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.
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.
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