EDU 6526 Meta-Reflection

E1 – Exemplify professionally- informed, growth-centered practice.

For this course reflection, I chose program standard E1 to speak to as it addresses the idea of reflection and looking back at something I have learned or practiced and use it to grow as an educator. In this case, EDU 6526 has discussed many instruction tools including: induction, using advance and graphic organizers, cooperative education and direct instruction. Each tool has strengths and weaknesses but when combined, can provide students with a well rounded, challenging and effective method of instruction.

While some of the tools presented may not be highly effective in a secondary math course, the challenge to incorporate them will be enjoyable. I can pull from less traditional methods and create a fun and exploratory environment for my students. Specifically, I want to incorporate induction prior to certain lessons. Allowing students to self discover leads to more comprehensive learning and ultimately longer information retention. Combining induction with advance organizers will create a pre-lesson activity that students can work on before a brief utilization of direct instruction. A self or group discovery task allows students to almost teach themselves so that the direct instruction serves more as a clarifying tool. After this instruction, a small group or individual activity can solidify concepts through repeated practice and feedback. The graphic organizer below would serve as a comprehensive unit reflection (Olyano. 2013). After the four lessons presented, students will be able to see how all math concepts are inherently related.

In math courses, teachers may feel that direct instruction through lectures is the only way to teach but this is not the case and ideally, I aim to minimize direct instruction and maximize self discovery so as to not lull my students to sleep.

Olyano, A. (2013, March 11). Ideas on using advanced organizers in mathematics. Retrieved March 6, 2015, from https://awstenolyanobporfolio.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/ideas-on-using-advanced-organizers-in-mathematics/

Scheuerman, Richard. Edu 6526 Syllabus. Winter 2015.

Encouraging Student Self-Esteem

H5- Honor student potential for roles in the greater society.

Fostering student self-esteem is a key way to encourage students to succeed and become worthwhile members of society later in their lives. Citizens with high self-esteem levels are more likely to contribute to their societies by getting involved in various projects and feeling as though their time and efforts are worthwhile.

As Joyce et al. notes that, “if we model activity and reaching out toward the world, we encourage active states”, which can be seen in our students (2004). Essentially, we as educators need to lead by example and honor our own self-esteem in order to model self-esteem for the students.

Additionally, creating an environment where progress and achievements can be made will help to boost student self-esteem. Students need to feel cared for and encouraged to succeed in order to allow their self-esteem to grow. In order to do this, educators must “[relate] to [students] in a person-to-person manner” (Rogers). Listening to student’s opinions and taking them into consideration can make a student feel as though their opinions and thoughts are meaningful and valued. Even if it’s in a small way that we honor their opinions and ideas, students will feel appreciated. From here, they will be more willing to participate during class and contribute ideas for future improvements.

One way I plan to include my student’s opinions and ideas is to establish a list of class rules. Each class period will make their own set with little guidance from me. By providing input and discussing how they want their classroom to function, the students will feel valued. At various times throughout the year, we will revisit the classroom rules and determine if they need to be adjusted. This way, students who previously did not participate now have the opportunity to do so. The class will also see how rules and regulations can change fluidly and do not have to remain static, as is the case with the greater society. Laws are relatively static but as we have all seen, they are never set in stone.

Joyce, B., Weil, M., Calhoun, E. (2004). Models of Teaching. New Jersey: Pearson.

Rogers, C. (n.d.). Teacher Effects Research on Student Self-Concept. Retrieved February 28, 2015, from https://mountainlightschool.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/sis-session-8-reading-rogers.pdf

Incorporating Various Learning Styles

H2 – Honor student access to content material.

The “Multiple Intelligence” concept draws a direct connection to the H2 learning standard “honor student access to content material”. While it may not have much to do with physical resources and access in the form of classroom time, access to content material and learning styles go hand in hand.

Owen Edwards discusses seven different intelligences ranging from Visual-Spatial to musical to linguistic and how each student is able to learn through all of the intelligences but often, one type comes more naturally (2009). From this information, an educator could take a “one size fits all” method of instruction and accept that some students will learn at a faster pace and others might struggle immensely. Similarly, the teacher could plan for a few of the intelligences; maybe those that are more common in their specific classroom and cater to a wider range of students. Allowing children to learn in a way that is most comfortable will produce students with a passion for learning and a built up confidence as they witness their success in school.

The Birmingham Grid for Learning is a valuable tool for both students and educators to explore in order to figure out what their personal learning style is. Teachers may not have time to explore each student’s unique style balance, but providing the survey and grid to students early in the school year will allow for self-reflection by both the students and teacher. As a math educator, I would like to take the time to explore my student’s learning styles and show them my own learning style. This allows students to relate to me and allows me to survey what the best approach to teaching will be for each class. To the left is the Birmingham Grid for Learning with my own learning style results that I would have my students complete.

Incorporating all learning styles in a math classroom will prove to be challenging but highly possible and will benefit each child who will be able to relate and learn the material via their own strengths. Lectures and providing notes for students to see will appease visual-spatial learners, hands on geometry projects will favor kinesthetic learners and having students work together and explore and explain concepts in groups targets those who favor linguistic learning. I found it interesting that as humans, we all learn by incorporating each intelligence and just as Edwards noted in his interview with Howard Gardner, we do favor one or two processes over the others (2009).

Birmingham Grid for Learning – Multiple Intelligences (Secondary). (n.d.). Retrieved February 23, 2015, from http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks3/ict/multiple_int/index.htm

Edwards, O. (2009). An Interview with Howard Gardner, Father of Multiple Intelligence. Retrieved February 23, 2015, from https://mountainlightschool.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/sis-session-7-reading-gardner.pdf

Family Involvement in Moral Education

H4 – Honor family/community involvement in the learning process.

Values and citizenship are ideas that are often “caught not taught”. This means that through observation, practice and reinforcement of good behavior, students are formed into successful members of society. This is where families and the community come into play. These entities are the examples that students need in order to be able to mimic and learn good practices from. Kirk’s article addresses just that by mentioning that “the recovery of virtue in America depends in great part upon the reinvigoration of family” (1987). The venn diagram below shows how all pieces of a child’s life, family, school and community, contribute to the student’s success. Family involvement in student’s education takes different forms in different families. Some parents can help their child with their homework, no matter the subject, while other families cannot. Regardless of the level of academic support families can provide, they can provide morally sound examples of how values and citizenship are just as important in being successful in school. Contributions include academic as well as moral support and modeling.

An effective way to be sure that families are involved in this endeavor of improving the values and behaviors of our students is to address the subject directly. Parents and family members need to be informed that they, as much as the educator, is responsible for setting a good example. During a “back to school night” or parent meeting at the beginning of the school year, I will discuss the yearly academic goals and go over the content we will be learning. I will tell parents about homework requirements, assessments and other classroom activities their students will do. In addition to this information though, I will talk about classroom expectations and how they can help their students be successful in their behavior. Respect, communication, politeness and strong effort will be the focus. As parents, they can uphold these values at home so that students are constantly surrounded by morally sound people. With the outside influence and ability to observe good values in all aspects of their life, students will be molded into sound citizens and classroom management will be more successful.

Kirk, R. (1987). Can Virtue Be Taught? The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written in the Sky. Retrieved from https://mountainlightschool.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/sis-session-6-reading-kirk1.pdf

Community in the Classroom

H3- Honor the classroom/school community as a milieu for learning

Reading about cooperative learning drew a stark connection to the H3 standard of fostering a “classroom/school community as a milieu for learning”. This standard addresses being able to promote knowledge and skills for working with others. This is the epitome of cooperative learning. Dean et al. discusses five elements to the cooperative learning model. Those that stood out to me most were “individual and group accountability” as well as “interpersonal and small-group skills” (p. 36). These ideas feed off of each other and they coincide with teaching students how to be effective and productive members of a group.

The first step in creating an effective cooperative learning environment is creating groups within the classroom. With regard to group size, the smaller the better. This will harness accountability from each member to contribute ideas and information for the good of the group. Groups larger than five give way to the bystander effect or the idea that individuals will depend on others to do work or take action and instead, will sit back and not take part in the activity.

While tutoring in a middle school math class this year, I observed a classroom layout that successfully promoted both cooperative and individual learning. The classroom arrangement is below.

The teacher gives a quick lecture about the day’s topic and hands out a work sheet with examples that start off straightforward and progress to be more challenging. Students are able to work informally with their classmates on learning the information. When they have questions, they discuss with their peers before consulting either the teacher or myself. This fosters successful people skills, teaches the students to clearly communicate what they are struggling with and teaches them that it is ok to ask their peers clarifying questions. The arrangement also allows for social interaction for the students. They are able to talk and socialize so long as they remain on task. They also get to work with different students when the teacher changes their seats. The students end up interacting with most of the class and they learn how to work with different personalities and types of people.

I would plan on implementing a similar seating arrangement in my own classroom in order to promote cooperative learning. Not only is the classroom a place to learn specific information, in my case, mathematics, but as an educator I would also like to promote a community within my classroom. Once community is established, students can take more risks with their education and feel comfortable doing so.

Dean, Ceri, et. al. Classroom Instruction that Works. ASCD: 2012.

Advance Organizers to Preview New Material

P1 – Practice intentional inquiry and planning for instruction.

Advance Organizers provide an opportunity for intentional inquiry and planning for instruction while giving students a preview of what is going to come (Dean et al. p. 62). They allow educators to lie out specific learning goals and give an overview of the upcoming unit. Advance organizers serve as a road map and offer inclusion of students in the learning process by allowing them to see ahead of time what they are supposed to learn. In order to be the most effective, advance organizers should be specific to the upcoming unit and present clear expectations rather than trying to be mysterious about learning goals. I think the best way to be specific and clear with advance organizers is to pull information straight from state or national learning requirements. This will give students insight to the learning requirements provided from teacher supervisors. Information of this nature may harness student “buy-in” as if they were being given secret access to certain information.

Along with specific learning goals and concise language to present these goals, an example of the skill would be a strong use of an advance organizer. Students like to see why what they are learning is important and applicable to the world around them and advance organizers can provide this opportunity. Specifically, in a higher-level math class, many students do not see the applicability in some of the material. Presenting real world uses for the math can show students that their 9th grade geometry class may in fact be useful later in life.

Below is the Common Core State Standard for high school geometry regarding Modeling with Geometry. Providing this specific language to students and a real-world example would be a sufficient advance organizer. With regard to using volume in real life situations, I could walk my students through an example comparing two objects, a cup and a pole, and finding their geometric similarities. After coming up with a few ideas, we can conclude that both objects are cylinders. From there I can provide how to find certain properties of cylinders such as volume and surface area and use these to solve a problem about how much coffee could fit in various size cups.

 

Common Core State Standards: Mathematics. (2010, January 1). Retrieved February 2, 2015, from https://www.k12.wa.us/CoreStandards/Mathematics/pubdocs/CCSSI_MathStandards.pdf

Dean, Ceri, et. al. Classroom Instruction that Works. ASCD: 2012.

 

Concept Attainment Model and Memorization

P2. Practice differentiated instruction.

Bruner’s article “Some Elements of Discovery” corresponds with Joyce et al.’s discussion about concept attainment. Both present an alternate approach to presenting a topic, giving teachers a plethora of tools for differentiated instruction. This methodology also gives students the power to discover and lead their own education. Joyce et al.’s Conception Attainment Model provides an exploratory plan for discovering various topics. Joyce et al. also discusses tools for memorization for knowledge retention. While the two methods seem different, they both aim for higher thinking from students.

The Concept Attainment Model and Memorization, if used effectively, can both foster more complex thinking from the student. The Concept Attainment Model uses problem solving to discover new topics using a “think outside the box” approach where students will see examples of a concept and explore, question and infer what the all of the examples have in common. From here, the teacher will help the students correctly define the concept. This approach supports students in thinking on their own and making their own educational discoveries. Such is the case with discovering math concepts such as area or perimeter of different shapes. Memorization differs from the Concept Attainment Model in that it deals with storing ideas or things in our brain for an extended period of time. While rote learning helps in memorization through repetition, there are other, more mentally stimulating ways to memorize things. Using linking ideas and words to draw connections from new ideas to the student’s previously known knowledge. By establishing these relationships, students create associations with new information, which then helps them recall that information at a later time. Multiplication can be learned in both rote and conceptual ways. Repetition of times tables will work but using the concept of addition to show how multiplication makes adding easier, may stick with students longer and help them understand the concept better.

Both methods are useful for students to expand their thinking skills and analyze various situations. The Concept Attainment Model (Figure 1) works better with discovering an idea or topic while Memorization (Figure 2) and all of its methods help with specific knowledge learning and retention.

Figure 1                                                          Figure 2

      

Joyce, B., Weil, M., Calhoun, E. (2004). Models of Teaching. New Jersey: Pearson.

Bruner, J. S. (1966). Some elements of discovery. In L. S. Shulman & E. R. Keislar (Eds.), Learning by discovery. Retrieved from:https://mountainlightschool.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/sis-session-3-reading-bruner.pdf

Charlotte Mason’s Model vs WA State EALRs

H5- Honor student potential for roles in the greater society.

While reading through Macauley’s paper on Charlotte Mason’s model and educational philosophy, the ideas presented appeared to be applicable to all educational subjects. Similarly, the state of Washington has four foundational learning goals to accompany its  education standards, which also cover all areas of instruction. The parallels between the two demonstrate that Mason’s model supports the state’s current learning requirements (EALRs) and fostering these learning goals will create more efficient and competent members of society.

Mason mentions that “helping kids become critical, creative, curious thinkers” is highly important when it comes to child education and teaching solely for high test scores is a waste of time (Macauley, 2004). This corresponds with the Washington state learning goal, which states that students should be able to “think analytically, logically, and creatively” (OSPI EALRs). While the clear similarity is to allow students to think freely and creatively, it is also important that students can analyze and criticize what they are learning as this is a critical skill to possess later in life. In math for example, creative thinking would take the form of exploring different shapes and having the students, on their own, discover patterns between formulas for each shape’s properties. From here, students can extrapolate their findings into broader concepts. This type of activity allows students to think freely and analytically with teacher assistance rather than the teacher dumping the information in lecture form. When students are allowed to uncover information on their own, they are more inspired to keep learning and investigating new topics and information (Macauley, 2004). Students will develop a sense of ownership over their education and when ownership is present, learning becomes more personal and valuable to students. Fostering independent thinking will improve a student’s confidence and encourage them to keep thinking in this manner. This kind of instruction will challenge students to think in ways they are not used to in order to stretch their capabilities and prepare them for future problem solving endeavors.

Overall, Macauley’s take on Mason’s model clearly supports Washington’s goals regarding how to educate students. Creating a sense of freedom and responsibility for one’s education can inspire students to love learning. Rather than feeding information to students, allowing for self-discovery and creativity will provide a more comprehensive and effective education.

Macauley, S. (2004). When Children Love to Learn: A Practical Application of Charlotte Mason’s Philosophy for Today.

Washington State K-12 Learning Standards. (n.d.). Retrieved January 11, 2015, from https://www.k12.wa.us/CurriculumInstruct/learningstandards.aspx