In this module, I learned that education is moving towards the active student, rather than the passive student. The passive student “sits in his or her seat [and] listens to what the teacher has to say, who follows the prescribed curriculum, who turns in the assignments, takes the exams, receives the grade, and moves on to the next level”(Ellis). This classroom would have mostly direct instruction, and little constructivism or inquiry. In classrooms with active students, there is more student-student questioning and hands-on work in which the students are working together to figure something out. I learned that this idea of the active student increases the amount of knowledge the student gains by discovery, rather than by receiving it from someone else. Students internalize knowledge gained by discovery, and the idea of the active student puts the pressure on the student to learn, rather than the teacher to force the information into the student.
Tag Archive: Class structure
Small group work is great for teaching between students. Students can explain concepts to each other and often the students who did not understand to begin with get a different perspective and the content mzakes more sense to them. The students who understood the content before the group work can internalize the material by teaching it to other students. However, there is always the danger of a couple students doing all the work, while the others just slide through without learning anything, or doing any work. Without self evaluation, there is no sure way to tell which students are actually learning and working, especially when the project contains work outside of class. I think small group work is valuable because the students can learn how to work with different types of students, which will be valuable to their futures
When we think about ways to use podcasts in our classrooms, many teachers immediately jump to the idea that students can still listen to lectures even if they are absent. Pair that with a power point, the students can easily make up missed classes. This is a beneficial technique, especially when teachers use power points as visuals rather than drawing on the white board (there would be no way for students to see that material first hand). However, there are other ways of using podcasts in the classroom.
I thought of a few other ways podcasts can be used, aside from recording our own lectures. The first idea I have is to have students listen to podcasts from other teachers. This way they can gain a new perspective on the material. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, students do not understand our way of explaining the concepts. If we have our students listen to a way someone else explains the concept, the students may understand more readily. New viewpoints can also give a fresh perspective, to help students apply the knowledge they understand to alternate situations. Podcasts are available at sites such as, http://www.learnoutloud.com/contents/LearnOutLoud.com-Podcasts/9/21, http://education.podcast.com/, and http://epnweb.org/index.php?openpod=18#18.
Another way to use podcasts in the classroom is to have students create their own for specific topics. Often, the most effective way to learn is to teach the material to someone else. Through podcasts, students can teach others about the material, and then refer back their recorded podcasts for revision. By the end of the year, there will be a full curriculum of podcasts, and they may be used to help give the following year of classes a new perspective. I think podcasts would be very beneficial when used in education because it gives students a new way to teach other students about a specific concept as well as giving them a different teaching strategy to learn through, rather than reading out of a textbook for a different perspective on the content.
Of course, the biggest issue with podcasts would be getting the students access to them. As the reading discussed, one easy way is to create a blog at wordpress.com and install PodPress plugin (Ovadia 2008). This will allow you to link podcasts to your blog, and allow students to subscribe to the blog so that they can receive notifications when a new podcast is added. I do not think that students will have a rough time with this as they live immersed in technology every day. The biggest problem would probably be gaining access to technology to record lectures. Either a teacher would have to re-do the lectures by the computer with a microphone or find some way of recording effectively in the classroom. Having students record podcasts may be difficult as well, because all students (or most students) would need to have access to a computer with a microphone.
References:
Ovadia, Micah. (2007-2008). PoducateMe. Retrieved from http://www.poducateme.com/.
36-37 students is a lot of students!!! My biology classes have this many, but the faculty are working to decrease this number. My chemistry classes are much smaller, only 31 or 32 students. But it is still more kids than I’ve ever worked with before. The school is on the wealthier side, and the students seem very privileged (my mentors confirmed this). There seem to be lots of resources available, including computers at lab stations, tvs and vcrs in every classroom, faculty offices (double or triple) and lots of lab supplies, including materials for microscopy, dissection and gel electrophoresis. Also, each room I work in has a smart board!! I like how one of the classrooms I’m in is arranged. It has one section of the room with lab stations, and one section with desks for lecture and group work. One of the classrooms has lab stations around the outside and desks on the inside. This layout seems crowded to me, and makes the people in the back of the room seem very far away from what is happening up front. (apparent when doing demos!) I think the rooms have the potential to be both inviting and uninviting, but the elements are things I don’t feel I can do much about.
I think my biggest success last week was learning to juggle both my chemistry classes and biology classes. I finally learned all my chemistry students’ names and I am comfortable in front of both classes. In chemistry, I got to the point where I was familiar enough with what I was doing that I can now walk around and call on people, rather than being stuck to my lesson plan and seating chart. Having already accomplished this in my biology classes, I am now getting to know them better, trying to figure out what they are interested in and how I can relate it to class.
I think the biggest issues I am having in both classes are with specific students. In chemistry, I have a student, who was suspended for three days last week. During the first week, it was apparent that he was a very privileged child who was used to having things handed to him. When he returned from his suspension, he kept asking about past work in class, and tried to get my co-teacher (mentor) and me to teach the previous material again. He would not come after school, and he would continuously disrupt class. We would play team teacher here by having one of us take care of the student on the side while the other kept teaching. We suggested several times he come after school, but he never showed up. We had a quiz today, so we will see how he did. Maybe if he does poorly it will show him that he does need help. I have another student in biology who also does not like to do work. He is a special needs child and has a IEP. We have been working together to figure how to help him do his work. The problem is that he has anxiety issues so he has a hard time taking responsibility for his actions, such as forgetting to do his homework. He makes up excuses for every inappropriate behavior and is constantly asking to leave class. I am working with both my mentor teacher and the student’s special needs teacher to help him do what he needs to do to pass my class. At this point, I am initialing his planner with the night’s homework and taking points off for tardiness (tardy three times = help clean up after school). I am trying to praise both students for things I see them do well, such as the first student’s performance in the football game and the second student coming to class on time on Friday.
Wow! That was way more exhausting than I expected (I really needed the whole three-day weekend to recooperate). I learned a lot of things very quickly. First off, it is really important to have comfortable shoes. I was kicking myself at the end of both wednesday and thursday because my feet hurt so much. Second, knowing the kids names really helps with management issues. Third, it really helps student to hear expectations before every activity. I found that in the classes that I gave expectations before the activity began, the students behaved a lot better. I also found that students start talking if they are not doing work, or listening to me or another student. I found that if I start talking about the activity while I’m passing out papers, and if I talk about student’s presentations as groups are switching, there is less chatter, and more learning going on.
I also learned alot about different teaching strategies. It is good that my mentors have two different strategies, because I can see how they both work, and figure out what sorts of things work for me. With one of my mentors, I can watch how he handles the situation and then think about how I would do it. It is really great to see how he handles it, and then I reflect on how I would do it. I usually come up with something different because I do not think his methods would work for me, but I can see how they work for him.
I thought the lesson went well, other than the fact that I had nothing for students who finished early. I just didn’t realize that one group would get done so much faster than the others. It might have had something to do with the fact that we were classifying shoes and one group was all girls and one group was all guys. I think girls think about shoes much more than guys on a daily basis. One thing I could have done was to ask them to do another classification system, and try to use as many different categories as possible. During the lesson, I thought I might also make-up crossword puzzles for each unit, just so students have something to work on if they finish early in any activity. But I think asking them to create another system would be more applicable to the lesson. Some other changes I might make would be to ask students to further explain why they used the type of organization they did. For example, if they used a hierarchy system, why did they use that, as opposed to various groups on the same level? I may not tell them to start with two groups, so that I do not give away the idea of using a hierarchy system.
One of the misconceptions students have in classification is they do not readily use a hierarchy system without being asked to do so. If I do not ask them, or hint to them, to use a hierarchy system, I will be able to judge how much the students already know or guess about classification, which was my goal in this lesson. I really used the whole lesson as a formative assessment, though I could have done a better job explaining that idea in the beginning.
In addition, I thought I could have added more student contribution in the final discussion. I could have asked if any of the students had heard of the Linnaeus classification system, and if they could explain it. I could have even asked students for the taxonomy levels, because they probably would be able to get most of them (at least kingdom and species) without my help. Then we could have gone more in depth with an example relating the systems they devised to a system in place, like a dog versus a cat, and the flow of their taxonomy levels. Even in that discussion, students could be asked to contribute also. They would probably know the species of dog is canine and cat is feline. They may also know that both belong to the animal kingdom, and may know that mammal is one of the levels. One student may even be smart and check their textbook (the levels for a dog are in the book I will be using at Skyline).
I think I did fairly well on the RTOP criteria. The only section I thought was severely lacking was the preconceptions and prior knowledge. I think this part was a problem because I planned a journal entry about why they thought scientists classified organisms, and what they thought those systems looked like, and there was not time for this to be included in the lesson I presented. I thought the activity covered this portion as well, but not as well as I would have liked. I gave the students a hint about using a hierarchy system, which I think I will not do next time. I also need to have more explicit criteria for the presentations so I can hear students’ thinking on why they used the type of system they did. Maybe I could even say something like, “think about how scientists classify animals while you are classifying your shoes” or something of that sort at the beginning of the activity.
I engaged the students as members of a learning community by having them create a classification system by working together and discussing their ideas on why they wanted to structure their system in a specific way. Student exploration exceeded formal presentation, because they were creating the system and then discussing their thinking, rather than having me lecture on how systems are structured. I thought the lesson encouraged students to seek alternative modes of investigation because they were using ideas from biology to create a system using their shoes, rather than animals. We could have done many other things to look at classification, but this way, they needed to look outside the box, and understand classification by performing it in a different manner. This section may have been a little weak because they really only had one mode of investigation open to them. I thought there was a high proportion of student to student talk. I tried not to help the students until they really needed it, at the end of the lesson, for example, when the boys were taking too long to decide what categories to use.
All in all, I thought this lesson was a very good learning experience for me. I did manage to do the one thing I have been working on in the classroom. I gave out all the directions and papers before splitting them into groups, and did not talk over the students as they were getting into groups. This was something I did every time I presented a lesson, so I was happy that I finally fixed this issue.
Yay for RTOP!! It was a good reminder to go through this again, and it reminded me how diverse lessons need to be, and how it is not possible to apply every concept we are learning about teaching to every lesson. It also reminded me that I need to work on developing lessons that are student directed, or based on student questions. I never think about this idea when developing lessons, and I should have a small portion of the lessons be bassed on student ideas and questions.
In addition, we watched a video of a teacher teaching a lesson. It made me think about how flexible teachers have to be. We need to be able to incorporate student ideas at times, and make sure to answer any questions they might have, in a reasonable amount of time. We also need to be flexible enough to deviate from the lesson we planned fro the day in order to address student questions, misconceptions or students not understanding or misunderstanding concepts. And finally, the video reminded me how much praise is valued in the classroom. If students are not encouraged or praised for their answers, contributions and/or work, they are going to be less inclined to voice their own ideas. I will remember to praise students as much as I can, so they do not feel discouraged in their educational career.
This week, we had to present 10 minutes of a prepared lesson. I presented a warm-up, which included a journal entry and pair discussions on the characteristics of life. I thought the lesson went well, granted that the class had no preparation for the topic, while the students would have had a day of preparation. I still need to work on talking over students; I need to give them all the directions and then let them go. If I forget, I need to remember to call their attention again before I start talking. I thought I got their attention well, but it was a verbal command, so I need to come up with a silent one. I think it would be good to have both under my belt, especially with the amount of group activity I plan to use in my classroom. I thought my que questions to the students worked well, and that they encouraged the students to look at the ideas in a different way, so they could see other opinions that would have been able to use if we had continued on to the debate portion of the lesson. Overall, I think it went really well and I can’t wait to use this lesson in the classroom.
I think I bring many different important qualities to the classroom. I am very enthusiastic and passionate when I teach. I try to show my students this through my attitude, and hope that my enthusiasm is transferred onto them. If the students can be excited to come to my class every day, they will be more willing to learn, and probably learn more about any subject discussed because they could be inspired to do some research on their own and learn more that is not discussed in class. In addition, I have a very structured approach to preparing lessons, and hopefully, that structure will affect my students. They can learn how to structure their notes and assignments, which will help them immensely in college. My planning will be modeled in the classroom when it comes to large projects. I will be able to help students plan how to make sure their projects are finished on time, without huge amounts of anxiety the night before it’s due.
