Knowledge retention. How do you know that the students have retained anything that has been taught?  I have been doing several reviews of the same questions in randomized order and the students seem to be retaining the info.

I did a quiz which could be considered a summative assessment as I was doing an assessment of learning.  The one class of 24 students had an average score of 77% which seemed like a reasonable indication that retention was occurring.  For the 2 outliers that failed I am giving the option to provide evidence of learning by providing a hand-in assignment.  I believe that this a reasonable method of allowing the students to prove that they understand the knowledge and can apply it.  It may be considered a modification as the students who did not do well may have a learning challenge that is not being addressed during the assessment of learning process.

This allowed me to keep the level of rigor high enough to see if the top outliers were challenged enough and that the median student is retaining enough knowledge.

Everything with a beginners mind

I was at aikido on Saturday and sensei mentioned the message that her teacher gave her. Everything with a beginners mind. She explained that even a student with a black belt needs to remember what it was like to train with a beginners mind.  The beginners mind is pure and does not have any preconceptions or apprehension.

My high school students are all new to everything that I am teaching and even the senior students are still beginners learning new skills.

Recently my planning has been from my perspective of what do I need to teach them. But I think I will incorporate more of their beginning perspective into the planning as well.  This means that the lessons will be less complex to accommodate the beginner mind.

Week 1 at RE Mountain Secondary seemed like I resumed where I left off from my short practicum.  Students were busy working away on their projects. I did notice that during the 6 weeks since I last saw the students the progress of their projects appeared to be slower than I anticipated.  During my planning stages the rule of thumb was to consider the time it takes me to complete a project and for students, it would take 4x times longer to complete.  With the pace that I have witnessed, I may have to increase that time.

Productivity is an issue that I will have to contend with as I find that there are some students that work very slowly or choose not to work at all.  In my opinion. some of the reasons that a student may choose to not work are lack of interest, lack of knowledge, fear, laziness, attitude.

Lack of interest may be addressed by changing projects, offering choices.

Lack of knowledge may be addressed by better instructions, clearer instructions, smaller chunks of activity.

Other behavioural issues may be individually addressed but may have deeper underlying issues.

TPI – completed at the end of the course. The results are very similar except for a drop in Apprenticeship and an increase in Nurturing.

Interestingly, my TPI at the beginning of the year had even levels of beliefs, intentions, and actions.  The second time around I completed the survey questions with my practicum as my frame of reference.  In the apprenticeship section I have a high action and low belief because during my practicum I was asked to teach automotive.  I spoke with my SA and mentioned that I didn’t feel comfortable teaching auto as I felt that I didn’t have a strong background in automotive theory and application.  He encouraged me to continue to work and push through the discomfort.  During my teaching I would strive for mastery in the topics that I was teaching.  Although the topic that I taught relative to the total amount of automotive theory was miniscule, I could at least feel comfortable that the topic that I taught was accurate and that I didn’t need to be an automotive expert on all things.

Systematic Inquiry

Presentation #2 I did my presentation today on Automotive relays.  I wanted to experiment with two new teaching methodologies.  The first was google Q&A – this is a feature in Google slides that allows students to type in a URL created by the google slide and allow the students to ask questions through the web window and have the ability to change the discussion depending on the student questions.  There was an anonymous feature which allowed the students to ask any questions without being singled out as asking “stupid questions”.  The downside was that the students also had the ability to be disruptive in the digital space.

The second experiment was to try a deeper learning strategy using the KWL chart.  I introduced guiding questions on each column:

Where have you seen relays in your car? – What Knowledge do I possess.

What kind of logic application can you think of that you would like to use relays? -What would I Like to learn.

In your own words describe a relay and what it is used for – What did I learn.

Overall it went well and as I noticed during my short practicum, the students were partially engaged but to get 100% engagement will require building the expectations of the students that I am requesting 100% involvement 100% of the time.

Week 2 practicum

As an IB school the IB students do not have the luxury of selecting electives as their schedule fills up with university related courses.  This leaves the students who are not interested in academics or who are poor at academics to make up the type of students that are in the ADST group.

Several of these students have IEPs and I did not notice very many SEAs supporting them in the shops.  This leaves me in a situation where I am either spending a disproportionate time working with these kids or neglecting them while I am helping other kids.  I will have to balance both as I would like to try to reach some of them and I realize that I won’t be able to reach them all.

I spoke with a colleague who has been teaching shop for several years and he mentioned that managing the students is 95% relationship.  My philosophy for teaching will be to build that relationship and gain their trust and respect and their motivation to complete projects will be based on our mutual goals rather than making it my goal to have them complete projects. I have experienced this in the workplace as it is more difficult to motivate staff who are de-motivated and uninterested in their work.  The staff who were supported and were given all the necessary tools and resources worked well on their own. My philosophy has always been you manage resources and lead people.  Applying this philosophy to the classroom means that instead of classroom management I am going to focus on classroom leadership.

I’m looking forward to returning in the new year for the long practicum so that I can build stronger relationships with the students – for the students that I remembered their names, I know that they have acknowledged that I am one of their teachers when they address me as Mr. A or Mr. Aliwalas.

First week of practicum

It was a good week at RE Mountain.  I have been assigned 2 classes of junior drafting, one class of senior auto, one class of power-tech, and one class of junior woodworking.

I feel completely out of my element teaching auto but I am going to give it a try.  Drafting feels pretty good since I am quite comfortable with Autocad.  Woodshop has been very interesting trying to manage safety with the sheer number of kids to have to watch.  The school is very ethnically diverse and overall seems to be a typical high school. It doesn’t seem to be any different than any other high school that I have visited so far.

I’m still volunteering at HD Stafford Middle School with their robotics club on Thursday afternoons so I have had to leave quickly at the end of the day on Thursday to make it to the after school club.  One day I had a TOC in place of my SA and he asked me to lead the class and he would provide back up.  In the end, it worked out because he didn’t have knowledge on Autocad so he just provided good advice on how to conduct a classroom.  For example, he only let one boy and one girl go to the bathroom at a time and the students had to wait for one to come back before they could leave.

We met with the principal and the question was asked “what does he expect from the teacher candidates” one of his responses for teaching to go deep instead of just surface. That the most important thing to do is provide learning for the students.  I did some research and found a few techniques: concept maps, anticipation guides, KWL , discrepant events.

I would like to see more of these strategies taught at UBC in methodology class as there is a decent body of knowledge:

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2012). Improving Adolescent Literacy: Content Area Strategies at Work. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Hoover, T. F. (2010, october). The “Magic” String: Differentiating observation and inference using a discrepant event. Science and Children, 32-35.

Kozen, A. A., Murray, R. K., & Windell, I. (2006, March). Increasing All Students’ Chance to Achieve: Using and Adapting Anticipataion Guides With Middle School Learners. Intervention in School and Clinic, 41(4), 195-200.

Woelders, A. (2007, July/August). “It Makes You Think More When You Watch Things”: Scaffolding for Historical Inquiry Using Film in the Middle School Classroom. The Social Studies, 145-152.

Irony – i·ro·ny

Definition: a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.

Students expressed that in some situations they were not able to express their thoughts and opinions. They made comments of being attacked for their ideas because of their appearance and not given the opportunity to provide input.  The irony is that at that moment they became members of the oppressed – they were oppressed and claim inequity, the very same ideals that the people who were oppressing them were fighting for.

Which brings me to empathy:

Empathy – em·pa·thy

Definition: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

I shared that one tool to experience empathy is to reflect on why the other person/group is not letting you speak. Why does that person feel so strongly and what happened to them to feel that way?  Once the question is not about self but about the other you begin to experience empathy.

See that wasn’t so hard? But reflection is a difficult skill to master.  It’s like holding water in your hands – its there but its hard to hold on to and eventually it slips away.

Self-reflection – self-re·flec·tion

Definition: meditation or serious thought about one’s character, actions, and motives.

Self-awareness is conscious knowledge of one’s character, actions, and motives. In a way, I’m not surprised that the students did not understand why they were not being heard or felt that they were muzzled, because of the lack of self-awareness.  Self-awareness, similar to self-reflection is a difficult skill requiring the individual the ability to analyze what they are feeling at any given moment in time.  But it is much easier said than done. Many times I would feel uncomfortable about a situation but not understand why.  Peeling the onion layers apart reveals the feelings and emotions that underly the discomfort and let me get closer to what it is that affected me.

Self-reflection includes inquiring about what feelings are felt, what thoughts were had, and what behaviours were observed.  This is the basis of cognitive behaviour theory: Thoughts – what we think affects how we act and feel, Feel – what we feel affects what we think and do, Behaviour – what we do affects how we think and feel.  Since this is all connected, as we inquire and self-reflect we can influence our own behaviour into new behaviours.

I delivered my Pecha Kucha today.  20 images X 20 seconds each.

3D Filament Presentation

It felt natural. 20 seconds seemed like an eternity but flew by like it was a fraction of a second. I think I would use this method to introduce a topic.  The fewer words the better to give the students something to look at and make their own connections.

I should try to develop my artistic abilities.  This way I could create my own graphic illustrations without having to scour the internet for images that don’t belong to me.