Category Archives: Inquiry Reflection

05/17/16

Inquiry: Scaffolding and Modeling

Welcome back to another post on my inquiry.

Last time, I touched on how I have been working on allowing students to demonstrate their understanding through different avenues. The students did a great job on their fairytale projects because they were able to choose how they wanted to present their fairytales as a group. Many students chose to do a drama and made their own costumes and props! Other groups decided to use puppets. One group made a pop-up presentation of their fairytale, which was so creative!

Moving onto the intent of this post: scaffolding and modeling. During my research on my inquiry topic, I came across many articles that discussed the importance of scaffolding and modeling as a way of helping to build student self-confidence. I have kept this in mind during my practicum as something that I am constantly striving to do. Has it always been perfect? No, but I believe that I am getting better at this aspect. I like to call it “front-loading” or “pre-loading” as it is also called. Front-load all of the expectations of what students are to do before they begin an activity to: 1. prevent misbehaviors and 2. so that students have the confidence in themselves that they know what to do and how to complete the activity. I am finding that fewer students are coming up to me feeling confused or asking questions because I have scaffolded and modeled the activity.

I have also found that anchor charts have aided students who are visual learners and need those drawings to make sense of their learning. I display anchor charts around the classroom (wherever there’s space!) to help students remember key pieces of information about concepts. They can feel confident that they can look at the chart whenever they need that extra support.

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04/27/16

Inquiry: Continuing to Build Student Self-Confidence

Hello readers,

It has been a while since I have last updated on my inquiry progress. Practicum has been busy but I have not forgotten about my inquiry project. If you remember my post about my synthesis, I had set up some goals for myself to achieve during my long practicum. I have done many of the goals that were outlined in my post. For example, I make the effort to tell my students when I have seen an improvement in their academics or if I notice that they are working really hard. For many of my students, their reading and writing has come a long way from the first time that I met them. It is so great to see when the students are making progress in school and with that progress, comes newfound confidence in their own skills and learning.

I have also tried, and will continue to try, to give my students options on how they can show their learning. This has been a learning experience for me as well, as I seek to address the diversity of my learners in the classroom. For those who struggle in writing in particular, I allow these students to focus on drawing and telling me their understanding rather than asking them to write it out. This helps to alleviate that stress and anxiety of writing for these students. There are still opportunities for these students to continue to practice their writing, but the fact that they are given options to demonstrate their learning in their own way, allows them to build up confidence in their own abilities. I have done this through my fairytales unit for example. I have refined my story maps to allow students to both draw and, if able to, write about fairytale story elements.

I have noticed that over the past couple of months, the overall confidence of my students is improving. They are more sure of themselves and they are really starting to trust in their own abilities to succeed. For example, I know that many of my students know their letter sounds. Whenever they come up to me to ask how to spell a word, I encourage them to sound out the word by stretching it out and breaking the word down, and to simply write the sounds that they hear in that word. It may not be “book spelling”, but the students can feel confident in themselves that they know all of the letter sounds that they hear in a word without having to rely on the teacher for help. That sense of ownership over knowing that they spelt a hard word all by themselves, helps to build that self-confidence. That is probably one of the great things about being in Grade 1- perfect spelling does not matter!

03/12/16

Synthesis of Inquiry

Inquiry question: How can teachers help to build self-confidence within students who get frustrated in completing classroom activities?

Where I came from

My inquiry journey began in my practicum classroom and what I saw from my observations. I noticed that for many of my students, they did not believe in their own abilities to succeed in completing their journals, worksheets, or reading. I realized that this was an issue that I wanted to explore further, since this behavior was seen in quite a few students over a period of time. As a teacher, I want to make it a goal to help my students develop self-confidence within themselves, which would help them succeed not just in the classroom, but also outside in the world.

Where I am now

Over the course of the past five months, I have learned many strategies that teachers can implement into their classroom in order to help build self-confidence within their students. I have also learned how and why our students get frustrated in the first place. As bloggers and authors have cited, students often get frustrated due to a variety of reasons: they are afraid of making mistakes and failing, afraid of having their peers or teacher judge them, or because they have not been scaffolded enough by the teacher (Willingham, 2009). Learning about the reasons why some of my students may get frustrated has helped me to understand their perspective and the difficulties that they experience. It has allowed me to become more understanding and sympathetic to their situation and individual needs.

I have also learned the importance of building a positive classroom community as a way of building student self-confidence. A key part of this is explicitly teaching our students about grit and how to build a growth mindset (Stuart, 2015). I have already started to do this within my own classroom, which so far has been successful among my students. Another part of building a positive classroom community involves the relationships that a teacher forms with the students. If there was one thing that almost all of my research emphasized, it was creating a supportive relationship between teacher and student. As Rita Pierson says, every child deserves a champion or someone who will be their own personal cheerleader. You may believe that being a personal cheerleader to 25-30 students is difficult and it is, but that does not mean that we should not make an effort to be there to support each and every one of our students.

Where I am headed

In my practicum classroom, I will strive to continue to promote self-confidence and positivity through my lessons and conversations with my students. For example, I will tell my students when I am noticing that their writing is improving or if they are making an effort to try hard. Next, I will encourage my students to make mistakes and that it is only when we make a mistake that we learn the most. Finally, I will create opportunities for my students to demonstrate their learning in various ways. I understand that not many of my students enjoy writing, but they can explain their thinking and learning in articulate ways. For example, in my Fairytales unit, I will be allowing my students to create their fairytale through different modes, either through a storyboard, on the iPad on Puppet Pals, or using puppets for example.

Overall, this inquiry journey has been a fulfilling learning experience for me. I am excited to take my learning and continue to apply it to my practicum classroom.

References:

Pierson, Rita. (2013, May). Every kid needs a champion. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/rita_pierson_every_kid_needs_a_champion#t-196559.

Stuart, D. (2015). For noncognitive skill development, start with growth mindset – here’s how. Retrieved from http://www.davestuartjr.com/noncognitive-skill-development-growth-mindset/

Willingham, D.T. (2009). Why don’t students like school? A cognitive science answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom. San Fransico: Jossey-Bass.

03/7/16

Post-Inquiry Presentation Reflection

Today I presented in front of my peers my inquiry journey that I began about five months ago. While there was some “lecturing” involved in my presentation, I tried to involve the whole class by doing a self-confidence building activity. I got my activity from one of the articles that I have discussed (link to post can be found here). Students commented that the activity helped them to realize some of the strengths that they had not even realized in themselves, yet were noticed by other people. I think that as hard working individuals, we are often quite critical about ourselves. We often overlook the many positives that we have, including ones that we may not even notice. This activity would benefit any class because students can begin to realize the strengths that they see in themselves and the strengths that others see in them. This activity would work well in any classroom, as a way of building student self-confidence and as a way of building a positive classroom community. I would recommend doing this activity perhaps in the middle of the school year, where students have had a chance to get to know one another.

As a teacher, we work a lot individually with students and we get to observe their strengths (and struggles) that our students may not notice. We can help our students to realize their own strengths through conversations by saying something such as, “I notice that you are an excellent writer because you use a lot of character description in your writing.” For a student who may not believe that they are a good writer, hearing this comment could boost their confidence in writing. That in itself is powerful.

During my presentation, I also referred to my lesson plan that I did with my own class last week, which I have reflected on in my blog. My lesson plan can be downloaded and viewed here.

My presentation today can be viewed here:

03/4/16

Practicum Reflection: Lesson on Building Self-Confidence

This week at my practicum school, I targetted my lesson towards building self-confidence and a growth mindset with my students. I started my lesson by showing my students a picture of me when I was in Grade 1. I told my students about my story and how I always told myself “I can’t” because I was always afraid of failing. I then told my class that I have since learned that it is alright to fail and to make mistakes – it is better to try than to not try at all. I did a read aloud of “Anything Is Possible” by Giulia Belloni – a cute story about a sheep and wolf who try to build a flying machine. Their flying machine failed to fly after a couple tries, but the characters persevered and succeeded in  the end.

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We had a discussion about how it feels when we say “I can’t” to ourselves, with students commenting that it made them feel “sad” and “lonely.” Our class then brainstormed some phrases to say to ourselves instead of saying “I can’t.”  The students were involved and came up with some great phrases – some that I had not even thought of myself! In the end, we said all of the phrases together as a class. We then transitioned into journal time, where the students wrote something that they are good at doing and how it makes them feel when they do it. There were some great responses! Overall the lesson went really well and I am excited to continue to implement more lessons similar to this during my long practicum.

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02/24/16

Wise Wednesday’s: How to Help Students Who Don’t Like School

Welcome back to Wise Wednesday’s! It has been a busy week as our long practicum is just about a month away. Nonetheless, I am here to discuss another book written by Daniel Willingham, titled Why Don’t Students Like School? The title itself invites for some curiosity, which first caught my attention. However, as I delved deeper into what Willingham argues within his book, I realized that his discussion provides some insight into our students who get frustrated in completing classroom activities.

Willingham argues that people like to solve problems, but they do not to solve unsolvable problems (p.4). If schoolwork has become just a little bit too difficult for a student, then they will begin to grow a dislike for school. In relation to this, he argues that humans are bad at thinking and that thinking is usually a slow and arduous process. Willingham uses the example of learning how to drive a car for the first time. When you’re first learning how to drive, you are focusing your attention in steering, accelerating, and braking. Over time and with enough practice, driving begins to become second nature and you begin to barely think about going through the motions as you drive. This does not mean that humans do not like to think, it is just that it does take a long time to learn and process new information. Where trouble lies is when people (such as our students) are working on a problem for a long time, yet there is no sense that there is any progress that has been made (p.9). I think we can all think of a time when this has happened to us.

So what does Willingham suggest? Ensure that you give enough necessary background knowledge before you ask your students to begin a task, meaning: scaffold, scaffold, scaffold. Further, when necessary, give “cognitive breaks” to students (p.19). I perhaps did not realize this, but we do ask a lot out of our students during the school day – even for students in primary grades. It is understanding how some students may become more frustrated with their work as the day goes on because they have used a lot of their cognitive skills to stay focused throughout the day. This brings in the importance of having brain breaks scheduled in during the day, to allow children to stop and do a quick, fun activity that will re-energize the students.

I see many connections between Willingham’s discussion and my experience to my practicum school. I have seen first-hand the implications of failing to scaffold enough for my students (as a result of my teaching). Many students became frustrated and needed extra help from me. Thankfully, I have learned my lesson! I appreciate how much scaffolding I see being done in my classroom and it is something that I continue in trying to implement within my unit plans. I am constantly asking myself whether I am providing my students with enough knowledge and information in order to guarantee success for all of my students.

Reference:

Willingham, D.T. (2009). Why don’t students like school? A cognitive science answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom. San Fransico: Jossey-Bass.

02/22/16

Wise Wednesday’s: How To Support Our Struggling Students

 

For this week’s Wise Wednesday’s post, I wanted to draw your attention to an informative book that I have found by Robyn Jackson called, Mastering the Principles of Great Teaching: How to Support Struggling Students. What drew my attention to this book was that the book was written in a way that was very relatable to myself as an emerging educator. As my inquiry question may indicate, I do have a few struggling students – this experience is relatable to many teachers, I am sure. As Jackson says in her Introduction chapter, “All teachers have had that moment in the classroom where we’ve just finished explaining what we thought was a simple concept and then see our students staring blankly back, completely lost. We have all experienced the frustration that comes when students continue to struggle and constantly lag behind.” (p.13) Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Jackson provides readers with many different practical strategies that educators can use to ensure that even our most struggling students are succeeding within our classroom. She discusses strategies that have been touched on in this blog, such as having support for the students, meaning that teachers are guiding students throughout the entire learning progress, through modeling and scaffolding, and for preparing for instances when students may struggle with certain concepts. In these cases, it is imperative that teachers set up opportunities prior to the summative assessment, for students to re-engage with the material and to learn the things that they missed. I believe that providing for these different opportunities of learning similar concepts will help alleviate the anxiety and frustration among students in the classroom. I have seen this happen at my own practicum school, where there is a lot of scaffolding provided to my students. Key concepts are constantly being repeated and students get a lot of time to play and work with the topic. I know that when I was in elementary school, I had often become frustrated with learning math concepts. Word problems in particular were difficult for me, and it was a frustrating process. I was not given the opportunities to re-engage with the material and to re-learn the things that I had missed. To this day, word problems in math continue to be one of my biggest struggles.

One of the biggest positives in the book is the discussion about how teachers should keep their students in mind when planning a lesson or unit. It really is about knowing your students, such as knowing what their skills and struggles are, and what kind of prior knowledge they bring into the classroom. Jackson brings up this excellent point: “Students who struggle because of a lack of background knowledge don’t have the vocabulary or the experiences they need to make sense of new information.” (p.18) This diagnostic assessment is critical in preventing students from feeling frustrated right off the bat in a new unit, for example. This is something that I will definitely be keeping in mind during my practicum. Asking myself questions such as: “What kind of prior knowledge do my students have?” and “What are some struggles that some students may have?” will help me to give the support that all of my students need in order to help prevent frustration and instead, create success for my students.

 

Reference:

Jackson, R. R., & Lambert, C. (2010). Mastering the principles of great teaching: How to support struggling students. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development (ASCD).

 

02/12/16

Practicum Reflection: How Does a Frustrated Student Look Like?

Over the past weeks, I have discussed the different strategies of how teachers can build self-confidence and grit among the students. I have also delved into how building a positive classroom environment is essential in fostering these characteristics within students. I believe that now is a good time to take a step further and apply these strategies into students who get frustrated in completing classroom activities. But first, why do students get frustrated in the first place? What are some things that are going on in their minds when they feel defeated? I touched on this piece a little bit a couple months ago when I discussed the fight, flight, or freeze response in frustrated students.

To give a more concrete and practical example of an example of this process, I turn to my practicum school. On Thursday, I led an art activity with my Grade 1 students, where they had to create a fish made out of hearts. As I am quickly learning, art activities can be very loud and there is a lot going on at once – for a teacher candidate, this scenario can often be very intimidating! For the most part, the students did enjoy doing the activity, with some students asking if they could take home their fish that day. Nonetheless, there were some bumps along the way. One significant bump was that a couple students became visibly frustrated when they struggled with making heart shapes for the fish’s tail and head. These students were experiencing the “freeze” response, where they had come to the conclusion that they could not do it and in response, they sat on the floor or at their desks with their heads down. I gave them independent attention and walked through with them the steps on how to draw a heart and brought my own example that I used to demonstrate so that they could see the example closer up. In future, if there are multiple students who are struggling, instead of giving independent attention to each student, I  will instead gather the students together and walk through the steps as a group. This would prevent me from jumping from student to student and it would also help to ensure that students who are struggling, get the teacher support that they need in a timely manner.

By going through the process of my inquiry and of being at my practicum school, I am learning that there are many different elements that must come into place in order to help not only build a supportive classroom environment but to also help students build confidence to succeed within the classroom. Perhaps part of the issue is that there are many students and only one to two teachers in a classroom. For students who need extra support, it can be difficult as a teacher, to provide that constant support. This is why my inquiry question is so important to me, as a teacher candidate. I want to build that self-confidence in all of my students so that they do not get frustrated in the first place.

Reference:

Minahan, J., & Schultz, J.J. (2014;2015). Interventions can salve unseen anxiety barriers. Phi Delta Kappan, 96(4), 46-50. Doi: 10.1177/0031721714561446

02/5/16

Wise Wednesday’s: Let’s Get (More) Gritty

Ah, it feels so good to have February upon us. The days are getting longer and we are much more closer to seeing some more sunny days. Last week, I introduced grit and its role in the classroom. I want to expand and go more in depth on grit, not only because it fits well into my inquiry question, but also because it’s such an important thing to teach to our students.

Thus, I bring to you some wise words, spoken by Angela Lee Duckworth, a Grade 7 educator, who explains her theory on grit and its relationship to the success of her students. She poses the challenge that schools measure only the IQ of their students, but intelligence can only go so far in one’s life. What builds long-term success within students after they leave school and enter the working world, is grit. Grit drives students to achieve their goals, to persevere in the face of adversity. Duckworth says that teachers can help promote grit through encouraging a growth mindset. She says that teachers should show their students that the brain changes and grows in response to challenge and that failure is not permanent. As a result, students are more likely to persevere when they fail. Building a growth mindset along with encouraging grit, is a step in the right direction but as Duckworth argues, we need more. We need different ways of measuring student success that is not solely based on IQ scores or on intelligence.

If you would like to do some further reading, there is an article that is written by Corey Donahue that goes into some more discussion about Duckworth’s beliefs in grit. Article can be accessed here: http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/blog/helping-students-succeed-by-building-grit/

Reference:

Ducksworth, A. (April 2013). Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit. [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_the_key_to_success_grit?language=en#t-355670

01/28/16

Wise Wednesdays: Teaching Grit to Our Students

Another week has gone by, which means that I am here for another instalment of Wise Wednesdays! This week, I explore another strategy that teachers can employ to help particularly frustrated students and that is the role of grit. When I think of grit, I think of perseverance, meaning that when I come to a difficult task, I buckle down and I try my hardest to accomplish the difficult task. Moreover, it is about overcoming obstacles in order to succeed short-term and long-term goals. Now, I realize that having grit is not always easy, especially if a student is hard on themselves and may not believe in their abilities to succeed. This is where the teacher comes in! Teaching grit to our students is possible.

How you ask? Teachers can help build resilience by promoting positive emotions within the classroom. This can be done by encouraging students to share positive stories so that when they are in a difficult situation, they can recall a positive event and the emotions that were attached to it. For example, if a student who struggles in writing, recalls a time when they succeeded in writing a beautifully crafted sentence, they will feel better about their writing abilities. Another strategy that teachers can use to teach grit is to help students to work with their difficult emotions. This is particularly helpful for students who get anxious or depressed or come from a traumatic home environment. When students face a difficult obstacle, feelings of fear or anger can arise quickly in these situations. Teachers can teach their students to recognize and label emotional responses, so that the student knows when their emotions are spinning out of control. After this, teachers can teach the student methods of how to calm down when they are feeling particularly angry or fearful, such as deep breathing.

A Grade 5 teacher in New Hampshire created an entire curriculum on grit. The video is a great demonstration of how teaching grit to students has long-term benefits.

References:

[Edutopia]. (April 29, 2014). Teaching Grit Cultivates Resilience and Perseverance. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0qrtsYg6kI.

Zarkzewski, V. (2014). Teaching grit: How to help students overcome inner obstacles. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/grit-help-students-overcome-inner-obstacles-vicki-zakrzewski