHD may feel anxious about it most specially if their experiences in school have been frustrating.

PREPARING THE CHILD

The remaining days before school opens should be the best time for parents to gradually prepare their child for going back to school. The following tips could be helpful:

Adjust bed and wake up times. As early as now, help your child adjust to a new schedule by moving the "sleeping time" and "wake up" times to the "real time" they will be during the school year. Just make sure the new schedule will allow for enough sleep time at night. It is very important for children to get good quality sleep to help them in the learning process and for the child’s health in general.

Organize school supplies. Make your child enjoy and be a part of buying new school supplies and organizing his/her school bag. This will be a good time too to talk with your child about his/her feelings about school. Be a good listener.

Visit the school. Work out a visit in his/her school. This will be a good chance for the child to get acquainted with his new classroom and the school premises before school starts. Try to get an appointment with your child’s new teacher so he/she could meet your child and also show him/her around.

Create a study area. It doesn’t really have to be a big space – just a small desk or a small room would make for a nice study area. Just make sure this space will be your child’s permanently identified place for study. To make it more conducive to learning, prepare all necessary materials like pencils, pencil sharpener, paper, good light, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, ruler, etc so it will be easily accessible to your child when he/she needs it. Also list down the homework rules – what time it will begin, no television during homework time, no clutter on homework desk, etc and post it prominently in the study area.

Identify storage places. Designate special areas where your child could keep his/her school bag, lunch kit, school ID and other school paraphernalia. This will help him/her get into the habit of putting important school items in their designated areas when he/she comes home from school each day. It will also help him/her keep better track of important school items. Assist your child too in fixing his/her school bag each day.

THE TEACHER GETS READY TOO!

Although there are still no local statistics on ADHD, estimates run as high as having at least 3-5 percent of school-aged children’s population. Roughly, these amounts to at least one child in a classroom of 25 to 30 children will have ADHD.

Teachers are on the front line in dealing with and helping children with ADHD. It is therefore important for them to understand that the normal expectations from a "regular" student to sit still, stay in their seats, focus on their lessons, remember what they have been taught, submit school work on time, etc. will be more difficult for children with ADHD to perform.

It should also be emphasized that children with ADHD do not necessarily have "low IQs" , but on the contrary, they are very intelligent and creative. They may have no problem understanding the concepts being taught, but they may be unable to complete their work because of the difficulty they have staying on task. These children may also be emotionally immature and oftentimes, have low self-esteem.

Understandably, teachers, especially those with big class numbers, are often pressed for time and thus, do not have the ability to individually help each child. With both limited time and resources, teachers can truly be at a loss as to what they can do to help the child with ADHD. However, there are some simple and effective ways teachers can utilize to assist children with ADHD in their regular classroom:

Seat the child where distractions are minimized. The teacher can sit the child directly in front of him/her, along the aisle or beside a student who could easily focus and concentrate. Avoid sitting a child with ADHD by the doors, windows, and trashcans to minimize distractions.

Use a signal to help the child stay on task. Create a "special signal" between you and the child with ADHD. Signals could include tapping the child’s shoulder or your desk, just so the child would know that he/she is distracted and should get back on task. On the other hand, the child may also want to create a signal for you to know that they do not understand the lesson and may just be embarrassed to ask a question out loud. Agree on both signals and let the child know you are comfortable with it.

Find ways to praise the child. Look behind each accomplished task and recognize the effort. A tap on the shoulder or a small word as they leave the classroom can mean a great deal to a student with ADHD.

Center constructive criticism between compliments. If there is a need to let the student know about an off-task behavior in class, start with what they have done well first before offering constructive criticism. More importantly, let the student know that you appreciate their effort. This will make the child feel good about him/herself and be more open to listening to your comments in the future.

Find opportunities to allow hyperactive children to use their energy. Give them special tasks − get supplies from the office, distribute papers to the class, clean the board or fix the books on the shelf, etc. − to let them help you and at the same time channel their boundless energy. Giving them opportunities to move around will help them stay still during periods when sitting in their seat is a necessity. If possible, do not make the child finish work or complete tests during recess or lunch breaks. These hyperactive children need these breaks to use up their excess energy.

Find a "homework buddy." One of the major difficulties for students with ADHD is forgetting their homework and which items they need to bring home each day. A "homework buddy" can help the student with ADHD get the homeworks correctly written in his/her assignment notebook and also make sure that he/she brings home all books and papers needed.

STAY POSITIVE!

Another new school year can create anxieties not only to the child with ADHD but also to both parents and teachers. As parents, try your best to keep calm and positive yourself in order for your child to feel positive about school. School should also mean fun. The parents must remind your child to enjoy him/herself too!

Teachers on the other hand can start to think about the items listed above and work on more creative ways to reach out to the students with ADHD. Keep in mind that the child’s successful inclusion in your classroom is not only rewarding and fulfilling for the student but for you too!