How have I grown this semester? Well, I am still a short dude, about 5’ 3”, lol jk! Sorry just what came to mind first. But on a serious note, at the beginning of the semester I really didn’t have an expectations except to try to learn as much as possible from the program and from my C-15 fam! I really didn’t use much technology in the classroom. The bits I used was to provide my students with daily agendas and live links to classroom tasks and homework assignments. Here and there I would pull up a Desmos activity that involved students to use their laptops but that’s it. So my comfort of using tech in the class made me feel a bit uncomfortable. This is probably due to the fact that I don’t have a class set of chrome books, I only have 5 available, and not all my students own one. And I didn’t really bother to think how I could implement tech tools with the resources that I have available. These attitudes towards using tech in the class have definitely changed now. Especially now that I have ran a project in my classroom that involves students doing most of their work on laptops. I realized now, that my students know how to create and have a good hand on using google docs or slides. Also, when telling them to bring devices, a little bit more than half of my students brought devices and by asking neighboring teachers to borrow their class set, almost all of my thirty-something students had a laptop! So now I am more motivated to implement projects or tasks that involve technology. I don’t fell as afraid as I did before. The tools that have been presented to us through this course have also helped out. It’s really nice to know that there are a ton of websites that are free for us to use and implement in our curriculum. That is something that I am looking forward to in the future. I think one thing that comes to mind is assigning not just projects but small homework assignments through different websites for students to play games or create games on their own and then bring them to class and master the math content as a class. But I am probably more excited to see and listen to what my cohort will be doing in their classroom. I enjoy listening to others’ ideas and their experiences in the classroom. Most of what I do is by doing just that.
I have previously heard about flipped teaching. But never really researched it or “dived” into what it’s all about. And I honestly haven’t heard about Challenge Based Learning till now. To me flipped teaching seems amazing, just to think that I can give students resources that are then assigned as homework assignments or notes for them to do at home and then in the classroom we can build and master the content through rigorous tasks. That can save time in the classroom and focus on the math content instead of note taking per say. I can see how CBL can motivate students because the teacher is allowing for students to engage in something that students are interested in and then they are allowed to come up with their own ideas and hypothesis for solutions to a situation that impacts them personally. How much more engaging can that be? If I was in high school, I would have loved to work on a project in my Math class with peers and given a situation that is affecting our community and allowing us to find solutions to help others out while learning math makes me want to do math! This is my second year teaching and so far I have adapted, for the most part, PBL learning in my class. Now that I have taught the same subject for two years and feel somewhat comfortable with it, I think that I am ready to at least try the flipped classroom next year in Math 1. Will I try it in all of my Math classes? Maybe not, but who knows. I like this idea of flipped teaching because it does allow students to learn the content at their own pace, because I have seen students who don’t get to write all the notes down or are too shy to ask questions. So maybe at the comfort of their homes or at a café or a friend’s house they will be able to learn the content better. But before I can really try this out I would love to attend conferences or any sessions about flipped teaching and get a better idea of how I can really structure this in my classroom.
I found a lot of great and insightful information in the four videos we watched for this week’s session. In my opinion, all 4 of them share the idea of allowing students the freedom of practicing the 4 C’s in the classroom. At times the scholars in the videos give the message that these skills can’t be taught but that students will become critical thinkers, creative, collaborators, and or communicators through open ended and rigorous tasks. And for students to accomplish this we should allow them to learn exponentially or at least facilitate this type of learning environment. This is something that John Seely Brown mentioned in his talk. He believes that this can be accomplished by students having a mindset where they have a passionate pursuit of extreme performance with a deep questioning disposition while being committed in being present and engaged in the classroom. I also admired Ken Robinson’s quote on “seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are (children), and seeing our children for the hope that they are. Our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future.” This to me is a great 21st century skill since us as teachers have to allow students to use their talents to be successful in any content class. This ties in with what another scholar in a video, Daniel Pink mentioned about advocating that the answer isn’t just one answer and to find it is straight ahead, but the answer should be “peripheral”.
All of the talks tie in with 21st century teaching and learning, equity, the brain etc. since my biggest take away is giving students open-ended work where they are challenged which then makes them use their own 4 C’s skills to a certain extent. Being a Math teacher, my students and probably the majority of them, still believe that in Math you always have to get the correct answer, no matter what. That there is only one way to find a solution and that it seems to be the end of the world when they make a mistake in a Math classroom. I know that I have to put in my part in what Ken Robinson says to “celebrate human imagination”. As a second year teacher this is something that I have been trying to get better at in acknowledging and celebrating mistakes in my class. This school year I opened up my class with 3 days on celebrating mistakes and trying to create this type of culture. This goes in with Mobley’s 6 insights in helping students think creatively. To me thinking creatively is giving students the option to go in any direction to find a solution. One of the main ways I practice this in my classroom is showcasing student work where each student work showcases a different approach to a solution. The open ended tasks in my classroom allows students to be creative and I also try to students work with people with different academic capacities so they can get that exposure to diverse ideas when doing group work. What I do is in no way perfect because I know I have to give more power to my students. I say this because when I feel that students aren’t practicing or using the 4 C’s I tend to take over. So how do I not take over and feel comfortable in seeing them struggle? The feeling I get is to jump in and guide them in the right direction and at times their guided with my thinking and in what I believe in. I catch myself doing that a lot. Which brings me back to the main question, how do we or can we even teach creativity? As I began reading the end of Darling-Hammond, I was trying to focus on the first principle: meaningful learning goals. Honestly I can say that I agree with a lot of what was said in this section especially on how assessments should be used to better support students. I think something that myself and the rest of my cohort is doing with our research since we will be gathering data and then analyzing it. After analyzing this I believe that we can use these results to make our classrooms a better learning environment. These assessments should be used just for that not to rank our schools or our students. These assessments should be “used to guide learning, diagnose students’ needs, and inform teaching.” (pg. 292) I think that if we can do this we can really help students prepare for the future while instilling 21st century skills rather than preparing them to just pass the class.
If teachers can’t explore new teaching practices then how can we develop and improve the learning environment in our classroom? The third policy mentioned in Darling-Hammond, was Strong Professional Practice. I mean, who wouldn’t want an incentive for developing their professional growth? I have been lucky enough to attend a couple of AVID Summer Institutes and a talk from Jo Boaler but for me they have been free. There have been many opportunities where I would have loved to attend other week long conferences or daily conferences but I can’t attend because they are expensive and I have to pay for them. Why can’t the government at any level support teachers in a better way for these opportunities to be equitable and accessible for all of us teachers? This has to change. Another policy that caught my attention was the last one: Schools Organized for Student and Teacher Learning. I loved the idea that the a change should happen where there are “investments in technology that extend the capacity of every teacher and child to connect with an infinite variety of resources and tools for learning, and in new assessment systems that value students’ abilities to use these tools to solve real-world problems.” I feel that we are all trying to do this but our time to develop this is very limited with very little resources. This was seen across the Learning and the Brain Log where there was a theme across our ideas of changing the classroom where students are and can be more creative through collaborative and engaging curriculum. A lot of the focus this week (days) was done towards the movement of integrating the 4 C’s into our classrooms by having people from the very top all the way down to students working together to accomplish this. I truly believe that these four characteristics are highly important to prepare students for the “real life”. But as a teacher I honestly feel very frustrated. After seeing the case study that I observed, doing the readings and from previous class discussions it feels really frustrating that I don’t have all the technological tools available to me and my students. I have 5 chrome books for my 32+ students to use. If I ask my students to get out their laptops about 8 students on average will get their devices out. I know I have and am doing activities in the classroom that involve the 4 C’s but it lacks the technology part. If I had enough resources along with my colleagues I am sure that we will be more open to try and take risks in our own classrooms and try assignments or projects that involve more students to work with technology. As mentioned in the ACOT article, they “found that teachers were not as interested in learning about technology when access to technology seemed unlikely.” The crazy thing about this is that this quote comes from a study from 1994, we’re in 2018!
In regards to what I will do to make sure that 21st century learning is happening in my classroom is that I will have to adapt these skills while integrating technology with the resources that I have. I need to learn on how to better outreach to colleagues at the current school site that I am in or from any other educators and learn from them when it comes to using technology in the classroom. I feel frustrated with the lack of resources but I have to get that out of my mind and try to think as positively as I can and implement technology in the tasks and projects I already do in my Math and AVID classes. A lot of the information in The Flat World was very interesting to me especially in Chapter 5 where it talked about New Jersey and Connecticut on how they evolved their educational system for the better. What was disappointing was my own home state of California. I remember growing up while our governator was in charge and how bad our education system went. But how can all of this change. One of the biggest messages I got was to listen. Listen to the students on what they want and what they need in terms of what they want for their futures. Adora Svitak said it perfectly, it should be a reciprocal learning among teachers and students. I should include this in my teaching practice as I work with my students. I should listen to them more or get to know them a little bit better to know what they want to learn and get out of my Math 1 class.
A lot of students in my class are motivated to pursue higher education after they graduate therefore I want to make sure that my class, even though it’s math 1, is preparing them for the future. But there’s obstacles. Not every student has access to a laptop while we are in class or when they are in their homes. Do they all have access to Wi-Fi? I don’t know. I wish I had more projects (big or small) that directly relate to my students where they can analyze data taken from our own community so they can apply Math 1 concepts to this data. That way they can see exactly what’s going on in our community and maybe even think on how they can better the community. To do this though what I need is more time with colleagues to discuss and plan projects that will help our student learning. I am sure that if we are all on the same page we can create amazing projects, homework/classwork assignments or assessments that can get our students ready for the future. Another thing that I can think of that I might need is not just technological devices but new and current software that students can use in the classroom. I mean, we live just a drive away from Silicon Valley and my students can’t even have a class set of devices that will allow them to explore the world of crunching live-time stats of Steph Curry’s three point shots during a game? How cool would that be if high school students can dive in to that world of sports data or any kind of "data analyzation" with technology? Purpose of Lesson: Kate Summers, the teacher of this biology class in Hayward, created a Project Base Learning activity for students where these students would teach each other key concepts of Chemistry.
How are students learning: One of the first things that caught my eye during the video is that students were actively collaborating with a partner on this project. A lot of the work was done through google docs or google slides but there was plenty of verbal communication and use of resources like textbooks and internet. Another piece of evidence of how students were learning was the time of their presentations. Chemistry is a subject they will be taking next year, so the simple fact that they were giving their classmates notes on this topic was new to them and they had a level of “mastery” in key concepts of Chemistry if they had to teach the class. What is the teacher doing: Attached to the video is a PDF file of what Kate hands out to her students in regards to the expectations for the project. She is very specific on the items and topics that students need to cover on their lesson like what key words they should teach, they type of visual representation, the handout they will give their classmates and to create an engaging activity for the class. In the video she is also seen walking around the classroom helping students. But it seems that there is more independence among students as they work with their partners throughout the project. Can I use this lesson: I really like the structure of this lesson and it could work in my Math 1 class and even in my AVID class. I like the idea of how students explore key concepts of a subject they will be involved in the following school year. I can do something like this as well where students can look into the world of quadratics since in Math 1 we focus on linear equations. Or since we do look at the Pythagorean Theorem in our current unit, they can explore the basics of Trigonometry, which they will explore next year as well. Here are the following three videos that observed on case studies that demonstrated the use of digital media and technology in the classroom:
Video #1: Collaborative Digital Presentations Enrich Projects Video #2: Tech Buddies: Building Technology Skills Through Peer Teaching Video #3: Tech in Real Life: Students See Devices as Tools, Not Toys Well that is a lot of data put out there for me. It seems to me that the title of this book so far ties in to the fact that there aren’t many resources poured into our public educational system and support given to teachers to develop their practice that this is effecting our students. Our educational system is metaphorically flat. No change is happening. Is it weird that my inner Math teacher is thinking of what kind of 2-dimensional shape best fits this idea?
As a “new teacher”, only in my second year, I have seen how we struggle with large number of students in a classroom while we still have the expectation to teach each and every single student equally but we lack technology in the classroom, so how can we have students build and explore 21st century skills that will help the in college and in their future careers? I feel that this is where the achievement gap among student comes in to play. A problem is that a lot of students still don’t have access to a device at home and aren’t able to complete assignments or look deeper into a project they are working on because the only time to do that is in the classroom. The third chapter, New Standards and Old Inequalities, was a very interesting chapter for me because during my high school years I was right in the middle of the No Child Left behind Act. I remember being one of the first classes that had to take the high school exit exam and how much pressure there was. Curriculum at the time was focused on how to pass this class. That was our main focus. In a Math class it was all about memorization. Now that I am a teacher, I think about my English Language Learner on how they would fair on a high school exit exam. Probably not to well, and the problem with this is that the exam would discourage these and many other students to not even try to perform well in class and possibly drop out. Even though with the newer Common Core Standards, I enjoy seeing my students explore Mathematical concepts and work together to work through tasks using skills like critical thinking, collaboration, inquiry and even organizing their thinking on paper or verbally. Students probably don’t realize that these skills are skills they will be using once they go into the work force or in college. |
Samuel UreñaWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2018
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