Inquiry #2

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Teacher effectiveness?

Inquiry #1 was concerned with logistical aspect of supporting teachers to make an environment where the teachers are less stretched with their time and energy among the students in the classroom.

Inquiry #2 is concerned with teacher practices in the classroom.

Could effective teaching practices and strategies compensate for the difficulties of giving every student enough attention and time for them to fully develop their potentials and grow as they spend time in the classroom?

Culturally Responsive Teaching/Differentiated Instructions?

There were two different approaches to teaching that I have looked at so far. Inquiry#2 will focus on the Culturally Responsive/Differentiated Instructions.

Lorri J. Santamaria of California State University, argues that although Differentiated Instruction is an important strategy to look into when it comes to teaching students and trying tackle the different needs of the students, the growing diversity in cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the students puts enormous challenge to such practice in the classroom.

Although both Differentiated Instructions (DI) and Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) are designed to support the group of students who have historically been unsuccessful in mainstream general education classroom for various reasons, the since, DI comes out from special education research and practices, when in practice, it significantly misdiagnosed, misidentified,  Culturally Diverse Learners and resulted in overrepresentation of these type of students in programs serving high-incidence disabilities.

The author believes that CRT is more important way of approaching education and also educating preservice teachers before they go into their actual practice. The reason is because CRT is a practice that requires not only the strive for academic achievement, but it also requires cultural competence and sociopolitical competence in teachers’ instructional practices. Therefore, the argument is that it covers more ground and truly encompasses multicultural education so that every student can achieve to their fullest in school.

Although this may sound like DI is not useful, DI is still a good instructional tool that can be used in the classroom, and it covers a lot of area in student needs and their level of abilities. However, it is a limited resource when we have a diverse group of students in our classroom, and we must be able to accommodate such environment as well.

The question that I asked after reading this article was if effectiveness will eliminate time consumption that I have for each students? I think it does and that is one part of my conclusion. However, I also think that the instructional practices in the article really shows that becoming a teacher is something that takes a long time; at least to become a better teacher than you were before.

The next inquiry blog post will be about the article Developments in classroom-based talk by Robyn M. Gillies.

Chris Park

Inquiry #1

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How can/should teachers allocate their time?

Sometimes in a group project you want to go around to everyone but you have limited time and how can you give full attention to each student as you meet them without getting distracted or missing anyone? From this inquiry I wanted to look at it from two different perspectives:

    • Logistical: how can we support teachers in practical ways so they have enough time and energy to give to students?
    • Teacher Practice: how can teachers become better teachers and effectively allocate their time to students?

In Charles M. Achilles’s “Students achieve more in smaller classes” it argues that there’s a strong correlation that younger students do get more out of small class sizes because they get a lot of attention and time with the teacher. As the students get older this correlation diminishes.

An interesting information that Achilles points out is that while small classes benefits all students in the classroom, the ones that most benefited from the small class size were minority students.

However, the article was quite short and does not specify a lot of measurements that they have used to see the difference between bigger classrooms and smaller classrooms. I find it quite unreliable or at least something that I can completely base my inquiry and build up on it. It is definitely something to appreciate but I don’t think this satisfies the question of whether it is really good to reduce the size of the classroom.

Another article about the side effects of reducing class sizes by Thomson and Cunningham talks about the problem that arises from classroom reduction.

    • Money becomes a problem: you need more teachers, bigger schools etc. Many schools will struggle with this.
    • Article was based in California
    • Teacher quality becomes a problem- you need more teachers, and if you don’t have a good pool… It becomes a challenge to make sure you have enough quality teachers to fulfil demand. David says teachers might actually improve with smaller class sizes. Chris says that people might be enticed to become teachers because they think sizes are smaller and the job might be easy therefore they might not be the best teachers.

So there are complication that follows because of reducing the size of class. But they both argue that smaller classrooms have benefits in students, but up until certain ages.

From the discussion with my inquiry group, there were many suggestions and ideas for me to look for in my further inquiry.

One of the suggestions was to look into different organizational strategies to find a way for teachers to  make other processes more efficient so that they have more time for students.

But also, I could look into mini-conferences with students to ensure they are getting equal one on one attention (once a week? Once a day? Twice a week? Not sure of the regularity, but something that can be structured into my practice)

 

 

Next inquiry might be on the teacher pedagogy and actual teacher practices in the classroom.

Week 11 – Literacy Education

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For this week, we specifically looked into levelling books, matching right books to the readers and also looking at guided reading and shared reading lessons in class.

This week was quite heavy with information.

In levelling books, there are three main factors that we had to look for: Format, language structure and the content in the books. Looking at these allows us to determine the complexity of the books and be able to level them accordingly.

Guided reading and shared readings were touched on a little bit in the earlier part of the course so it seemed a little redundant, but the differentiation and the information of how they work differently and their different uses in the classroom is something that is definitely helpful.

Week 10 – Literacy Education

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This week was covering on how we could invite authors to the classroom and the process of how we can do this in our practicum as well.

I think this could be a good experience for students when they are doing a specific book as a whole class, but not when they do not have a context. I think this will only be possible if they all have read a book from the same author.

This could be however, a good project to plan ahead while planning a unit. Thus, author visits has to be arranged ahead of time for the author to schedule their time and come to visit the school. It is something to consider for maybe upper grades as they start to read short novels or books from a specific author.

Capstone Final – PE

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After reviewing my blog posts for HOPE journal, I think I have some idea of which direction I want to take this with the new perspective about physical education.

First of all, I think I have gained an important perspective and attitude towards physical education throughout this particular course. I have never envisioned physical activity to be this in depth and broad as a curriculum and an education. I think what I really want to focus is the idea of how it feels to be healthy. I want to really push through to connecting the things that I have learned in this class to really focusing on helping students to feel healthy and that it feels good to be healthy.

I think I definitely found some of my strength in my role as a physical health educator. I found that I have good projection of my voice and is able to make instructions very simple. However, simple instruction will not have any impact when there is no purpose behind it. This is something that really struck me during my time in this course. I know how to be simple and be a good presence in the gym as an instructor, but I think I really lacked in the purpose in terms of thinking that physical education was just doing different games and activities that the students could enjoy.

This led me to think about the what I am learning in the IB cohort as well. It is hard to miss the emphasis on the purpose of learning. Every lesson should have a purpose because knowledge can be gained by searching for them on the internet. Why do we participate in certain physical activity? Why do we engage in certain topics? Because we want the students to feel the importance of these big ideas. The importance of physical activity and being healthy cannot be taught unless the students experience them for themselves. Studying different subjects comes from similar perspective. The importance of learning cannot be taught unless students feel that there is a need and that there is a interesting thing about it and we can explore more into it.

 

 

I think this leads to the idea of what makes a good physical health educator? I think as I have felt throughout the course, a good physical health educator is a person who can guide students to become engaged in activities that they might have never approached if they were to do it by themselves. Physical health literacy can only be achieved once the students start moving around. However, they have to be purposeful and meaningful, even though the students might not know it at the time. The importance is how I can get the students to be more engaged with all different activities that can promote healthy living.

If a person is physically or healthy literate, the person knows why health is really important in our lives. Moreover, they are people who can discern whether they are making healthy choices and are being physically active and choose to be more active than their current self if the discernment does not see a great support of good examples of physical activities.

Health and physical activity can become an issue where the world is becoming more comfortable, fast and in some ways, more lazy than the previous generation. I think this mindfulness really helps us to understand what is really important, not just in physical activities but in all other courses as well.

Thus ends my Hope Journal entries, and I really enjoyed my time being in this class which helped me a lot in gaining new perspective about this area.

End.

Week 9 – Literacy Education

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This week’s main content was on digital platforms to help teachers in their classroom and running records practice.

One of the digital platforms that the presenter came in and introduced to us was Freshgrade, which is a digital platform that allows the teacher and the students to use and create their digital portfolio as the semester progresses. This allows constant recording of data and the progress that the students have throughout the year and could be used as a good both formative and summative assessment tool.

The running record practice was quite difficult. It was a very thorough process of recording a student’s reading skills by carefully recording every details of mistakes, repeats and completion of sentences. I don’t know if it would come in handy during my practicum experiences, but it was good to know that this particular practice exists.

Week 9 PE

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This session was on individual physical activity, and the lesson was particularly focused on Yoga.

This was very relaxing and interesting lesson out of all the lessons we have done.

One comment that caught my attention in this particular lesson was about the religious background in Yoga. Although it is a individual physical activity, one of the lesson providers briefly raised a comment that some have found practicing Yoga to be somewhat religious in terms of things like meditation and being able to feel one’s mind and soul and other things that could trigger a sentiment of religious practice.

This really made me to think about some of the things that might arise from parents and families from various backgrounds. This does not have to do with Yoga, but sometimes, there might be students who are uncomfortable in certain situations where they might not feel like participating in certain activities because they are mindful of their own culture. Or maybe not the students but the parents might feel a little unsure about the things that students might be doing in physical education.

I think it goes back to the question of what are we trying to teach? Whether it is Yoga or other physical activity is, our purpose should be promoting physical activity and healthy life style. To achieve that goal, we can take variety of ways and methods that could fully help students to develop various different knowledge about their body and health.

I think if this message is clear to the students and to the families and parents, it might become easier to communicate with people from different backgrounds.

Overall, it was an interesting lesson.

End.

Week 8 – Literacy Education

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This week was our class after coming back from our 2 week practicum.

We mainly shared our experiences during our practicum placements.

During my 2 week practicum, I was able to lead a guided reading lesson for group of students who were in need of extra help. It was very difficult, but the lesson planning templates and practices that we have done in class helped out a lot with my lesson.

It was very helpful in organizing what I should be looking for in the lesson and how I should go about it with the students. Some of the key moments were when the students were able to make their own connections with the story during the guided reading time.

It was great to be back and listen to other people’s experiences during their practicum.

Week 7 – Literacy Education

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This weeks main discussion was around early childhood literacy.

We learned that young children learn about books, print and writing long before they can read and write or going to school. This particular phenomena was defined as emergent literacy. This particular idea tells us that children develop gradually and that it does not happen in a day. It all starts from scribble to small words and later into sentences.

There are many indicators of emergent literacy development. Some of them are children starting to pretend read and write, listening and also producing a fictional narratives on their own.

This made me think about how I should view the grades ones in my practicum classroom with their literacy works. Should I correct most of their work or should I be selective in my correction?

End.

Week 8 PE

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This week’s lesson was on Dance and also was looking at cultural relevance, performative and kinesthetic understanding.

The class was able to try a form of Greek traditional group dance during our time in the gym. I think this was a very good way to approach dancing to the students.

Many times, when I look back, dancing section of physical education was something not everyone enjoyed. However, this particular lesson had a cultural aspect as well as teamwork and a lot of movements that varied in complexity and intensity.

I think the dance lesson was really well planned out to accommodate an intensive physical activity that helped students to move while dancing and also brought in the aspect of inclusivity for all students where all students had to do the same thing to achieve certain goal, which was to make a big circle and dance in sync to the music.

I think dance lesson should be more active and also be accommodating for creativity for students to try new things and also be inclusive. Sometimes, some students do not like to dance and something simple like jumping and kicking could help them to engage in the activity without even realizing that it is a form of dance that the student is doing.

Overall, it was great to see how the dancing lesson was fun for everyone and got everyone to become engaged in the activity.

End.