Moving

While I do want to continue to think on this page, I am moving to a new blog, at least for the summer.  Because I am taking the Summer Technology Institute in Belfast, I needed a blog for that so for the summer anyway will be on Catwoodsummer.  Looking forward to it!

Final Reflection

While this may be the last post for this class, I hope I will continue to use this as a place for me to reflect on what I am doing and why.  When I look back over my posts, what I see is myself reflecting on what I have read, learned, experienced or thought about.  These are important for teachers, or regular people!, to reflect on so that we can improve and better utilize what we experience.  So I think what I see when I look back over my posts is the benefit of reflections.  They really help me and they will really help my students when I have them write them for their portfolios.  Thinking about our thinking helps us retain what we have learned.  During the discussion with my group today via Skype it hit me that there is a difference, in math at least, between being able to do something and understanding it.  Reflections can help me understand what I know and can do.  I want my students to understand what they have the ability to do.  If they understand it, they may better know when to apply it. 

Changing Again

Life is easy right now. I know what I am doing and how to do it in my classroom. So that means it is time for a change! We are moving to a new building and starting a new textbook series. I really liked the old one as it was constructed math and the students had to work to figure out how to solve problems. In the new one, there are many examples and way more than I will ever be able to get across to the students. So I am going to have to heavily filter what I have the students learn.

I also want to change how students are assessed. I really want to move towards digital portfolios and I want, at this point, to have them link work to standards and reflections to show how well they understand the standards. I think this will work and it will be interesting to see how the students adapt and feel about this kind of assessment. I may change my picture of what a portfolio looks like after I finish my enquiry project, but we'll see.

This isn't so much changing the curriculum itself, I don't have a clear one anyway, as it is changing how I asses, but that in itself, will change my curriculum as I teach students how to document.

Two Minds

I am still of two minds as to what we need to do with curriculum and what we should do with curriculum. It isn't our choice alone which is good because it doesn't influence us alone. But we can influence strongly, or subtly, what happens in our schools and in our classes.

Change definitely needs to occur. For the most part, even though society has changed tremendously since the 1900's, schools have not. We are, for the most part, still in the factory model of turning out students who have the knowledge to meet the standards. While some thinking is required to meet the standards, not enough thinking is required to meet the challenges our students will face when they go to look for employment. 

What do students really need to be successful in today's world? They need to be able to be flexible for one thing! Technology and how it is used are changing so rapidly that students need to be able to think, and adapt just as rapidly. And yet, we can't just focus on the technology. Many of our students spend too much time caught up in the web and not enough in the real world. We need to help them come up with a happy medium.

So, how we teach needs to change as much as what we teach. I really enjoyed reading the first and last chapters of HHJ Curriculum 21 together. I enjoyed the fact that it agreed with what I have come to believe. (Probably that was the point of the class!) We need the rigor redefined of which Tony Wagner spoke. We need the curriculum of process as process is what leads our students to thinking. And I really do want to find a poster of The 16 Habits of Mind.

 

I do believe they are all important, but some I liked better than others. I love metacognition! I still remember when I first heard the word and learned what it was. It was a child psych class at Chico State and the whole concept fascinated me. I was learning to really think and connect at the time and that word and its importance has always stuck with me. We need for our students to know what they know. In mathematics, particularly, I need to teach my students to strive for accuracy and precision. Just doing it isn't really enough. Applying past knowledge to novel situations is so vital. We learned it for a reason other than the test! Use what you learn. Taking responsible risks! To me that is daring to apply the knowledge to new situations and not being afraid to be wrong. Learn from mistakes. 

Think interdependently. I remember a Building Bridges between Schools and Businesses course I took and the businesses wanted team players then, 15 years ago, and I am sure they still do. Learn from your peers. That's what we have be doing in part in this class. And most important, in many ways, find humor. Have fun doing what you do. If I don't enjoy teaching, my students won't enjoy learning. 

Finally, our students need time to reflect. That rather ties in with everything I think. If we don't encourage, or require, reflection, how will they ever meta-cognate. (Is that a real word?) We can help them to this best I think, not so much by teaching, but by leading them to the knowledge and ways of thinking. Sounds like fun to me!

To Track or Not to Track

Tracking seems like it would be beneficial to students as they would be able to learn at their own pace. Research really doesn't find that to be true. The gains found in tracked or ability grouped students are not significant enough to be worth while as well at either end of the ability spectrum. The only real gain was seen in the high ability students who were accelerated by a grade level or so.

One of the problems that was reported was that often more qualified teachers were assigned the students with the higher abilities while the students who were more mathematically challenged were given to less qualified students. That was not beneficial to the students who struggled with math. As a result of the teacher assignments, the higher level students received instruction with more rigor while the struggling students got more skill work and less of the higher level thinking skills. “Among variables assessing teacher “quality,” the percentage of teachers with full certification and a major in the field is a more powerful predictor of student achievement than teachers’ education levels (e.g., master’s degrees).” (Hammond, L D. 1999)

Another problem was that the identification of students does not always match their real skill levels. Teachers might assume that because this student did well in class their test scores would be such that they would be placed in a higher level course. This was not always found to be true. So that means that higher ability students might not get the upper level courses while a student with comparatively lower abilities might get the placement.

The only real benefit that could happen was the improvement of the confidence of students with difficulties when the higher ability students were removed from their classes. Because they did not compare themselves to students who were not in their class, they were more confident in their abilities. On the flip side, those in the higher ability classes sometimes became less confident as they were challenged for the first time. This benefit was not see to be enough to ability group students.

What I found really interesting is this research did not agree with what I had always thought. I thought being taught at a pace that was comfortable for learning would benefit all students. What I had not taken into account was teacher assignment and the subsequent lack of rigor in lower ability classes.The final conclusion I came to after this research is that it is important to offer rigor to students of all levels as well as qualified, motivated teachers who believe in the students ability to learn. As a student, learning in a class that offered more than basic skills would also be far more motivating.

Hammond, L D. Teacher Quality and Student Achievement: A Review of State Policy Evidence

http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n1/

Kulik, J A. (1993, Spring). An analysis of the research on ability grouping. The National Research     Center on the Gifted and Talented Newsletter, p. 8-9.

Slavin, R E. (1990). Ability grouping in the middle grades: achievement effects and alternatives. Review of Educational Research, 60, 471-479.

Stiff, L V., Johnson, J L., & Akos, P. (2011). Disrupting tradition: research and practice pathways in mathematics education. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Enquiry Project

I am beginning to get excited about doing my inquiry project and I am very happy about the excitement.  Don't you find it is easier to do a project when you are interested and get excited?  I can remember doing such a project in the past and I picked, as I did here, something I thought I SHOULD find our about.  I never did get really excited and don't even remember exactly what my project was about.  Same situation basically but what is the difference?  This time I am looking into not only something I should know about but something I plan on using that will, I hope, revolutionize my assessment methods.  Do I think it will work well the first year?  Not really, because I will need to get better as doing what I need to do as well as have my students get good at what they need to do.  But I am excited about it and will pass that excitement on to my students.  I don't really want to say any more specifically about what my project is on, but it feels great to be excited about learning more.

On another note, in reference to a past post where I had my students take ownership of their learning, what a difference it has made in my test results.  I just gave a test on Thursday, same type as always, many complicated steps, and got no grade lower than a 2.  A 2 is partially meets that standards and while that may not seem great, compared to previous test where I had to give around 6 1-1.5s I am very happy with these results.  This is something that is working for me that I will continue to use.

Learning

I love the way, and this is sarcasm, I learn how to do something after I have done it.  I really enjoyed making the podcast for this week and learned so much as I was doing it.  Of course I went to school today and learned how to do everything I couldn't figure out how to do on my own.  It is probably like that for our students as well.  I remember a debriefing that one of my fellow teachers held at the end of the school year.  I was teaching science at the time and had had my students write two research papers, one right after the other.  The other teacher was not happy that I had had the students write two papers and was very surprised when one of the students said they had really liked writing the second paper because they could enjoy it now that they had learned how.  I think that is something we should remember when we teach something.  We need to let our students do something more than once.  I don't know how many times I have tried something once, only to not have it work as I anticipated.  At that point, I have two choices.  I can give up, or I can try again.  Trying again has never failed me!  The more I do anything, the better I get.  If you think about it, the old adage, "If at first you don't succeed, try try again", is an old adage for a reason!