WISE seems to be quite ‘wise’

I have had the opportunity to work with students who have designations in terms of learning disabilities; therefore, they come to the learning center during their study block or after school to get extra help. I feel that using WISE with my learning center students would be a ‘wise’ idea to help them understand some of the concepts they did not understand fully in class. I would be using WISE as a supplement tool for students to re-learn or perhaps review what they learned in their class. Based on my experience, most of the times these students think that either the teacher went over the material in class way too fast or they were just not paying attention when the lesson was taught. Either way, it shows that they are fully capable of understanding the concept that they missed if taught in a different setting at a different pace using a different PCK.

Using WISE would help these students have a better chance/ another chance at learning the missed material or perhaps the misconceptions that may have taken place the first time they learned about it. WISE would also be a great tool for these individuals as most of the WISE lessons are interactive and one can learn at their own pace in their own time. One of the best thing about WISE lessons is the scaffolding happening starting from the beginning and question prompts as the students go through the lesson to support the learning. My students would benefit a great deal with SKI taking place in WISE lessons as they can go back to the content to re-learn the material if they get the answer wrong for one for one of the questions as they go through the lesson.

I would ask my student to start by going over the table of contents for the lesson, so they see some of the familiar terminologies that they have seen earlier in their class. I chose to edit the “Plate Tectonic” lesson as I have taught this lesson to an Earth science class before and am familiar with the content knowledge in this lesson. This lesson starts with a slide on “Did you feel it?” asking if you felt small-scale earthquakes during the day. One change I would make is to ask my student to google “earthquakes in Vancouver” and see for themselves that how many small-scale earthquakes actually take place every day that are rarely felt by us. The reason why I would make this change is to make this lesson’s beginning a little inquiry-based. Instead of telling them, students learn better if they see it for themselves.

Another change I made in the lesson was to add a “modeling” question at the end of the second lesson’s slides. The question is to ask students to draw “continental-oceanic” vs. “continental-continental” plates on a piece of paper and write about the difference between these two plates on WISE. The reason why I added this is because first, students use “model as a communication tool” (Gobert, Snyder, & Houghton, 2002, p. 5) and second, it helps students test themselves and be confident about certain knowledge. In my setting, where I will only be working with one student at a time, comparing the model with other models would not work. Although, I think students learn a great deal from their peers by evaluating their work. To conclude my lesson with this student, I will ask the student to compare their drawing with the one on the previous slide and point out the differences and make corrections.

Gobert, J., Snyder, J., & Houghton, C. (2002, April). The influence of students’ understanding of models on model-based reasoning. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), New Orleans, Louisiana.