Arquivo da categoria: Intro to Teaching

Intro to Teaching – Final Paper

EDUC 213:  INTRODUCTION TO TEACHING
FINAL ASSIGNMENT
Lucas Longo – Dec 5, 2015

Description of the Lesson

Mr. Fischer’s lesson utilized several pedagogical techniques to enhance the learning objectives, stated at the beginning of the class. The lesson started out with giving students input about the subject with some direct teaching and lecturing (3:37). The teacher pulls from previous knowledge the students poses when mentioning cross examination (3:10) and recalling that the have done this process before. Asking the students questions about the case, the teacher assesses informally their knowledge and summarizing what is being said in the class on the blackboard by drawing a mind map. Scaffolding the students with prompts, probes and further questions, the teacher was able to extract deeper and more precise responses.

Mrs. Gomez then switched gears into an interesting activity of following her directions in Spanish. She was able to model to problem of communication, identified during the class activities, effectively and realistically. She was able to generate an affective response from the students (8:17) allowing them to feel what the problem was and hopefully promote metacognition. This activity was preplanned by the two teachers and showed a great level of PCK application to the lesson – they understood the content and created interesting ways to convey this to the students.

In preparation for the mock trial, the students broke out into groups. They moved from independent practice they’ve had with the content towards guided practice. After organizing themselves into the roles each wished to play, they discussed the subject matter with each other while the teachers moved from group to group facilitating discussion (9:40), assessing informally their knowledge about the subject and coaching them towards the trial. The teachers understood the concept of ZPD providing scaffolds for the students while not overdoing it by giving out all the answers. “I’m not going to do it for you. You know how to do it” (13:00). This activity then culminated in the actual reenactment of the trial and a debriefing session to summarize what the students had learned from the exercise.

Application of Course Content

Instructional Planning & Assessment

The teacher’s objectives for the lesson seem to be to illustrate to the students the importance of history and the connections that can be made with the present through the law and the court systems. They wanted the students to understand how does the US Supreme Court’s decisions in the past affect our lives today and how labour is an important aspect for understanding our past. By exposing the students to the Amistad case, topics about slavery, justice, and communication were covered, even if indirectly.

The teachers planned the instruction with care with distinct types of instruction starting ranging from direct teaching, prior knowledge assessment, group discussions, facilitation, modeling and peer-to-peer teaching. We can say that the lesson moved effectively up the levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy starting by recognizing and recalling facts about the case, understanding what the facts meant, applying and analyzing these facts in order to prepare for the trial, evaluating what was important or not and finally creating the mock trial reenactment. A full progression that visibly engaged students.

The teachers used informal assessment to judge if these objectives were met. By creating the mock trial exercise, they were able to understand how well the students grasped the subject. An important part of this assessment was conducted throughout the group sessions where the teachers could hear and interact with the student’s knowledge by facilitating their discussions. There was no formal assessment in the sense that there was not a test nor a written documents each student had to present.

Knowledge for Teaching

The teachers did show a wealth of content and pedagogical content knowledge in preparing for this lesson and teaching it. Their content knowledge about the Amistad case was necessary to be able to explain the case, focus on key issues, and provoke thought and questions about relevant facts. Without this knowledge they would not be able to guide the students in the process of creating the mock trial.

In terms of pedagogical content knowledge, the teachers understood the benefits of utilizing several techniques to pull from the student’s previous knowledge, elicit content association, and even draw upon their funds of knowledge. A great example of this was the activity where instructions were given out in Spanish – it situated them in a context that might very well be present in everyday life. It was so effective that it caused transfer when the student, playing the lawyer, used the same technique to ‘prove’ that the witness did not speak Spanish.

Their PCK extended to having the students model the trial, preparing for it using independent practice, group activities, and metacognition. At the end of the video one of the students summarized it well saying that the ‘trial got all the information they already knew and made it more realistic’. Without PCK, I believe the teachers might not have been able to crate such a rich experience for the students.

Differentiation

The lesson included several ways for the students to engage, process, and construct ideas with the content. They obviously read about the case before coming into class, heard a lecture about the case, responded to the questions the teachers posed, worked in groups to dig deeper into the content, were scaffolded during the process of preparing for the trial, and finally created and enacted the trial to expose what they had learned. This diverse set of activities ensured that the students had several opportunities to engage with the content, ask questions, and absorb the content throughout the exercise.

An important part of their differentiation technique was illustrated in the group activity where the students were learning from their peers while being scaffolded by the teacher’s facilitations and interventions. The trial also aided in the sense that the students were able to observe each other’s performances which illustrated facets of the issues based on in-depth analysis of each other’s roles in the trial.

Language and Culture

The teachers were able to build off of and support the students’ community and cultural knowledge by choosing the case to be studied. The Amistad case dealt with issues that were culturally and historically relevant to the class since the majority of the students were African American and Latino, including the teachers themselves. With this, the subject matter was directly relevant to the students and taught them about their heritage.

English Language Development was supported by the teachers by showing the students the effects of not knowing another language and the communication problems that it entails. They were aware that some students did not speak Spanish and used this to their advantage and illustrate this point. They also explained in Spanish some concepts to a student who needed it. The other students also were shown helping each other in Spanish to clarify some concepts. In this sense, the whole classroom culture was geared towards accommodating for bi-lingual students.

Classroom Management and Engagement

The classroom was well managed and the students well behaved, showing that the teacher had established control and respect. The norms of engagement seemed to be well established in the sense that students were comfortable in participating, answering questions, and working in groups. During the group activities, the teachers walked around verifying if there were any doubts, encouraging them to ask questions, share with their neighbors, and discuss their ideas. The teachers also allowed great freedom for the students in promoting individual and group decision-making, making them think and build upon each others knowledge.

The group activity also allowed for the teachers to mediate discussions, reflect on the subject matter and finally demonstrate what they had learned in the mock trial. They also ensured that they worked with the students to draw out the underlying issues about the case as well as making sure that they were able to follow the mock trial’s proceedings and constraints.

By ‘making it real’, they were also able to obtain full class engagement and participation. The students were clearly interested in the subject matter and put in real effort in making sure that everyone in the team was on the same page, had no doubts, and were sure about what they had to do. To the mock trial was a formidable way to assess the students knowledge and keep them motivated to present their best work.

Overall analysis of the strengths and weaknesses

The greatest weakness of this lesson I found to be the debriefing session. Granted that we might not have been presented its entirety in the video, yet it seems like it was short and shallow. I would have spent more time with the group trying to pull out what they had learned, what they had found most interesting, and what they felt about the lesson’s structure. I would also have attempted to summarize what was learned and trace back to the learning objectives along with what the teachers felt they had learned from the exercise.

The greatest strengths of this lesson were the multiple ways in which the students and teachers engaged with the content. It was not simply a lecture that exposed the students to the Amistad case and then tested them formally on what they could recall. The teachers created activities that engaged the students deeply with the content. The mock trial was a big motivator in the sense that every student participated in the activity, contributed to the task at hand and, through self investigation, deepened their knowledge about the subject at hand. The teachers were also very attentive to all students and were able to access the students’ ZPD by providing scaffolding and facilitation so that they could reach a level of understanding high enough to create and act out the mock trial.

Particularly, I was pleased to see how the teacher noticed one of the students, who did not speak Spanish, stand up following the cue from her peers, instead of truly understanding the instructions given to do so in Spanish. From the simple fact that the teacher noticed this action, I believe that in some minor way, might have acted as an informal formative assessment. This observation might cause the teachers to reflect and adapt their instructions on this task – they might say explicitly that you should only follow the instructions you undeniably understand. Yet I also feel there was a missed opportunity there for the teacher to ask the girl who stood up, why she stood up, and use that to demonstrate social pressures that lead to involuntary or automatic reflexes while in a community.

I was also pleased to see that there was absolute no mention of a test, grades, common core, or any kind of formal assessment. This shows that the teachers might be aware of reports such as 47th Annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward Public Schools which shows that there is too much emphasis on standardized testing.

Finally, the lesson was an absolute success if we analyze it using the “Identification of Evidence-based Practices” framework (Simonsen, Fairbanks, Briesch, Myers, & Sugai 2008). The use of two teachers instead of one along with a well organized and reasonably sized classroom attended to the needs of maximizing structure. Clear rules were stated, revised, monitored and enforced. One clear example was when the teacher interrupted the mock trial to correct a procedural sequence the students missed. The teachers also offered plenty of Opportunities to Respond (OTR), Class Wide Peer Tutoring (CWPT), along with some Direct Instruction. There was no evidence of the use of Computer Aided Instruction (CAI) nor Guided Notes yet they could have been part of the assigned reading and homework activities. The strategies for acknowledging appropriate behavior were limited to verbal acknowledgements yet were clear and precise. There was no evidence of inappropriate behavior so we also cannot tell if there was any strategy in place to do so. A good sign that the class was well managed and that the students were seriously engaged.

References

Simonsen, B., Fairbanks, S., Briesch, A., Myers, D., & Sugai, G. (2008). Evidence-based practices in classroom management: Considerations for research to practice. Education and Treatment of Children, 31(3), 351-380.

Intro to Teaching – Video Notes

Notes on the video were supposed to watch:

Video notes

Teachers shows pedagogical content knowledge  when evidencing the need to make connections to the student’s funds of knowledge. He is also teaching for higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy when eliciting analysis of the subject matter, evaluating its implications and even creating the reenactment of the trial.

1:31 “If you show connections. If you show how history repeats itself. If you show them  how history is still coming around even to the point that it affects you today”

Mr. Fischer – 8th Grade

      1. 2:53
        1. What we are going to study today
      2. 2:59
        1. Objective of the course – narration
      3. 3:10
        1. “Cross examination – we’ve done cases before” previous knowledge
      4. 3:37
        1. Input – lecturing about the facts
      5. 4:00
        1. Showing map – illustrating – situating story
      6. 4:30
        1. Asks questions to students – assessing what the students know
        2. Writes on the board the big ideas – modeling mind map
      7. 5:22
        1. Keeps pulling from students and scaffolding them to get out specific ideas
        2. Summarizes ideas on the board
      8. 6:30
        1. Bad handwriting
      9. 7:04
        1. Todo el mundo deven estar poniendo-se de pied neste momento
        2. Modeling the problem of communication
      10. 7:44
        1. You may sit down – classroom management
      11. 8:17
        1. How did you feel when I spoke Spanish?
        2. Eliciting emotions – affect
      12. 8:55
        1. Planning time – how to illustrate concept
        2. Preplan for when she would do it but let it flow
      13. 9:20
        1. Girl who stud up who did not speak Spanish
        2. Formattve Assessment?
        3. Had impact
      14. 9:33
        1. Reminds students how we are all different and that we have to respect each other’s differences
      15. 9:40
        1. Students prepare for the mock trial in groups
      16. 10:20
        1. They all bring something to the table
      17. 10:32
        1. You decide amongst each others who’s going to do what
      18. 11:00
        1. No leader, everybody was equal
        2. Communities of practice
      19. 11:06
        1. Facilitating / coaching / scaffolding
        2. Provided content for their examination
      20. 12:26
        1. Informal assessment
      21. 12:53
        1. Modeling opening statement
      22. 13:00
        1. I’m not going to do it for you – you know how to do it
        2. Independent practice
      23. Day 2 – 13:21
        1. Cannot teach without allowing the to ask questions as well
      24. 13:28
        1. Homework – independent practice
      25. 14:50
        1. Informal assessment
      26. 15:23
        1. Did not have help to much help from the teachers
        2. Worked independently
        3. Worked together – brainstormed
        4. Went out to do what we had to do
      27. Day 3 – 15:47
      28.  19:33
        1. Student speaks Spanish – transfer from the modeling example the teacher gave in classroom
      29. 23:22
        1. Summarizing what student learned – Bloom’s Taxonomy
      30. 24:10
        1. Debriefing
      31. 24:20
        1. We will continue to study
      32. 24:40
        1. Showing a real example of nowadays
      33. 25:00
        1. Anyone have any questions?
        2. Good job – great class
      34. 25:25
        1. Makes you think a little more
      35. 25:30
        1. Trial got all the information we already new and made it more realistic

 

Intro to Teaching – Final Notes

Notes in preparation to writting final paper:

Learning

ZPD – Distance between actual development level as determined by independent problem solving vs. that through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more levels of competence.

Transfer – learning in ways that allow us to solve novel problems that we may encounter later.

Metacognition – Knowledge about one’s own cognitive processes, aka one’s own abilities to learn and solve problems. Types of cognitive processes include: attention and fluency, short term memory, storage vs. retrieval, comprehension, motivation and transfer.

Expertise – could be a combination of both content-knowledge and organizational skill and ability to implement and expand.

Instructional Planning

“What will I do to develop effective lessons organized into a cohesive unit?” Marzano, 2007

Action steps:

  1. Identify the focus of a Unit of Instruction
    1. Focus on knowledge that leads towards the goals
    2. Focus on issues that leads towards the goals
    3. Focus on student exploration
  2. Plan for lesson segments that will be routine components of every lesson
    1. Communicate learning goals
    2. Track progress and celebrate success
    3. Establish rules and procedures
  3. Lesson design plan:
    1. Anticipatory set
    2. Objective and purpose
    3. Input
    4. Modeling
    5. Checking for understanding
    6. Guided Practice
    7. Independent Practice
  4. Plan for content specific lesson segments
    1. Help interact with new knowledge
    2. Help practice on the now knowledge
    3. Help generate and test hypothesis about knowledge
    4. Lesson segments devoted to critical – input experience
    5. Lesson segments devoted to practice and deepening of student’s understanding of content
  5. Plan for actions that must be of taken on the spot
    1. Engage students
    2. Rules and procedures – adherence or not
    3. Relationship with students
    4. Communicate with expectations
  6. Develop a flexible draft of daily activities for a unit
  7. Review the critical aspects of effective teaching daily

Bloom’s Taxonomy

  1. Remember – recognizing and recalling facts
  2. Understand – understanding what the facts mean
  3. Apply – Applying the facts, rules, concepts, and ideas
  4. Analyze – Breaking down information into component parts
  5. Evaluate – Judging the value of information or ideas
  6. Create – Combining parts to make a new whole

Objectives – behavioral and measurable

Goals – longer term and might no be achievable

Content Knowledge and Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Differentiation

  • Working with ZPD
  • Account for individual differences
  • Adjusting scaffolds to the child
  • Adjusting scaffolds to the subject
  • Using scaffolds to guide students work in classroom
  • Capitalizing on student’s developmental interests

Readiness

  • No use to step over child’s natural evolutionary steps
  • Supporting social and emotional development
  • Supporting identity development
  • Cultural contexts and development
  • Learning diverse cultural contexts
  • School as a cultural context

Assessment

  • Formative assessment – learn from students and adjust teaching
  • Summative assessment – evaluate goals at the end of a teaching
  • Learning progression
  • Prior knowledge assessments
  • K.W.L.
    • What you Know
    • What the Want to understand
    • Later, what you have learned
  • Rubrics
  • Feedback
  • Assessing for transfer
  • Student self assessment
  • Formal and informal assessment
  • Equity concerns
  • Grades and motivation
  • High and low stakes assessment
  • Looking inside the Black Box

Diversity and Funds of Knowledge

  • Capitalize on school and community resources
  • The culture of power
    • “My kids know how to be Black. You all teach him how to be successful in the White mans’ s world”, Delpit, L., 1995
  • We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.” Riley, 2014

Professional Development

  • How to teach teachers teach in a new way

Intro to Teaching – Week 10 – Class Notes

Very good last class – able to wrap up with solid discussions about the greater challenges of education and teaching.

Funds of Knowledge vs. Prior Knowledge

  • Funds is about a community’s practice – not only culture but way of doing things
  • How do use these practices within the classroom the help for learner
  • Prior knowledge is typically something specific the student learned before

Cohen – Ms. Oublier

  • Teacher training and professional development
  • PCK and CK
    • “She thought that her revolution was over. Her teaching had changed definitively. She had arrived at the other shore.” p. 325
    • “Lacking deep knowledge, Mrs. O was simply unaware of much mathematical content and many ramifications off the material she taught…. Because her grip on mathematics was so modest.” p. 322
    • “Hence teachers are the most important agents of instructional policy (Cohen, 1988; Lipsky, 1980), but the state’s new policy also asserts that teachers are the problem. It is, after all, their knowledge and skills that are deficient.” p. 326
    • “Teachers also would have to learn a new practice of mathematics teaching, while learning the new mathematics and unlearning the old.” p. 327

San Francisco Teacher Residency

  • Just like medical students
  • Expose future teachers to practice

 Week 1 reboot

  • Look at the video again and see how much we have learned.

Video Notes:

  • Sitting in groups
  • Sets out clear mechanics of the class
  • Peer-to-peer teaching
  • Visualization of process – modeling by the teacher
  • Student centered teaching
  • Generate own data for better engagement and ownership of information
  • Prior knowledge
  • Transfer
  • Modeling by the student on the board
  • Asks questions from the students, doesn’t give out answers straight away
  • Facilitation of the process

Post video notes:

  • Clearly there was instructional planning
  • PCK & CK were there
  • Development – teacher was aware of where the students were and where he wants them to be at
  • Assessment – peer review
  • Classroom management – not much – students were already well behaved

Room for improvement

  • Show relevance of content material with real life

Reread notes

  • We were given out notes from the same video we did earlier in the quarter
    • Noticed similar things but lacked some terminology acquired during this class
    • Had not thought about / did not know about certain aspects or terminology of teaching:
      • Classroom management
      • Peer-to-peer teaching
      • Modeling
      • Prior knowledge
      • Transfer
      • Instructional planning
      • ZPD

Intro to Teaching – Week 10 – Reading Notes

Cohen, D. K. (1990). A revolution in one classroom: The case of Mrs. Oublier. Educational Evaluation and Policy. 12(3). 311-329.

Rereading – Mrs. Oublie was also assigned as a reading in Qualitative Research 🙂 Interesting to read it with a different lens.

  • Something old, something new: missinterpretations of policy lead to partial teaching practice change.
    • “Is Mrs. O’s mathematical revolution a story of progress, or of confusion? Does it signal an advance for the new math framework, or a setback?” p. 323
  • Teachers may not be willing to change way of teaching
    • “She thought that her revolution was over. Her teaching had changed definitively. She had arrived at the other shore.” p. 325
  • How to teach teachers not to teach by telling, by telling them how to teach?
    • “If students need a new instruction to learn to understand mathematics, would not teachers need a new instruction to learn to teach a new mathematics?”. p. 327
    • “Hence teachers are the most important agents of instructional policy (Cohen, 1988; Lipsky, 1980), but the state’s new policy also asserts that teachers are the problem. It is, after all, their knowledge and skills that are deficient.” p. 326
    • “Teachers also would have to learn a new practice of mathematics teaching, while learning the new mathematics and unlearning the old.” p. 327

Zimmerman, J. (2014). Why is American Teaching so Bad?

  • Women as teachers – lower salaries, maternal instinct
    • That helped save money for taxpayers, because school districts could pay women less than their male counterparts. It also capitalized on women’s natural instincts and abilities…” 
  • Quality of teachers in decline – create Teach for America – but still need Teacher Professional Development
    • “By 1980, Texas Monthly published an award-winning article showing that public school teachers in Houston and Dallas scored lower on reading and math tests than the average sixteen-year-old in nearby suburbs did.”
    • “Everyone understands that you can’t be a nurse without attending a nursing school with carefully developed standards that must be met if candidates are to be systematically inducted into the profession. Most of our schools of education lack such high standards.”
  • Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) – Lee Shulman, Stanford
    • “I am a full professor at a major research university, but I could not, without much preparation, teach high school chemistry.”
  • Japanese teachers have weekly routine for PD
    • “Japanese teachers even have a separate word for this process, jugyokenkyu, which is built into their weekly routines. All teachers have designated periods to observe each other’s classes, study curriculum, and otherwise hone their craft.”
  • American education is technocentric
    • “But the countries that are outpacing us at school, like Japan and Finland, are noticeably low-tech in their classrooms; they recognize that it’s the teacher that counts, not the technology. In America, by contrast, we’re always looking for the next gadget to improve—and, one suspects, to supplant—our beleaguered teaching profession.”

Intro Teaching – Week 9 – Reading Notes

Topic

The Politics of Teaching and Teacher Evaluation: What are the political hot-buttons in teaching? Who are the stakeholders and what are their perspectives? How should teachers be evaluated?

Assignment

  1. Richardson, J. & Bushaw, W. J. (2015). Testing doesn’t measure up for Americans. The 47th Annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward Public Schools. Arlington, VA: Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll.
  2. Haertel, E. H. (2013). Reliability and validity of inferences about teachers based on student test scores. The 14th William H. Angoff Memorial Lecture.

Bring on a device (no need to read ahead):

National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Common Core State Standards. Washington, DC

Reading Notes: 

IMG_1226 IMG_1227

Intro Teaching – Week 9 – Assignment Position Paper

Went to the park to do most of the reading for this assignment : )

IMG_1223

Assignment:

Take a position on a current controversial issue in education. Choose one of the following:

  1. Flipped Classroom
  2. Gifted Education
  3. Standardized Testing
  4. Teaching Grit

Read these papers:

Reading Notes:

IMG_1224 IMG_1225 IMG_1228 IMG_1229

Response: 

Position Paper – Flipped Classroom 
Lucas Longo – Nov 14, 2015

The Flipped Classroom has become a buzz word which like most, become oversimplifications of a concept and over-promises results. I believe that much of the debate lies around its real effectiveness and its implementations. Obviously some debate arrises from common  misconceptions of its definition as well as its focus, in my opinion.

The main oversimplification and misconception is that by simply watching video lectures at home and doing assignments in the classroom would suffice. To ‘flip the classroom’ one must rethink both the content students consume at home and what happens inside the classroom. One must consider the learner’s household context, access to content, and the content itself. Within the classroom, one must understand how to engage learners in scaffolded discussions, activities and other pedagogical moves that are usually not part of the teacher’s repertoire. It’s what you do with the content, be it a lecture in class or on video. If there are no cognitively engaging activities following the content consumption, it will only have an expository impact, failing to stimulate exploratory and meaningful learning. A class like that would look like students are being tested every single day doing their homework silently and individually in class.

The “nothing new” argument also strongly resounds with me. A major change that has to happen “inside the black box” (Black, P. & Wiliam, D.,1998) for the model to work. What does a teacher do if all of the sudden her school is ‘flipped’ when the teaching style was direct? A good starting point would be to understand how to manage this new format of a classroom where the students must participate, interact with each other and get one on one help from the teacher. “To teach, I would need to establish a way for students to work that made it possible for the activities I planned to be educative” (Lampert, M., 2001). A reading assignment and discussion in class model is already a flipped classroom, along with John Dewey’s 20th century ideas of a student centered approach to teaching.

The most positive aspect of the model is that if implemented with care, it encompasses several teaching methods, theories and frameworks at once. More one-on-one teaching leads to a more personalized learning experience making it easier to work on Zones of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, L., 1978). Teachers are now talking with students instead of at students, hopefully making classwork more meaningful than homework. With this increased interactivity with the students, the teacher could also leverage funds of knowledge, differentiate better, move students toward higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and hopefully be able to use formative assessments to improve the class. Not an easy task for a teacher with limited time and resources available.

For the students, this model promises that you can now study at your own pace (which you can do with books as well) and learn more from, or at least engage more with, your peers. It could also mean a greater potential for parental engagement since homework becomes less of an individualized activity. The content is shared and takes advantage of Joint Media Engagement (Takeuchi, L. & Stevens, R., 2011) effects where the interaction of the participants promote enhanced understanding of the content. To this note, there are opportunities to establish norms for the new “homework” where one encourage higher engagement with parents, peers, and friends outside of school to watch these lectures.

In general though, the greatest impact this framework has is on the change mindset it provokes. Even though it is a quasi buzz word, it makes people think. It makes people imagine what they could do differently. I am sure that most who hear the term and/or has little knowledge of it, comes up with interesting variations on what they could do if they ‘flipped’ the traditional model better known to them. This could produce interesting results or at the least change the pace of the classroom. A simple “let us try something new” in one class could spark a revolution.

On the other hand it could be harmful. Students might learn less from the TV than from a human and therefore start falling behind in the course content at an even greater pace. Problems at home such as access to the content itself and non conducive learning environments is one of the Achilles’ tendon of the model. In conjunction with this, EdTech companies want to push for it since it means potential new sales of a ‘magical’ solution for “the problem”.

Teachers might also see this model as much more work. They would have to either film themselves giving a lecture or spend time finding videos for the students to watch at home instead of simply showing up and putting on their regular ‘show’. During class, they would actually have to plan out several activities that might be harder to facilitate, manage, and execute.

For me, the flipped classroom model reduces the repetitive lecturing teachers have to do each time they give a course. It makes sense to record what you want to say, or find videos that might explain concepts better than you can, and have the students watch them. Yet this is simply an artifact that technology now allows us to do. Not much different than a book; just on another medium. You have to know what to do with the content.

It has to be made clear that an integral part of flipping the classroom is flipping the mindset of the teacher and providing them with tools, best practices, suggestions and examples of what to do with these learners to promote peer-learning, engaging discussions, classroom management, conflict resolution, amongst several other strategies and activities. Changing the mindset of the teacher about in-class activities, as well as providing adequate tools and resources, are the most important outcome of this entire debate in my opinion.

“Students tend to prefer in-person lectures to video lectures, but prefer interactive classroom activities over lectures. Anecdotal evidence suggests that student learning is improved for the flipped compared to traditional classroom. However, there is very little work investigating student learning outcomes objectively. We recommend for future work studies investigating of objective learning outcomes using controlled experimental or quasi-experimental designs. We also recommend that researchers carefully consider the theoretical framework used to guide the design of in-class activities.” (Bishop, J. & Verleger, D., 2013) 

Reference

  • Black, P. & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80
  • Darling-Hammond, L. & Bransford, J. (Eds.). (2005). Preparing teachers for a changing world: What teachers should learn and be able to do. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
  • Lampert, M. (2003). Teaching problems and the problems of teaching. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • Vygotsky, L. (1978). Interaction Between Learning and Development. From: Mind and Society (pp. 79-91). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
  • Takeuchi, L. & Stevens, R. (2011) The New Coviewing: Designing for Learning through Joint Media Engagement. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and LIFE Center
  • Bishop, J. & Verleger, D., (2013) The Flipped Classroom: A Survey of the Research. 2013 ASEE Annual Conference

Intro to Teaching – Week 8 – Class Notes

We talked about classroom management and about our next assignment in class.

No notes or pictures but great class.

Correction- took notes on the iPhone:

Intro to Teaching
Nov 10
Class Notes

Homework next week – position paper – can cite from any reading

Questions for instructors

  • How does all this apply to higher level teaching?
  • Professional Development / Teacher Credential Programs

East House – Teacher Credential Programs – 5:30 – 7:00pm

How did Lampert establish norms to teach the math content?

Proactive classroom management – set norms to be able to get good behavior

“These kids must be gifted”

Classroom management

Video Review: what are the types of management techniques are being used?

  • gives them a method to write down
    • Write the 4 down
      • Write 3 sub-items for each
  • walks around verifying if they are having problems
  • share with neighbor to discuss ideas
  • “anyone want to add to that?”
  • promotes individual decision-making – why – made them think
    • discuss with group
  • mediated discussion – now you reply
  • as a result of this discussion – reflect 
  • what we learned – is that you yourselves com up with discussions and good questions

Behavior management

-> I didn’t say that parents were at fault but that teaching is parenting to the nth power

Video analysis

Kids do well if they want to.

  • Your role will be to figure out what he wants.
  • Could be potentially dangerous if you work on the wrong ‘want’.

Kids do well if they can.

  • Your role is to make sure that you help there is nothing on the way.
  • Collaborative problem solving.
  • Try to find together with the kid what the underlying issue is to find out what is getting in the way of getting them there.

Restorative justice

  • as opposed to zero tolerance
  • talk to the kid – empathize with their victim

Audio media about Restorative Justice

  • kids are a long term project

Intro to Teaching – Week 8 – Reading Notes

Reading 

  • TPPT Ch. 4: 51-100

Zoom in and out and focus on the following question: How does Lampert establish norms for students to do the sort of mathematical problem solving she wants them to engage in?  What factors does she consider?

  • “Evidence-based Practices in Classroom Management: Considerations for Research to Practice”, Simonsen et all (pdf)

Think back on a student who struggled behaviorally.   As you read, keep this student in mind and relate the readings back to him/her. 

– or –

Think about a teacher who had the best classroom management and the one who had the worst classroom management and relate the readings back to him/her. Reflect and come ready to discuss.

Notes

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