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!

Connections and Sustainability

Sustainability is a hot topic in society right now. And it should be. As our population grows, in the US and all over the world, we need to make sure what we do does not adversely affect sustainability. We need to connect what we do to what will happen because of what we do. Actions have consequences. I tend to connect that right now to the nuclear power emergency in Japan. Because of all the people I know in that country and my trips there over the years, I have followed the recent news very carefully. The nuclear power plants are scary. It really doesn't matter how soon they contain the problem, (yes it does really) the damage is done. Radiation is loose in the atmosphere of Japan and the world. It may not have a huge effect but maybe it will. We don't know enough about nuclear disasters other than that they are not good. We need to think of the whole and not just our part. Is the power generated worth the risks?

While reading the chapter on “Educating for a Sustainable Future”, I saw a connection to the book I am reading for another assignment, The Last Child in the Woods. At the Willow School they believe, “humans are an integral part of the natural world and that the health and sustainability of our natural systems has a profound effect on the quality of our lives.” We need to feel connected to the Earth and the world. If we don't feel like that we do today will matter in the future we won't act as responsibly. Somehow we need for our students to see that the timeline of their lives today will affect their future as well as the future of the world. Even as individuals, they matter. Is the power we use daily worth what it takes to generate it?

I am not sure exactly how to connect students but I do know that experience makes a difference. I had 14 Japaneses college students come in and shadow my 7^th graders on March 8^th. It was a very enjoyable day all round and many of them are facebook friends now. It changed on March 13^th. Japan changed on March 13^th. After that Tuesday, when my students heard the news about the devastating earthquake, it wasn't just news. They cared far more than they would have in the past. They wanted information. They wanted to know that the students they had met and their families were OK. My husband, who coordinates the Japanese program, came in to talk to them about the earthquake and its effects.

We were lucky because all the families of the student's survived. One mother was missing for almost a week but was found, alive, in an evacuee shelter. That student's home is gone, washed away by the tsunami, but her family is intact. Our school will be doing a fundraiser for the victims of that disaster. We haven't decided exactly what to do or where to send the funds that we raise, but the students have decided to do something. They are now part of the world and I hope they remain there.

Driving forces

 Once again, I have read something that changes how I do what I do. Drive was the reading in this case. I have always disliked extrinsic motivations without really knowing why. Now I have a justification for that dislike. It doesn't really work the way we expect it should. I remember offering rewards to those students who got 100s on tests and being surprised that even the offer of a homework pass was not enough to motivate the students to do well on the test. Sometimes telling them it is very difficult seems to work even better as a motivation.

The impact of autonomy on workers was what really set me off and inspired me to try letting my students become self directed learners. I wrote about that in an earlier blog. It works but I need more practice as do they. One thing that I see that is really affected by letting them run the class themselves is the engagement of the students. They are all paying attention, all the time. We have to have our students want to learn before they can learn. Autonomy and motivation are vital to that. On page 122 Carol Dweck is quoted as saying, in part, “After all, their goal is to learn, not to prove they are smart.” Rethinking about this I can connect it to the curriculum audit my school just had done. Much of the talk about assessments was about formative assessments that would drive the teaching. We do need to have our students show what they have learned, not just that they CAN learn.  Formative assessments can guide what we teach next, or reteach now.

I also like the chart that showed that mastery was not an attainable goal. I like that from both the teaching and learning sides. When I think I know all I need to know to be a good teacher, I am finished being a good teacher. I remember an evaluation I had after my first year of teaching in a public school. My principal told me he was happy with my teaching. I told him that I was glad he was happy, but that I wasn't. I could see a lot of things I wanted to improve upon. We both agreed it was better he was happy and I wasn't rather than the other way around!

Drive is a book I will keep in my bookcase ( when I haven't loaned it to a friend to read) and refer to when I need to shake my teaching up a bit again. There are surprising truths in it and as a teacher, motivation for our students and for us is vital.

Hurt or Help?

 

Does an outside program help or hurt schools and students? (Everyday Math, Reading programs, etc...)

I think whether or not this works depends entirely on the teacher. I have a standard program I use as a guideline but I also work in other “bits” and focus on what I think my students really need. I know another teacher who uses the same program and doesn't use the book much at all. She generally does packets that give the students similar understandings. When I watched the PBS video for this week, Digital Media – New Learners of the 21^st Century, it spoke of the difference in our styles when, near the end, it said that there might, in the end be two kinds of schools; one for the rich and one for the poor.

I reviewed the video for this quote but am paraphrasing a bit as well. “The poor one will be a standardized, accountable system that will give you the basics that you need for a service job. In the privileged one they will learn the same facts but will use them to solve authentic problems and innovate and produce new knowledge.” Any kind of math program can be used the same way. It is all in HOW you choose to teach.

While we are discussing going back to a more traditional program from the Mathscapes we use now, it won't affect how I teach. Now that I have learned how to use the constructed type of math education, I can use that no matter what I have as a text book. I have added a bit to the unit on construction that we are doing now. We are working with scale models and our town is building a new school. I was fortunate enough to get real blue prints of the new building and we are going to use that to figure out the sizes of the rooms and compare them to what we have now. The kids are fascinated by the plans and the interest is very high. While they may not all learn the same things from this piece of the unit, they are exposed to real materials and that is much more valuable in the long run than lots of scale problems for homework, although we will do some of that as well.

I liked what Henry Jenkins said in the PBS video, “Society may be too smart for some of the jobs .” I rather hope so!