Confronting Ableism

Ableism is the idea that there is a preferential way of learning and interaction. Ableism is the idea that there is preferred normal and then there is everything else. According to this idea it is best to walk rather than be in a wheelchair, read rather than listen, spell rather than use a spellchecker. This article wants us to stop seeing disability in a negative light and intend see it is a uniqueness in our students that is not meant to be overcome but instead exploited. The article then goes through some guide-lines for effective special education teaching.

This argument about disability being a blessing falls under the same argument that we should see being obese as being beautiful or bad vision forcing good listening skills. I am saying that we should not value the person for they are a person, but we should not pretend to ourselves that having bad vision, being handicap, or being obese is a good thing. I think people can often make these statements in order to make themselves sound accepting towards others and enlightened but we need to ask ourselves, “if there was a magic button that would mean no one would ever have bad eyes again, would you push it?” Yes, I would. If you could push this button and no-one would ever have down syndrome, would you push it. Absolutely. This is the world as it is, not the world as it should be, and having those traits are not beneficial to their existence. However, we should recognize that they all have something to contribute, something that makes them valuable and we need to find this, but lets not belittle them by saying their flaws are their strengths.

Moore Chapter 3

Moore’s Chapter 3, “Setting Goals, and Objectives,” from Effective Instructional strategies examines how teachers should decide exactly what they should teach, how the students will learn it, and how the students will prove that they know it. In order to know exactly what goals and objectives teachers should set for their students, they need to know the level at which their students are starting. From this point, the teacher can plan appropriate goals of learning growth. Several factors determine the starting level of students. Some students can have special education needs, while others could be extremely limited in English proficiency. However, students may also come to the teacher as extremely gifted and thereby require their own differentiation.

The objective should be a statement of what the students are expected to be able to do after instruction. Since the students will require attention, the objectives must be able to include students from multiple levels. They must also set exactly what skills and knowledge students must show as result of instruction. They must be measurable. When they are measurable they build student and teacher accountability. This way objectives make sure learning is actually occurring.

Instruction must contain three elements, expected behavior and/or product, specific conditions, and a rubric. Communication and execution of these objectives are all required for successful learning. Furthermore, good objectives follow a taxonomy of objectives that moves up the difficulty scale. This is helpful for differentiation. These taxonomies exist for cognitive development, meaning blooms scale, and affective domains meaning the students attitude and emotions. This affective domain includes personal skills like making value judgments and organization. The third domain is psychomotor domain which relates to the development of muscular abilities including sports, music, art and vocational skills. Thus, standards keep teachers and students accountable and objectives are how teacher seek to actually meet these standards.

This chapters focus supports and aligns to everything we have learned as a teacher. Accountability is the watchword these days. It’s a vital concept for both education and the marketplace today. Assuming teachers care about standards or have some incentive to care about standards, standards provide the goal that students should strive for. As long as the student can internalize the rationale for why they must know this, and assuming it is in fact geared to their level, standards provide the goal and organization for students. It makes the whole process transparent to both the teacher and the student. I have learned that in the class the most important thing is to be transparent with your instructions and goals. Students who end up guessing get sick of being wrong and will either give up or act out. However, the problem with this comes down to practically. Sure all teachers would love to be able to incorporate this ideas and make sure their objectives are working up the scales. But finding the time to do that is a taller order. It just like most things gets better with practice, I assume.

Cultural Captial

DiMaggio, Paul. "Cultural Captial and School Success: The impact of status culture particiaption on the grades of U.S. High Schools." American Sociological Review 47 (1982): 189-201.

This article, Cultural Capital and School Success: The Impact of Status culture participation on the grades of U.S. High school students by Paul DiMaggio, assesses the impact of a students’ cultural capital on their grades. This theory revolves around Weber’s idea of status culture, where a certain group will monopolize personal ties, shared conventions, cultural traits, tastes and styles. Those who do not have these traits will not be allowed within the status group. Thus, when these groups form at the top of the social hierarchy it is does to differentiate themselves form the lower classes. If a certain level of education or job field becomes associated with this group then it is excluded to other groups. Thus, the idea of going to college, or going to some ivy league enters the realm of impossible in the students eyes. The most important factors that the article found in accessing the students level of cultural capital is the Father’s education and the head of the household’s occupation. This article then goes on to analyze through studies how true this hypothesis is. After some complex statistics, the article finds out that this original theory of status culture does not transcend generations. Thus, if a parent has an academic advantage due to their cultural background, there is only a 30% of passing this down to their sons, and a 60% for daughters.

I think these findings demonstrate why it is so important for Teach for America teachers to be in the classroom at every level. The fact that children don’t necessary correlate to the success of their parents shows that there are many influences on a students cultural capital rather than just their parents. It can come from their interaction with different peers and different adults. However, as students do need to be learning the cultural capital, Teach for America teachers who often come from this elite culture provide first hand interaction with this type of culture for students. This is why I think its important for teachers not to change how they dress, how they interact, and how they talk from their elite education experience to teaching. Students need to be exposed to this kind of behavior so that they can begin to incorporate it in their own behavior. This I think is an under-published benefit of Teach for America. Students are interacting with people who come from a privileged background, so not only does this make those with the privileged background want to change the education system, but it also opens up the world of possibility to the students who have these teachers.

Teaching to ELL

Joseph, Furner M. "Teach Mathematics: Strategies to Reach All Students." Intervention in School and Clinic 41.1 (2005):

This article Teach Mathematics: Strategies to Reach all Students, goes through 20 tangible ways to teach math to ELL students. These techniques vary from the simple #9 “Explain directions clearly, and repeat key terms” to the more complex ones like #16 “Concretize math concepts with total physical response. The article described these strategies as a grab-bag, designed to give teachers flexibility in using a variation of different techniques in order to get their ELL students to learn. However, a majority of these techniques have some common threads. First, none of these strategies require separate exclusive ELL time. These strategies are meant to be used to teach math, rather than transform the math class into an extension of English class. Second, most of these strategies try and use multiple sensory learning in order to get kids who might not be able to understand with the ears and tongues to be able to understand with their eyes and hands. Third, many of these strategies also try to build connections to their native cultures and math. This way they help to create a welcoming environment where the kids will be feel comfortable than be vulnerable in a new environment.

Even though this article is about math, I found that most of principles and practices mentioned in it could be applied in any classroom. For example #7, Encouraging students to think aloud when solving word problems. Word problems exist in many subject fields, from Science to Social Studies. #3 Applying problems to real-life situations helps with anybody, not just ELL students. #17 Creating word banks would be helpful for any class that depends of key definitions. Therefore, I found this article helpful for any teacher with ELL students.

However, I think the article suffers from some problems because if you craft your lessons so much to the needs of the ELL students, won’t this negatively affect those who don’t need the work as ELL. This assumes that certain ways of teaching that are better than others. For example if you can teach a lesson through inductive simulations, this will be better than just a straight lecture. Thus, if you teach your math with these ELL students in mind doesn’t that come at the expense of the kids who already speak English. I am in particular thinking of the example of using the Abacus to help Chinese students relate to math. This seems like the teacher is planning his/her lesson around the individual ELL learner.

I assume that this will not always be the case, and often times there is no clear single best way of learning, so an ELL strategy could work for the entire class. Also, times the lesson plan could be differentiated so that the learning for the ELL kids will not come at the other’s expense.

List of Web resources

Algebra Henrico County Virginia Google Search it for lots of good infomration

ELA – teenink.com – teen stories that are free

ELA - readwritethink.com lesson planning for ELA, might have other places

Math - purplemath.com Descriptions of math, breaks down difficult concepts

Football: ndnation.com

General

Youtube: Berc group

Whole brain teaching: upbeat way of teaching, good review

Chapter Summaries

Chapter 5:

Chapter 5 covers the various components of direct teaching and in particular emphasizes how exposition teaching with interactive teaching is the most effective method of direct instruction. Direct Instruction uses deductive knowledge, where the Teacher directs the students to the knowledge they are supposed to uncover. It is a more traditional model of teaching, where the primary actor is the Teacher who either conveys information to the student and checks for understanding through questioning. This varies from indirect instruction in that the later uses inductive knowledge where the student is the central actor unlocking the material.

Direct instruction is better for covering the lower levels of blooms and is very efficient at conveying high levels of information. It is efficient not only in how much knowledge is conveyed in a teaching period, but is also fairly simple to plan for the teacher. The teacher simply has to have a background of the knowledge and be able to show that knowledge to the students in a clear manner. However, direct instruction suffers from weaknesses in that it has the lowest level of retention, and it doesn’t use the critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity of the student. Thus, when the student does not use these thinking skills, the student is often bored and unmotivated. Thus, the student does not retain the material. These shortfalls can be offset through interacting with the students by using effective questioning. However, it still does not produce the same level of retention as indirect teaching.

I find it interesting that at the college level this in the only type of teaching that professors employ. This not only explains why the freshmen year of college is so difficult, but why so many students don’t retain the knowledge from lectures. I can’t remember a single lecture, and the only materials I do vaguely remember were from my essays or I used in presentations and debates. I wonder if either I adapted and started using all these higher processes in my head, or if I could have been much smarter in college if they used these techniques.

Chapter 6

Indirect reading is the opposite to direct teaching in that is focuses on a student centered discovery process while the directed learning emphasizes a more teacher oriented learning process. This means that the student is using inductive reasoning to figure out the learning objectives rather than learning the verbatim of the teacher. This also means that because the student is using higher-level thought processes the student will retain the material at a higher rate than direct teaching and will be more engaged in the classroom setting. Indirect teaching can occur in many different ways including discussions, discovery activities and problem solving. Here the students are using whatever knowledge they already have or is presented to unlock the objectives.

Although inquiry, indirect, inductive learning does lead to a better student interaction with the material and thus a higher retention rate of the material, indirect learning also requires a large amount of creativity on the part of the teacher. Therefore, this might mean a less time intensive workday, this sort of teaching requires much more prior preparation on the part of the teacher to produce the lesson plans for this way of learning. A teacher can simply not be expected to produce this type of indirect knowledge everyday, unless it is a skill that really gets better with time.

I also think that the best sorts of discussion or problem solving start with a limited background. Students need to understand the gist of the material before truly unlocking it in this indirect learning. Therefore, the best way to teach is probably with a combination of both direct and indirect reading.

Chapter 11: The Skillful Teacher

This chapter focused on illustrating various types of models for teaching. A model of teaching is a pattern of instruction that is recognizable and consistent. There are many types of models, from Group Investigation to the Synectics model of teaching, all of which provide different way of indirect teaching approaches. However, I found this chapter much less approachable than the chapters from “Effective Instructional Strategies.” This I think stemmed from both the denser less student friendly voice of the chapter and the fact that they only used geometry as an example for these models. I was lost how to apply these to a class like English, much less a class as ambiguous as Senior Project. As the chapter said on pg 251, models of teaching are not the same as patterns of instruction. Models of teaching are much more theory oriented while the latter deals with in class room activates. Thus, this chapter seems more focused on the theory behind the practical patterns of instruction in direct and indirect teaching. However, since I am doing on-the-job training, I seem much more engaged in the stuff that is directly relevant for me. I don’t want to debate theories in an ivory tower, I want stuff that will help me teach tomorrow, because I need it, and my students need it.

Annotated Bibliography for Assessment and Standard

Greer, L. (2001). Does changing the method of assessment of a module improve the performance of a student? Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 141 (2)

This article performs two tasks in that first summarizes past research on the rationale behind assessments in order to create a context, for its second task: the presentation of a study showing that tests which provided feedback lead to higher student performance than tests which did not. Past research has shown that the assessment process can be utilized to serve multiple purposes, including “reporting on student’s achievements, providing feedback to enable students to improve their understanding, diagnosing misunderstanding, expressing clearly the goals of the curriculum, improving the teacher’s methods. This study looks at the second and third of these reasons, as it tries to assess ways in which assessments provide feedback to the students in order to improve their understanding. The study found that students who receive feedback that directly to the mistakes and then were retested on that material did better on the tests than the group, which did not undergo this formative examination.

I think this study proves the point that assessments are more than a fire-and-forget test that students should focus on passing. Tests are a valuable learning experience, and provide both the teacher and the student with clear indications of what the student does not know. However, the test must be structured in a systematic way to ensure that the mistakes are evident to both the grader and the student. If a student fails a multiple choice test, the teacher doesn’t know why the student missed the information, the teacher just knows that the student did not know the right answer. Without knowing the exact mistake, the teacher cannot hope to improve that student’s understanding of the material. This is why tests that force the student to show the work for math and science, or essays for social studies, are a much better way to assess if the student understands the material. However, this does raise the problem of time on the teacher’s part, and determining where 100 students made mistakes will require much more time and effort than simply marking a multiple choice bubble wrong. I guess that’s why they pay us the big bucks though.

Howard, W., Crenshaw, M., No child left behind: a successful implementation. Education, 126 (3), 403-408

This controlled group experiment tests whether a school who implements the policies recommended by No Child Left Behind actually result in an improvement in student performance. This South Carolina study tests whether the NCLB-based model: Turning Good Teachers into Great Teachers: Turning Green Apples into Red Apples can lift a school out of the unsatisfactory rating. The study examines two very similar schools, one who implements the program and one that does not. This model implemented a number of changes including training the principal in effective leadership skills, training teachers to align their curriculum to South Carolina standards, bringing in the community, extending hours to weekends and after school, and introducing new technologies. Following this model, the “experimental school” improved to an average rating, while the control school remained unsatisfactory.

Although this study seems to prove that the model does work to improve schools, it is not specific enough to know which changes lead to the improvements. Since so many variable were changed between the control and the experimental it is hard to determine which is the causal agent. Perhaps the improvement is simply a result of extending the hours, and aligning the curriculum to standards did not change anything. Aligning the curriculum to the standards could have actually decreased the student performance, but all the other changes improved student performance so much that it outweighed the loss. In order to make this study more relevant and replicable it is important to narrow the change variables to just one, or else we cannot make any workable conclusions. However, I also believe that in terms of education reform, there is no one silver bullet to improving test results. In order to turn around schools, a lot needs to be changed, just like this study showed.