This blog post contributes to the achievement of FEAP(s) goal (a) Quality of Instruction: 3.i. Instructional Delivery and Facilitation. The effective educator consistently utilizes a deep and comprehensive knowledge of the subject taught to: Support, encourage, and provide immediate and specific feedback to students to promote student achievement.
Our reading for Seminar this week, The Reflective Educators Guide to Classroom Research (Dana, Yendol-Hoppey, 2009), provided an explanation of how passion leads to inquiry. We were asked to select one passion from the 8 listed in the book. I chose Passion 3: Focus on Developing Content Knowledge. I had several reasons for choosing content knowledge as a passion. The first is that, I feel like I already pursued passion 1 last semester with my inquiry into an individual learner; I didn't want to repeat research. Secondly. I've noticed in my CT's classrooms, that when students are interested in a topic, they tend to have an abundance of really good questions. I feel like not having the answers sometimes, and telling them " Well I don't really know", can discourage their interests. I want to keep them engaged in the conversation by being as knowledgeable as possible in the areas I'm teaching. I do believe that they should have to research on their own, and use other resources, however when they're engaged and excited about something, sometimes you just need to run with it. The subjects, I believe, that should get the most focus are Science and Social Studies. These are subjects that I've noticed produce the most questioning out of students, and that seem to be the most interesting subjects for the students. After choosing my passion at Seminar, I reported to my partnership school for the last hour or so of the day and then to planning. During our planning session, we were joined by a Math resource leader from the district to assist in planning our next unit. During our time together he stressed how important it is to know your content inside and out, so that you can understand the many different ways that a student produces an answer. If you aren't a master of the content, then you may not be able to asses a student's understanding of a concept by seeing their work. You have to be able to recognize and process all the many different entry points that students may have in a problem; Entry points were also discussed in our Math class this week. Now even though this planing was for Math and not Science or Social Studies, which are my main focus, it reaffirmed the fact that content knowledge is essential in instruction, especially in the diverse classrooms that we are in. We have so many different types of learners to accommodate and knowing the material is crucial. I aspire to be a lifelong learner. I always want to find new information and master new things, to keep my brain fresh even in my elderly years. So not only would an inquiry of this sort benefit the students, but me as well. By achieving a goal in increasing content knowledge, it will also satisfy the FEAP requirement of FEAP (a).3.i, Support, encourage and provide immediate and specific feedback to students to promote student achievement.
This blog post contributes to the achievement of FEAP(s) goal (a) Quality of Instruction: 3.i. Instructional Delivery and Facilitation. The effective educator consistently utilizes a deep and comprehensive knowledge of the subject taught to: Support, encourage, and provide immediate and specific feedback to students to promote student achievement.
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This weeks course work has pretty much overlapped on the topic of classroom discourse, and how to help students construct meaning through conversation and higher order thinking. This is such a change from when I was in school and our experience was mostly watching the teacher lecture, memorizing the information, and applying our memorized techniques to a test. My retention of some of this knowledge has not been so good, probably because I wasn't encouraged to know WHY we learned these things, only that we HAD to learn them. My personal flaw in all of this is that I find myself trying to deliver instruction instead of facilitating conversation. It is hard for me to let the students struggle. This may derive from my experiences in motherhood, where I always want to make things as easy as possible for my kids to achieve. I'm starting to learn that it is more valuable for them to struggle, and learn to construct their own knowledge, than it is to hand them everything they need. In our Math text this week, Elementary and Middle School Mathematics: Teaching Developmentally (Van De Walle, Karp, Bay-Williams, 2013), we explored how to create an appropriate discourse, relating to mathematics, for the purpose of encouraging students to construct their own knowledge. In chapter three, it explained how telling the students too much can actually discourage students from thinking any further. This is the last thing we want to do. In my CT's classroom, I actually experienced this first hand. I was working with two of my ESE students on the Social Studies LDC, and during our time together, was unable to get the students to have a productive conversation that would lead to them answering one of the questions on the worksheet. I believe that the lack of valuable information in their conversations was due to my ability to produce an appropriate question. When I asked the question, as it was written on the worksheet, they discussed where the exact answer was in the text. When I asked them what lead them to believe that this was the answer to the question, they said, because it says right there in the text. I was hoping for a more in depth analysis of why master tradesworkers were important to the Colonial market economy, what I got was a direct quote from the text which did not required any higher order thinking, just the ability to find a specific answer in a text. From this I learned that I am responsible for asking more appropriate questions, and maybe even adjust the order in which we do things, to get students to really think about what they've read and how they will use that information. By asking them a question, directly from the worksheet, after they read the text, I had basically handed them the answer to the question, but not given them tools and strategies to think about the reading as a whole. To better execute this lesson, or any other future lesson, I could start by having them read and code a text, then asking a question for the sole purpose of initiating conversation on the topic. Then after hearing them discuss, provide them with the question that is required from the worksheet. I wanted them to learn the material, but not just by getting the right answer. We retain things by discussing and retelling to one another, not just by copying an answer directly from a reading. I know when I read, I highlight, I take notes, I research further items that I don't understand, and I do all this so that I can actually process and retain information. I could have shared some of my experience with them and encouraged them to try to use a strategy while reading, to help them really process what they were reading. In this instance, I actually failed them as an instructor, even though they got the right answer. However, I have learned a valuable lesson, and will be able to correct my mistakes for next time. Next time, before attempting to deliver a lesson, I will think about not only WHAT I want them to learn, but HOW I want them to learn it. I promise to let them struggle so that they can make their own meaningful connections, no matter how hard it is for me to sit back and let the struggle go on. Perfecting my ability to do these things is a strong professional goal that I hope to achieve in the near future.
This blog post contributes to satisfying FEAP(s) (b) 5.a. Designs purposeful professional goals to strengthen the effectiveness of instruction based on students' needs. Although it is not a new year, only a new semester, I am starting over in a new class. I was moved from 3rd grade to 5th this semester. Since I'm new in this classroom, I felt that it would be helpful to refer back to one of our texts from last semester; The First Six Weeks of School by Paula Denton and Roxann Kriete. I read back through the first 2 chapters and was able to make some meaningful connections to a concept mentioned in the book and some of the things I experienced in my first week back in the classroom. The idea that stood out to me is that "knowing the children we teach is as important as knowing the content we teach"(Denton & Kriete 2013). In this new classroom I am a stranger and must build relationships with these students before I can teach them anything. Also in the book, one of the goals for the first week of school is that "students and teachers will be able to name some interests and out of school activities or experiences of members of the class"(Denton & Kriete 2013). In order to meet this goal and get to know my students, we had a simple greeting my first day back so that I could learn a little about the students. My CT and I met before the students came to class, and we discussed how this greeting would go, and she said to me," I show them pictures of Boo Boo." Boo boo is her cat. she explained to me that an important part of having a relationship with your classroom is to let them know that you are a person. They need to know that you have a life, outside of school, and that you're not just some robot programmed to come in, teach, and leave without making any personal connections. She said that it's important to let them into your life just a little, so that they can relate to you as a human being, and not just as an authority figure. During this conversation is when the wheels started turning. Now bare with me, because I'm not a very linear person and my thoughts bounce around a little, but they DO all connect. During our Social Studies class earlier that morning, we were given an assignment that requires us to make an animoto film about ourselves using a primary source. So basically, using pictures to show a timeline of our life that tells about who we are. This animoto website is a perfect resource for a new teacher to use to introduce themselves. Now unfortunately, I did not have time to make an animoto between Social Studies class and internship, so I simply showed the students some photos of my family, and talked about some of the things I like to do for fun, and then we went around the room and let them do the same. Now that I know about this resource, and the importance of using it to build relationships with my students, I'm going to do my absolute best to give a good representation of WHO I really am, so that my students can get to know me. After the assignment is complete, I intend on going back to my 5th grade class and showing them the video, and then maybe allowing them to critique it. They can tell me what they like, don't like, wish there was more of, and I can mold this video source into something that I can use in the first six weeks of school in my own classroom someday. Hooray for awesome resources!
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