Week 10 and 11

Week 10

Getting back to the pace of things was hard than I thought it would be. This week I’ve been more tired than I’ve ever been since I’ve started teaching. This lack of energy on my part unfortunately seemed to carry over into my students’ motivation and excitement about class. I imagine its hard to be excited about Quarter Two when your teacher is yawning while talking about it.

Nevertheless—the students were happy to be back (I think) and I was happy to have them back. Though I realized that I had to quickly get them and myself back into the mood of things. The relationships that we had built up from last quarter did carry over, but the classroom expectations seemed to have become lax. Because of this I had to address some behaviors that hadn’t been present in the last quarter.

With this I moved to quickly to go over existing class procedures, as well as to introduce some new ones. These new procedures attempt an interweaving remediation with the general progress by reviewing and grading homework daily in class. With this we go over the problems with each other and try to address together misunderstanding.

GOOD: I reacted to the student’s needs in terms of enacting new procedures.

BAD: I’ve got to do better at changing the way I do class in order to keep students’ interest. This might mean more games, group work, and real life connections.

Week 11

Because of the changes to the school schedule there has been some pressure to keep up and make sure students get to the breadth of material as opposed to delving into the material. This has been compounded more so with the pressure to keep up with the test which will test them on all the material. My reaction to this at first was to take a larger role in classes pulling student through the material. This was not that well received. Students getting pulled through math—that’s not the best class culture.

So noticing this I immediately took to having a smaller role in class. Making sure I made the most detailed and interpretable guided notes possible—I took to giving the student groups copies of the notes and letting them have at it. After a timed group work session I would recap asking clarification questions as a check for understanding and a way to correct. After this they would be let loose on their homework.

Also I took to adding remediation games where students are motivated support their group mates’ understanding of the material. I’ve also been able to use these games to weave in spiraled objectives’ remediation.

GOOD: I was able to boost student involvement with the new structure of class. The remediation games seem to be going well. The new homework

BAD: I have to work on making sure that everyone is fully understanding the material.

"Cultural Capital: A Theory of Structural Inequalities"

Rueda, R., Monzó, L. D. and Arzubiaga, A. (2003, September 16). Academic instrumental knowledge: Deconstructing cultural capital theory for strategic intervention approaches. Current Issues in Education [On-line], 6(14). Available:http://cie.ed.asu.edu/volume6/number14/

"Cultural Capital: A Theory of Structural Inequalities"

The chapter discusses the forms and roles of capital in society--that being "the wealth out of which more wealth comes." Cultural capital is distinguished as cultural wells of knowledge connected to cultural background. The biggest claim that is made, citing Bourdieu, is that in differentiation schools not only contribute to but also exacerbate inequalities in social capital. This is performed by grouping by ability, especially in early education. Students that have been fortunate enough to be prepared by their family to meet the expectations of teachers and schools are set often set on a more advanced academic track. This differentiation, perceived to those differentiators to be based on skill, sets groups apart and contribute inequality in opportunities, resources, and expectations. Those "advanced" students are then have more of a chance to become successful in their lives and in turn impart the lessons from their experiences onto their children allowing the "advanced" to be further advanced.

The usage of "structural inequalities" in the subtitle is very appropriate to the cyclical consequences. This tragedy of differentiation is something that I can attest to from my own experience. Students that have strong guided support from home usually perform higher and in turn are rewarded. The struggle for sensible teaching then lies in providing an equal playing field for all students. Does the answer lie in some greater role of teachers mimicking that of parents? I'm not sure--but I am sure that the current system of differentiation seems to lack foresight.

"Teaching Mathematics and English to English Language Learners Simultaneously"

David Slavit & Gisela Ernst-Slavit. "Teaching Mathematics and English to English Language Learners Simultaneously," Middle School Journal. November 2007.

The article takes a look at the challenge of ELL student in content area classes, particularly math, and the possible responses that teachers could implement. ELL students are described as doing twice the work--learning a new language while learning new content. The article contends that in order to communicate understanding of content to these students there needs to be an emphasis placed on vocabulary as being part of the lessons to build conceptual connections. Furthermore, there needs to be an effort to engage the cultural understanding of the student to have them draw on their knowledge and systems to develop understanding of new content. An example is given with different means of counting using body parts among students from different cultural backgrounds.

The authors do a good job of taking in the perspective of the student. This is seen in the sense of productive accommodation to the student in an effort to build upon their existing understandings. Connecting content to language structures and cultural experiences is a mode of accommodation that all teachers much possess dealing with all students--not just ELL.

Moore, Chapter 5: Using Direct Teaching Methods

The chapter contrasts and develops teaching strategies, converging on some best practices that are hypothesized to show increased/better student retention and engagement. There is a beginning with an examination of the “traditional” style of direct teaching, where the goal is to communicate material to students via direct exposure either by lecture or textbook. The benefit of this method lies in its efficiency in communicating material quickly and directly to students. The next step in teaching methods is that of exposition teaching. The core of exposition teaching is explanation. Models and other visual ties that illustrate material support the most effect modes of explanation. Questioning and waiting are two more facets that the chapter considers as being able to expand student understanding of material. These facets seem to have the function of pushing and pulling students into a better understanding of the material. The article converges the “best” practices to end on exposition teaching with interaction to be the best method.

While using sound logic, the work lacks on the support of itself in the way of case studies. Furthermore it operates in the ideal of a relatively homogeneous class of excited learners. And while I will not say that my classes are not full of excited learners, it they are far from homogeneous. It discusses the idea of Direct Teaching as being effective for students that are slow to understand, but I have see that modeling has been the best way for them, with my higher level students requiring little of me at all. This observation could be correlated to the article’s discussion of varied learners needing more or less of the teacher—I struggle to translate that into a succinct and single “one pill cure” teaching style. Perhaps further demonstration-illustration of the article’s concluding claim could convince me. Like Moore says, straight lectures can be “boring.”

Moore, Chapter 6: Using: Indirect Teaching Methods

This chapter examines indirect teaching methods that place more responsibility on students to drive discovery-based learning. This is characterized as by a less than active teacher hand in directing student learning. The teacher’s new role is that of constructing activities that anticipate student needs and possible pitfalls while working with self-directed learning. Student discussion is shown to be the motor behind this type of learning, with student discussion being broken into either that of the “entire class”/large group or with small groups—which the chapter favors as it promotes more student-to-student interaction.

The chapter continues to discuss Heuristic Models in which discovery based questions are used to promote higher thinking. This relies on the idea that the process allows for multileveled problem solving. In this as well the teacher’s role is limited to that of facilitating—this requires, as the chapter states, great deals freedom within the classroom culture.

The ideas of indirect teaching are very interesting and I feel have merit in their attempt to promote student honed learning. The discovery base of indirect learning allows students to take charge and responsibility of their learning. This allows inquiry that provides much more sustainable learning as there is not an absorbing of knowledge just being thrown at the students, but rather them reasoning into the knowledge—in my case being mathematicians as opposed to calculators. However there are weak points in these methods as well—that especially being the need to balance the role of the teacher as the facilitator and the introducer of the new material. My teaching style, which I have to admit has show me some great results lately, has become an attempt to straddle both indirect and direct teaching methods. I have seen this to allow students develop their own understanding while they model themselves on the teacher as an exemplar of understanding. Furthermore there is are the real issues of minority student dominance (even in small groups) or the fact that not all students can fully understand new concepts just by talking about them and in fact might benefit more from more direct strategies. This and the last chapter I feel are pointing out the benefits and weaknesses of both to come to some sort of conclusion mixing the both in the end.

Week 9

Week 9 was a challenge for both my students and myself. The end of the quarter one is neigh—the end of quarter one material is far from neigh. Unit 3 stood between us and a week of rested assurance of having mastered many of the 7^th grade math standards.

Decimal operations, scientific notation, and the order of operations—a big and mismatched three of 7^th grade math chuck full of possible pitfalls in understanding—some of which we would face. But I held fast to my guided notes method—having proven itself successful in pulling up scores during Unit 2—and charged ahead. Each day a rotating INM-“We Do”-“You Do” cycle that I tried to scaffold would drill through adding-subtracting-multiplying-dividing decimals and more.

Playing on the weirdness of the week before—students would read aloud as poets with English accents declaring the I can’s of the day. When the assessment finally came around there were initially mixed results. Our first round of decimal quizzes would show some confusion over the steps for multiplying and dividing decimals—a facet which I would work to later remediate with the Order of Operations. Then the Unit 3 assessment came just as quickly as we moved through our work—as I worked to force myself to stay true to my calendar.

Then there was the need to prepare students for their Quarter One Assessment—which would take place early the next week. I came up with the idea to have the students write study guides for 6^th graders at local elementary schools about the material that we covered in Quarter One, as well as writing them a letter letting them know how cool 7^th grade math was. They ate it up—with the agreement that this project would be the last piece of homework they would have for the rest of the semester.

Good: I was able to keep my kids focused whilst moving through lots of material at a very quick pace. The kookiness factor of my classroom has shown to support a classroom culture that the students fell comfortable in—which in turn has secured their learning something…

Bad: But maybe they are too comfortable. Hearing my name has become an item of loathing as students call out as they raise their hand. (At least they raise their hand?) I give my class a B.