Author: justinsiray

I personally think our focus should be less on the case against grades but the case for grades with meaning. I think everyone has had the experience where they had a paper or an assignment or test returned to them and it had a big fat “B” or “C” on the front. And you thought to yourself “Well what the heck, this paper was totally ‘A’ material.” You flip through the pages and see various grammatical corrections and the odd sentence rearrangement here or there and a couple notes saying “I love your point here, but it seems vague to me”. More or less it’s a bunch of nonsense and leaves you wondering why you got the grade you got. Meanwhile the person next to you who wrote on the same topic writes a masterpiece and gets a gold star and set of balloon stickers floating around their “A” they received making you feel like a nobody. Here’s the thing, I believe certain students deserve better grades then others, I mean if one kid does all their homework and assignments as asked and the other does nothing, yeah I’m going to mark them accordingly. I think the discrepancy lies in two important factors: student progress/effort and expectations. When we are going to assess a student we better darn well tell them what we expect, If i’m looking for a lab report I’m going to say I want the following criteria, with the following expectations and a model example for them to work from. It’s about setting a bar and a standard for them to work towards and exceed! If you don’t tell them what you won’t or how you want it, very few will hit the mark that you have set in your head and forget to let everyone know about. The other factor is progress/effort, honestly there are a lot of kids who work their butts off to get a C in a certain course after starting the year around a D or F, I think that should be celebrated and put on a silver platter indicating their achievement. Because lets face it not everyone is good at everything, but effort to excelling in something you are down right terrible at deserves recognition. How I will incorporate that into my assessment in whether it is formative or summative I have yet to discover, but I will try my best to find a place where it fits.

This was our week to present and I must say I had some fun with this topic. Assessment has unfortunately become the dark side of education for many teachers and students, an unpleasant task that must be done and be over with as soon as possible. I remember growing up listening to my teacher saying, “I know these tests suck guys, but they will help you in the future.” Upon which I thought to myself, well geez sign me up coach sounds fantastic. We played on this evil idea of assessment at the beginning of our presentation and had students write a ridiculous quiz that assessed how well they read the assignment. We berated students for talking or not understanding really playing up the act. The point was to poke fun or bring up past experiences that many of us have gone through in the realm of assessment. What is sad, is that we can relate to these experiences, we’ve all had a teacher who assessed us in a way that was so unfair and left us frustrated and unable to display what we knew. This was our overarching message that I hope struck home to many in the audience. Don’t put your students through what you went through. Create assessments that allow students to demonstrate their knowledge and express their thoughts, think of ways to challenge them in your questions that causes them to think, not just spit out the answer as it was written in the notes. Additionally I think we need to think long and hard about what it means to give good quality formative assessment, that tells students where they are at and where they need to improve. I’m looking forward to the challenge.

Funny thing about writing is it appears to come quite easily to us in our corresponding domains of education. I personally feel quite comfortable blabbering away about science, using the terms and vocabulary with ease. If we take the time to reflect on our journey to writing this away it’s likely not something that happened over night and took years of work to get us where we are now. Recognizing this concept I believe is key when teaching in our respected fields. Each year students enter into their subjects learning new words that they are asked and expected to use in the answers, discussions and responses. This is a skill that takes both time and patience. We as educators should be mindful of this and help them along the way in any way we can. I’m personally interested in implementing a writing assignment that asks the students to write on a certain topic in a creative way, using a list of vocabulary throughout their assignment. I think it will be a great opportunity for students to try out some words in a less stressful environment and it will be a good way for me as a teacher to see where there level of understanding is, in regards to the vocabulary pertaining to the topic.

So I want to just throw this out there: does anyone else find this book to be the plethora of possible teaching activities? I mean this thing is the holy grail of do’s and don’ts as a teacher. Pretty epic in my mind. Anyways group work, it’s a fail, succeed or kinda sorta work activity that requires way more thought then most people think. There are so many factors that go into a good discussion and this chapter does a really effective job of covering some of the major stepping stones required to build good classroom discussions. I would personally like to focus on one, which intrigued me. This idea of promoting and fostering proper classroom discussion across multiple subjects and years. As teachers we can come up with the best questions, perfect ways to present findings and the safest environments to have discussions; but if students aren’t exposed to discussions throughout their day or throughout their schooling career, how can we expect them to know what to do? Many students are very apprehensive about jumping into a discussion even amongst close friends or small groups, quite often because they’ve never really given it a try and the idea is some what scary and novel to them. I believe to promote engaging and student orientated discussions we need to foster the ideas of what makes a good discussion early on in education. If a grade 8 student is introduced to discussion based talks that encompass many of the ideas for a good discussion it is likely to start out slow and gradually build. If these same ideas are promoted and instilled from classroom to subject to year, imagine the types of discussions we could be having in grades 11 and 12? I don’t think this is an easy task, nor will it happen overnight, but I firmly believe if schools want to promote discussion it needs to be done school wide and developed over many years, not just one teacher, in one subject, for one year of their high school or middle school life.

The famed hawk moth and star orchid are truly the pinnacle example of species evolution and the drastic results that can arise under years of coevolution. Now for you non-bio people out there, this is a perfect example of the utmost need for vocabulary knowledge within a subject field. Without a vocabulary to fall back on you can’t even begin to comprehend the deeper take home message, which in this case is coevolution. Vocabulary is a tricky thing, it’s one thing to memorize a word based on its definition found on dictionary.com, its another thing to be able to apply that word correctly within the appropriate context. It is here that I believe a teacher should focus their energy the most when it comes tot he topic of vocabulary. I remember my teachers handing me “vocab lists” which I was expected to study diligently and regurgitate onto a quiz which simply said: “please define 10 of the 15 words”. After this quiz the words faded from my mind without a thought. This in itself lies the problem, whats the point of learning vocabulary, if your not going to use it. Its like telling someone to learn German and then never speak German to anyone, useless.

In addition to this point, a teacher should strive to make connections between words and challenge students on a regular basis with various exercises that require them to apply the vocabulary they learn to familiar and unfamiliar scenarios. Learning the definition of a word will give you no insight to the true meaning of the word, applying to real situations is what gives the word meaning and significance. By teaching a student this, you are building a vocabulary that they can use and will likely follow them through life. Even if they go on to do things complete opposite of the subject you teach, at the very least when that vocabulary is seen in newspapers, magazines, online or in books they can recognize its meaning and understand the context from which it comes. Giving them better insight in the world and allow them to perceive what they read with a more educated mind. BOOM!

Time and time again this course surprises me. I never realized how important it is to focus on language in the courses we teach. So often in the biology world I feel so removed from the realm of language and rules of punctation etc (which is generally evident in a lot of undergraduate research papers). Yet when I reflect on my language use in biology I realize how different it is in comparison to how I write essays, or blogs, or letters or anything for that matter. I definitely take my language repertoire I have gained over my 5 years in biology. Scientific speech is extremely difficult to follow, very descriptive and highly subject-specific. I personally, with a background in evolution, find a molecular genetics or a biochemical paper extremely difficult to read versus an ecology based paper on angiosperm coevolution. The fact of the matter is, whether you’ve studied science, math, history, languages, art or any other course, you yourself are very familiar with your subjects vocabulary and you take for granted the time you have personally put into gaining this vocabulary and your ability to use this language in a professional and even social context.

It is for this reason that we must be so conscious of how we use our own “language” while teaching. I remember to this day, a very specific subject we were covering in high school biology. It was on genetic transfer between species over generations. I was so hopelessly lost! The teacher went on and on about this homozygous male breeding with this heterozygous female and they produce a mixture of blah blah blah. It wasn’t until second year university when I finally understood this concept in full and looking back on myself and thinking man I was dumber than a sack of hammers. However the main point to this story is that, you can’t learn a subject without first learning how to apply the vocabulary.

This course is opening my eyes to the great need of focusing learning on the language of science. At first it seems like its a lot of extra work in an already very busy curriculum, but i believe with the right attention and focus it will actually encourage your students, giving them confidence and a foundation to work off and flourish. Like beautiful little butterflies hatching from cocoons hahaha.