791 - Making Sense of the Dervin Article The article, From the Mind’s Eye of the User: The Sense-Making Qualitative-Quantitative Methodology by Brenda Dervin definitely proved to be a challenging and dense read. We were asked to be metacognitive in the reading of it, focusing on our own processes as we tried to understand the content. I found myself feeling uncertain in the first couple of pages and soon frustrated. I found bits and pieces that seemed to make some sense but a few sentences later, I was again wondering what the author meant. After struggling with the content I will venture to guess that Dervin may be trying to teach concepts and principles and perhaps the gist of the article is about perspective. If I were to try to teach the content of this article to a high schooler, I think I would spend more time trying to understand it myself and find a colleague to discuss it with. I would search for graphics and perhaps video clips that may help students process the information and build understanding.
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Digital Citizenship - 702 In my 5th grade classroom, I aim to give my students as many opportunities to use technology as possible to engage and connect them in new ways. With these opportunities, comes a great deal of responsibility both on my part and my student’s part. My responsibility lies in teaching them to be safe and respectful digital citizens. Their responsibility lies in learning and exercising what it means to be a safe, respectful and responsible digital citizen. To accomplish this, I am planning to do the following.
Qualitative vs Quantitative Research MethodsI found it interesting learning about qualitative and quantitative research methods and it is easy now to see the value of both. I find it easier to collect and analyze quantitative data but I can see how the qualitative data will could lead to a deeper understanding of the quantitative data when you take into account the individual responses that are collected.
For my research project, The Effects of Whole Brain Teaching on Student Engagement and Achievement, I primarily focused on quantitative methods. I collected data to measure the amount of time on task for student engagement and compared it to student success rates on Reading Inventory quizzes. Once I had a complete set of data points, I used the Pearson correlation coefficient calculator to determine the value of r as well as the strength of my data. During Phase 2 of my research, I do plan to collect qualitative data and will look forward to hopefully gaining a deeper understanding of the quantitative data collected. Metacognition: The Ability to Think About Your Thoughts With the Aim of Improving Learning In my reading of articles about brain based education, I kept coming across articles about metacognition. I just returned from the AVID Summer Institute and teaching metacognition was one of the main focuses of my strand, “The Art of Inquiry”.
Teaching students to “drive their brains” with the goal of developing the ability to think about their thoughts with the aim of improving learning will have benefits for them both in and out of the classroom. Metacognition can be learned when it’s explicitly taught and practiced across content areas and social contexts. Teachers can model how they use higher order thinking strategies aloud as well as recognizing when they have made a mistake and use it as a teachable moment to show that everyone makes mistakes and that mistakes are best seen as opportunities to learn and improve. Students who are excited about steering toward learning success are more likely to become independent thinkers who are more aware of their independent progress along their learning path. This leads to students being more conscious and reflective about their learning. Synthesizing Paradigm Shifts - EDU 701 This week with the focus on creativity and learning, I am beginning to recognize how much synthesizing I have ahead to put these ideas together in a meaningful way in which I can hold on to it in a way that sticks as Howard Gardner explained in regards to the Five Minds of the Future.
From Laura Master’s talk about how the brain learns, I take away that neuroscience is how learning truly happens. As educators, we need to provide opportunities for students to process info rather than delivering it to them in hopes that they will remember it. Project Based Learning is a very effective way to accomplish this along with 21st century skills focusing on concepts, not coverage. I loved her slide that read, “Anything is possible, possibilities are endless.” It is critical that we prepare our students to go out into the world with brains structured to process information. From John Seely Brown’s talk about the New Culture of Learning I take away the importance of curiosity and how in today’s world, as he stated, “you’re screwed” if you don’t have curiosity because we live in a world that is in constant flux. I found it very interesting that one of the greatest predictors of a successful college student is the ability to join or form study groups. The example of the cohort of surfers and their willingness to fail repeatedly in order to learn something new was inspiring as was their approach using digital media and working together for the success of all. From Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future talk, it became clear that no longer can one stop learning and rest on their laurels. These days one must be an expert in their field otherwise they will work for an expert. The two minds I found most interesting were the synthesizing mind and the creative mind. Taking new information and putting it together with other information in a way that makes sense and in a way that can be held on to is critical. For the creative mind, one must have irreverence along with a tough, challenging temperament and be willing to try and try again, in other words, have a restless, challenging spirit. From Sir Ken Robinson’s humorous talk, I take away intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinct. I loved the example of the student who had difficulty sitting still in class and her physician observed her movement to music and suggested a school for dancers where she was thrilled to find a whole room filled with learners just like her with other learners who needed to move to think. The idea of celebrating a child’s whole being and recognizing the gift of imagination is so important. In Dan Pink’s talk about the Puzzle of Motivation he discusses the power of incentives, both extrinsic and intrinsic. In several studies it was found that rewarding people to do better work almost always has the opposite effect because it dulls thinking and blocks creativity. There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business, and I think education, does. Rewards tend to narrow the focus of real problems where the solution is often found on the periphery. The higher the incentive, the worse the performance became. Too many organizations are making decisions based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined and based on folklore. Instead, focusing on developing and recognizing intrinsic motivation is key to success. Intrinsic motivation is developed when we like something, we find it interesting and it matters to us. EDUC 701 As I finished reading The Flat World and Education (Darling-Hammond) I was left feeling both discouraged by the state of education and our country falling behind others but also encouraged that educational reform and change is definitely possible as proven by other countries.
Of the 5 policy prescriptions above and outlined in the closing chapter, I feel like I can personally make the most difference in regards to #5. I feel fortunate to work at a school where all teachers are willing to roll up their sleeves, learn and implement new ideas and strategies and work together in PLCs, professional development days, and in grade span teams to share and seek suggestions for improvement. I believe we are all better educators as a result of the collaboration we make time for and our students definitely benefit from it. Educator, Liz McDonald’s experience with district pacing guides really resonated with me. I believe that most educators make a good faith effort to implement the district’s curriculum and comply with mandated reforms while at the same time implementing additional resources to strengthen instruction. The pacing guides present continual challenges for teachers who need to make the decision to stay on pace for sake of scheduled assessments with the risk of losing students along the way. Like McDonald, when I have opted to stay on the prescribed pace, there has consistently been a rise in unwanted student behaviors as a result. In an ideal world, teachers would be provided with curriculum guidance and support for the best sequence of topics or central ideas to be introduced but would allow for students to spend more time studying central ideas with inquiry based methods and opportunities to apply, analyze and integrate new learning in real world applications. This is something I can make sure I do in my own classroom which is where I feel I have the most opportunity to make positive changes. 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”. 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.
Trying to choose a focus for my research and learning in this program has been challenging for me for several reasons. First, I am interested and passionate about many things related to education and the success of my students. I have a difficult time making decisions and especially ones as seemingly important as this one which will become the primary focus for the next year and a half, and most likely, well beyond that.
At the forefront of my thinking is the desire and need to improve student engagement and motivation. When students are motivated and engaged in their learning, that's where true growth occurs and in a collaborative classroom environment, everyone benefits. Some of the ideas I've considered over the past few weeks include ways to develop and improve the project based learning units I've created or will implement, using Whole Brain Teaching strategies to improve student engagement and maintain classroom management, improving my knowledge and implementation of AVID strategies into the PBL units and daily lessons, improving my knowledge of technology and implementing a larger variety of opportunities for my students to connect and share their thinking, becoming familiar with the Next Gen Science Standards and find ways to teach through a variety of subjects throughout the day, and finally, using a rich variety of children's literature to encourage a love of reading for all readers while building connections with the content and each other through sharing of individual thinking and connections to the literature and one another, and with an added goal of improving writing skills during that process. I am currently leaning toward choosing to focus on using children's literature to improve student engagement, connections with self and others, and improving student writing in response to the literature. First attempt at a driving question: How can a variety of rich literature be used to engage and encourage readers to make and share individual thinking and deep connections through writing? I know this is in need of quite a bit of work but it's a start... #EDUC790 #firstattemptataguidingquestion |
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April 2017
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