The Educational Context for My Driving Question My driving question is “What are the effects of Whole Brain Teaching on Student Engagement?”. I just returned from the 3 day Whole Brain Teaching National Conference in Las Vegas where the focus was answering the seven questions above. It was well worth the time and expense to attend and I am really excited to implement the strategies I learned. Whole Brain Teaching is an approach designed toward maximizing student engagement and focusing on on the way the brain learns to help students retain more information than the standard lecture model. Whole Brain Teaching is a highly interactive form of instruction that delivers information to students in short chunks using hand gestures to emphasize key information. Students then teach what they just learned to their partners using the same gestures.
One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced as a teacher is keeping students engaged. As we all know, when students aren’t engaged, they often choose either off task behaviors which affect their own learning, or worse, choose disruptive behaviors which affect everyone’s learning. That is one of the primary reasons that Whole Brain Teaching strategies were developed. Whole Brain Teaching is a system that includes strategies and methods for classroom management, character education, lesson design and delivery, writing, reading, critical thinking and ways to deal with “beloved rascals”.
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EDUC 701 - Technology in a 21st Century ClassroomThis week I watched the video titled, “Using Technology to Boost Confidence” found on the Teaching Channel. The video explored the use of technology to improve both communication skills as well as confidence. The teacher, Ms. Paraiso, uses Google Hangouts where her students meet online to collaborate and work in small groups. She found that her students enjoy seeing themselves on the computer screen and feel more confident working in smaller groups and more willing to participate because they see their peers doing so. The Hangouts are recorded so students can go back and watch current and former students responses as well as review content which leads to greater student confidence.
This past year, I used Google Hangouts as a forum for my students to connect and communicate with another 5th grade class in Indiana. The other teacher and I set up a virtual book club where both classes read the same book and took turns asking and answering questions from the book. We found that both classes really looked forward to the video calls and there was a greater sense of accountability among our students in taking time to craft thoughtful questions to ask their peers in the other class as well as taking their time to answer the questions with more attention to detail. EDUC 701 - Reflections of Chapters 4-6, The Flat World and Education (Linda Darling-Hammond)
I found it both interesting and discouraging reading about the issues in California. As a child, I remember hearing a lot about Proposition 13 and didn’t really understand the issue but it wasn’t long before I began to notice the effects of reduced funding. I also remember the class size reduction in the 90s and hearing stories of teachers trying to teach classes in a multi-use room, hallways, libraries, etc. - definitely not ideal conditions for either the students or the teacher. I think most unfortunate was the fact that districts were left scrambling at the last minute and having to hire unqualified teachers and students suffered as a result. I am glad the reading ended on a positive note with Chapter 6. It’s encouraging that other nations have been successful in education reform. It’s interesting to me that Korea takes the whole child into account in the curriculum development phases. It makes sense that considerations be made in furthering the development of the mind and body as well as a strong sense of self-identity as well as the focus on developing problem solving skills to use in daily life, using critical and creative thinking and the ability to express one’s own ideas and feelings and developing the skills and knowledge for engaging with a diverse world while respecting neighbors and other countries. IRB Review - EDUC 790 After reviewing the IRB document, several questions and insights came to mind. First of all, I really need to work on solidifying and improving my driving question so I can begin to think of the questions that will drive my research. Next, determining how to collect, analyze and make conclusions regarding the data will need exploration and support. I think that using student surveys for a more qualitative study are what I am leading toward with my current line of thinking. Utilizing Google Forms seems like a good starting point and then learning how to extract the data and put it into a more useable format will be one of my goals. I think once I finally solidify my driving question I will be able to develop the need to knows.
I woke up this morning and realized I forgot to mention one of the other major passions that I've considered which is the growth mindset. I believe that a positive growth mindset can be life changing and lead to amazing success. I'm interested in exploring strategies that support students developing and strengthening their mindsets so it will have a positive affect on student performance and confidence.
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April 2017
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