Think Like a Disciplinarian

I have been working VERY hard to recreate the black and white think like a disciplinarian (TLAD) pictures our GT trainer gave us.  I've been searching TpT for the perfect clip art and I finally have a set that I am very happy with.  I want to give a HUGE thank you to Ron Leishman at Digital Toonage for helping me!  He's amazing.  I sent him a message asking for some specific fields like entrepreneur, statistician, historian and physicist and he did an AMAZING job!  I highly recommend his work to anyone and he's super accommodating! These poster have two versions- one with a  small paragraph explaining the field and one without.  Print them on cardstock and laminate and you will be able to use them in so many different ways.  Teaching just math last year, I was not able to use them as much as I wanted to but each time we did a PBL, I was able to incorporate disciplinarian work. For example, in the fall when we did a project about designing a fall festival students learned about entrepreneurs, graphic designers, sociologists and environmentalists. Throughout the project, each of those disciplinarians had specific things that were relevant to them. The entrepreneur was concerned about choosing booths that made the most profit. The environmentalist was concerned about booths that adversely affected the environment. The graphic designer was concerned about making the best logo and brochure. And the sociologist was interested in setting up the festival so there was enough time and space for human interactions. Another project I did at the end of the year- the classroom makeover- also incorporated TLAD. I will describe that more in an additional post.
My ELA teammate used disciplinarians when reading novels with students. She had students thinking like a veterinarian while reading Because of Winn Dixie and thinking like an engineer when reading City of Ember. There are SO many uses for thinking like a disciplinarian!  Here are a few samples from my product. Here's a link to the product here

Scholarly Behaviors

I have a new job- I am the gifted specialist for a school in my district. I am beyond excited to begin this new journey. In preparation for my new job, I am taking another look at my Scholarly Behavior posters I made last year. I added some captions for each poster and finally uploaded them to TpT. You can find them here. These scholarly behaviors are based on the work of Dr. Sandra Kaplan. These are eleven different traits/skills that scholars should have or be able to do:

• Academic humility
• Intellectual risk-taking
• Academic Preparation
• Ponder Ideas
• Intellectual curiosity
• Save and organize ideas
• Exercise Intellect
• Goal-setting
• Perseverance in learning
• Use many and varied resources
• Multiple perspectives

Last year I used them in my 4th grade math classroom a lot. At the beginning of the year, I introduced the behaviors from the very beginning. The first day of school I asked my students to complete a sheet that looked like this:

I asked students to think about the math with which they already feel confident. I wanted them to write those concepts in the glass. Then around the side I asked student to write down things they want to learn this year in math- expressing their intellectual curiosity.

We were departmentalized this past year in 4th grade and it was important that student knew what materials they needed for each class. We created this organizer to help them the first week. In each class, students wrote down the subject and what materials were needed for that specific class.

Another way I introduced the behaviors was by graphing pre-test data and talking about the behavior of goal-setting.

I also used Save and Organize Ideas when we set up interactive notebooks.

Throughout the year we referred to these scholarly behaviors a lot in all subject areas. My language arts teammate would refer to these behaviors when discussing how characters acted in certain stories or how famous people reacted to events in their lives when reading biographies. In all our classrooms, these posters hung in prominent locations and students referred to them often. Here are some sample pictures from the product.

The set comes with four different choices- 2 font styles and then within both font styles there are posters with a caption and without a caption.