8/18- Article Critiques

Vocabulary:

Focus group interview- group interview about a particular topic or problem

Reflection:

Yesterday in class, we shared the articles that we had reviewed. The article I chose to review used a focus group interview to collect data about feedback, grades and praise. It was really interesting to hear what kinds of articles people came up with, and what they decided to study.  It was also great to see how much we all have grown in the last month. We were all analyzing the research articles using vocabulary and knowledge that we would not have known at the beginning of the course. We were able to intellectually discuss these articles and how valid, or how reliable, they were. My favorite article was probably Angie’s, because the idea of using the different video games in class was such as interesting idea. she did a great job pointing out that the reliability of the study was not that great because there was no time limit or minimum that the students had to play each game.

8/17- Chapter 13

Vocabulary:

Hawthorne effect- Individuals’ realization that they are subjects in a study

Reflection:

This chapter was very interesting because of the essential parts of a discussion are all parts that I have my students incorporate into their conclusions, which is a strategy I got from my mentor last year. Of course, my students do not respond to the extent that a full research article expects. I want to help expose the students to actual research articles, and how to perform research in the real world. I really like how fully my mentor incorporated parts of actual research articles into the lab reports we have our students write.

8/16- Chapter 9 (241-243)

Vocabulary:

Single-subject design- Individual behavior recorded before and after an intervention

Reflection:

Single-subject designs were a new idea, because I have never studied people before. They seem very similar to a pretest-posttest design, except only with one individual, rather than several groups. I could see use of this research theory with special needs students. Since each student is unique, each student would need their own “study” to which they would be the subject. This would help each student figure out what exactly they need to work on and what behaviors they may need to self-regulate.

8/11-Chapter 11&12

Vocabulary:

Ethnography- In-depth involvement in a culture to describe naturally occuring behavior

Reflection:

When I first looked at qualitative research, I was a little skeptical. How can you have research where the research can be biased? The research is even sometimes fully dependent on that bias? In class, we brought up the book “Nickel and Dimed” which I read in one of my college english classes. In the book, the author incoporates herself into “the working poor” in order to discover how they lived. I guess this is one type of research, but when I think of journal articles, I think of an experiment being performed and results being collected and analyzed. It was very weird to realize that this was a type of research that is comparable to experimental research.

8/10- Chapter 10

Vocabulary:

Level of significance- probability of being wrong in rejecting the null hypothesis

Reflection:

In class today, we discussed statistical tests used in research studies. These tests determine whether the results the researchers find are significant or not. There were three types of tests: f-test, t-test and chi-squared test. I have used all of these types of tests before in my chemistry classes, chi-squared and t-tests much more than the f-test. It was interesting to think about the tests in terms of people, rather than in terms of measurements done in a lab. In both cases, the results beome simply numbers, in terms of the tests.

8/9- Chapter 9

Vocabulary:

Internal validity- the extent at which the independent variable, not the extraneous or the confounding variable, produced teh obsered effects.

Reflection:

Today in class we talked about threats to internal and external validity in our project. It was very interesting to think about teh way we can apply the vocabulary words an concepts we are learning about. It makes it much easier to understand the ideas rather than only reading about them. For our project, we thought a few threats to internal variability would be a fitness test going on in PE during the intervention and athletes getting hurt and unable to participate. A few threats to external validity would be the period during that day that the students had math,  how the teachers implemented the intervention, and their attitudes toward the intervention.

Values and Citizenship

This week we discussed values and citizenship in the classroom. Within each subject, we had great discussions about how to implement each in the classroom. In the values section, we mostly talked about caught versus taught. This is the idea that students need to “catch” some values, while they need to be taught other values. Different values require different methods of teaching towards the students. I really liked the examples of some of my classmates. Group work and collaboration can usually be caught values, especially when the teachers and some students model good behavior in these activities. Students can catch values from the teacher, or from other students. At first, I interpreted catch as in catch students in bad behavior, which would teach those values. I was not sure about this idea because I did not think that students would necessarily be able to learn values this way. After reading my peers’ posts, I realized that the idea was meant as catch from a role model, similar to how fashion trends are started by one person and then spread through a population. Values can be spread the same way. I think that this is a much more effective method for students to learn values because many students are much more highly influenced by their peers.

UbD Stage 3

This week, we completed stage 3 of the understanding by design structured unit. I laid out my unit as I would any other unit, listing activities by the day. Then I labeled them according to which letter of WHERETO each applied to (many applied to both). I constructed it this way because it shows the sequence of activities as well as how they apply to each of the ides presented in the WHERETO acronym.

W- Where are we going?

H- How will we hook and hold educator interest?

E- How will we Equip educators for expected performance?

R- How will we help educators Rethink and revise?

E- How will educators self-Evaluate and reflect on their learning?

T- How will we Tailor learning to varied needs, interests, and styles?

O- How will we Organize and sequence the learning?

I think my plan showed how the spiral design is incorporated into my unit, helping the students remember to always return to previous knowledge. I think this idea helps the students truly build on their own knowledge, rather than learning a bunch of disordered facts.

I liked reading others’ plans, especially to see the different ways they put them together. I saw many of my peers post individual ideas under each letter, rather than present a consecutive list of activities. Some presented a consecutive list of activities, but only listed those that pertained to each letter in order. I saw some great potential in others’ work, and saw how their layout made sense for the type of unit they were trying to accomplish. I think this activity helped show how different level teachers and different subject teachers can use a similar form of lesson planning to accomplish their goals. I also saw that different layouts can work for different goals, but all parts are still necessary to create a viable unit plan. I enjoyed this project, and it really helped ground my planning for my first unit as a paid teacher!!

Learner-Centered Approach

This week we talked about multiple intelligences. I thought it was interesting to hear everyone’s ideas about how to use multiple intelligences in the classroom. I liked that everyone thought that this was a given in the classroom, because students have such different ways of learning, and such different personalities. It is nice to see that new teachers embrace this idea, because so many older teachers teach only how they were taught, or how they learn best. Students are not all cut by the same cookie cutter. They all learn very differently and we have to account for that when we are teaching. It is very important to think about differentiation in our classrooms and using different teaching strategies to account for multiple intelligences id a great way to differentiate instruction. Every student learns differently and we cannot make every individual lesson applicable to all of those intelligences. However, we can vary lessons within a unit so that the each of the concepts can be presented in a way that all learning strategies can benefit.

Module 5 Reflection

This week, we went through planning stage 2 of the understanding by design unit. I thought this stage was very helpful when thinking about what we can do to assess what the students have learned in the unit. It was interesting to see all the different takes that everyone took on the broad questions, but we all ended up with very well put-together unit plans. I thought it was a good tactic to think about all the different ways you are assessing your students in what they know. I liked to see all of the different ideas people came up with for assessments to get ideas for what I might add to my unit plan.

I also appreciated the comments on my unit plan. I got some great ideas for how to fix it up, and change a few things so that my unit plan would flow better. I even figured out some things I would have done in the classroom that I did not specify in the unit plan. I think this method is a great way to plan, because you are thinking about the goals you want the students to accomplish by the end of the unit, and planning their path to get there gives them the best opportunity for success.