Educational Pyschology #2

Sadker, David. "Gender Equality: Still Knocking at the Classroom Door." Educational Leadership56 (1999)

I am a gender biased teacher. I give lots of negative and positive attention to the boys in my class, but leave the girls on the sidelines. I need to give more positive reinforcement to those who are doing what they are supposed to be doing. I discovered this because I read the article “Gender Equality: Still Knocking at the Classroom.” Gender equality despite all the news reports to the contrary is still a major issue in the classroom today. This article outlines 10 updates on the battle for gender equality emphasizing such things as the widening technology gap between male and females, the preference of males to get the majority of attention, and the fact that males are stereotyped too and need to receive individual encouragement rather than just be treated as rowdy boys. I think a number of these are interesting to educational policy makers and should be looked into, like how perhaps the technology gap is a reflection of video games. However, as a teacher, I think the most important one to look at is the positive and negative attention we give to males over females. I know that the best girls in my class I don’t give enough attention to because I am always yelling at the boys. I need to call on girls more, but because I think they are shy, I don’t do it.

In terms of the classroom segregation debate, coming from Notre Dame, I know my perceptions on gender bias are a bit different than the typical college student. Notre Dame is Catholic and at Notre Dame, all the halls are gender segregated. There is no option to live in the same hall as women, and women cannot even stay in the hall after midnight on weekdays and 2:00 on weekends. Gender Segregation is the norm at this school, and I loved it. Sure I didn’t have many good girl friends, but my hall was very close-knit with male camaraderie. We were the Knights of Keenan Hall and our lives were free from a lot of the drama that co-ed halls fall into. It was a brotherhood and I know many people who loved it.

Although this Hall life was created because of the conservative desire to keep the genders separated, it did have the positive effect of building brotherhood. I don’t know if this brotherhood could have been built in a co-ed hall. However, I do think that this separation led to a number of problems with the hook-up culture at Notre Dame. Girls were seen as something you tried to get on the weekends and treated as prizes. A lot of times real positive relationships were not built between the genders, especially if you came from a single-sex Catholic school. Those who came from the public schools were a little bit better at the interactions. I think there are some benefits to gender segregation, I think it allows boys and girls to focus on what really matters. But it can come at a cost of learning how to interact with the other gender, which might be too high of a cost.

Educational Pyschology #1

Osborne, Jason. "Testing Sterotype Threat: Does Anxiety Explain Race and Sex Differences in Achievement." Contemporary Educational Pyschology 26 (2001): 291-310. Web.

This article explains who gender or racial stereotypes actually effect students and contribute to the achievement gap. This article specifically outline the idea of anxiety and how when students are aware of stereotypes about their gender or racial backgrounds they actually tend to fulfill these stereotypes. Thus, stereotypes are in fact a self-fulfilling philosophy. This is caused by the students who become aware of their stereotypes becoming psychologically anxious and feel that they do not have the ability to succeed. Since knowledge is such a psychological issue, the fact that these students no longer believe that they will succeed makes the students not succeed.

As a teacher this makes perfect sense to me. A big factor in whether or a not a child will succeed is whether they are confident in their ability to succeed. A kid with no confidence does not do well. A kid with high confidence learns better. Thus, if a kid is anxious about the fact that no one like him succeeds in math, then that kid will not succeed in math. It therefore becomes important for teachers to dispel as many of these myths and stereotypes as possible and have children believe that they can succeed. This is tough because you want the kids to not be complacent, and one way you do this is by showing them statistics about the school and their stereotypes and what will happen if they don’t do work. Its important to light a fire underneath them and get them to work. However, I think this catch-22 can be avoided if you simply explain that the statisitics are wrong and that hard-work can prove them wrong. Nothing is set in stone, therefore if they work hard they can break the stereotypes.

Learning Theory Article #2

Jones, Shelley. "Culturally Responsive Instruction." Leadership (2007): 14+. Web.

The article, “Culturally Responsive Instruction” by Shelley Jones overviews the teaching style of CRSBI, culturally responsive, standards based instruction. There are five components to CRSBI: Caring, Communication, Curriculum, Instruction, and Standards Based Instruction. All of these components are equally valued in the teaching-style, and this teaching style that empowers students intellectually, emotionally, socially, and politically. By using this teaching style, teachers and administrators can help to close the achievement gap that exists in America’s education system.

Caring is the simple idea of showing support and a genuine interest in the success of the students. Communication means both communication with the parents and the administration but also teaching what is proper communication to the students. Curriculum refers to the incorporation of cultural aspects. Instruction means trying pedagogies in order to accommodate to the student’s learning styles. Finally, Standards based refers to the idea of keeping instruction aligned to state or national standards.

Overall, I find this article enlightening in the fact that cultural responsive theory only contains one aspect about the culture. The other 4 elements of this are non-culturally sensitive, meaning caring or communication. So as a teacher it is just as important to be caring and have good communication as to be culturally sensitive. This can be taken to mean two things. One, since communication is very important for effective teachers, then cultural inclusion is equally as important. Second, it could mean that in order to be an effective teacher that is culturally responsive, the teacher can simply be caring and have good communication. These are things that will transcend cultural backgrounds and make them be able to connect with students of different backgrounds. Either way, it is important for teachers to implement the pedagogies of this discussed in this article in order to improve their teaching effectiveness.

Learning Theory Article #1

Gordon, Mordechai. "Toward a Pragmatic Discourse of Constructivism: Reflectiosn on Lessons from Practice." Educational Studies 45 (2009): 39-58.

This article gives an overview of the teaching idea of constructivism. The exact idea of constructivism has many different definitions, depending on the theorist. However, all constructivist theories revolve around the idea that knowledge is not independent of human knowledge or free of value. This means that knowledge is something that humans create, not discover. Thus, the role of teachings should be to facilitate student creation of this knowledge. Knowledge is not something that is learned from a text-book, it is built through student actions and interactions. Thus, teachers need to be aware of how knowledge is created, if they wish to use practices that are must conducive to having their students become knowledgeable. Now, this article shows that there are many different theories about how the idea of Constructivism actually plays out in the classroom. The ironic thing is that it concludes by asking for a constructivist discussion about how to use constructivism. It doesn’t give out any specific answers about how to use constructivism or what form it should take, but he does think that the knowledge of constructivism is still under construction.

As for the classroom, I find the idea that knowledge is created to be very applicable. Students need to have a part in creating their own knowledge, they need to be invested in the material and applying it to their own lives. It is very similar to the differences in pedagogies competition we did for an earlier group work. One group actually constructed knowledge through a play, while the other group simply learned the story through direct instruction. This is one way in which Constructivism can lead to better student internalization of the knowledge. Since, they created the knowledge they actually will retain that knowledge. Another good use of constructivism is inquiry based learning. The students will need to discover their learning objectives. This is very student centered as raises the question of how much knowledge of the material the teacher really has to know. These are all very interesting ideas to how to improve learning in the classroom.

Multicultural Education

This article gives a brief update on where the education world currently stands on the topic of multicultural education. It shows that the idea of multicultural education is quite new to norms of education and because of this young age, there is a lot of contention about what multicultural education really looks like. This article shows that multicultural education can range from simply including a local hero into a lesson to full-programs that cater only to the needs of a group. However, they all follow the idea that since America comes from such a diverse background, its education should reflect this.

However, the idea of multicultural education in its confused young state seems almost disturbing and potentially dangerous to me. The first question that comes to mind is where do we draw the line on multicultural education. Should we discuss the culture of wiccas or Kitchen Catholics? Where should the line be drawn on who to include? Also I worry about the idea of separating children too much in order to get unique schooling. Pretty soon this separation turns into separate but equal. We want kids to value each other not their own. Thus, I think multicultural education needs to be apart of everyday life. It also needs just more clarification and details about how exactly multicultural education works if we hope to replicate the positive effects.

Understanding Unconscious Bias and Unintentional Racism, Jean Moule.

“A stereotype is a simplistic image or distorted truth about a person or group based on a prejudgment of habits, traits, abilities, or expectations.” Almost everyone has stereotypes and acts on these stereotypes whether they know it or not. In fact, it when these stereotypes and the actions that people associate with them are unconscious is when they can become especially dangerous. Our minds are wired in order to process large amounts of information quickly allowing us to assess situations and act accordingly. If our brains were not quick at these actions, our ancestors would have died out long ago. The brain is able to do this by creating stereotypes and then placing new situations and people into these stereotypes in order to process them. However, these stereotypes might not always come from credible sources, so they could be distorted. Thus, it is important for us to recognize these stereotypes rather than pretend they are not their. If we do not recognize that we have them we won’t be able to address them, and thus as the old adage goes you have to know what you don’t know.

I am curious as to what stereotypes there are for Hawaii and whether or not these stereotypes match reality. How different are they from black and latino in New York City. I know I have many stereotypes of people from different backgrounds, meaning educational, racial, and social. I judge people off of how they dress and how they speak. If I didn’t though, would I be able to survive in this world. Are stereotypes always bad, or do they serve a vital purpose.

The Negotiated Project Approach: Project-Based Learning without Leaving the Standards Behind

Before reading this article, I was really skeptical of project based learning. I had an experience with project based learning my senior year in high school, when they were trying to totally revamp our school and it was terrible. Furthermore, teaching senior project now has shown how it can be very problematic in terms of actually getting kids motivated and making sure they are learning. Its kind of difficult to teach standards in a project form, especially if the students have a wide-variety of options to choose from and grading can be even harder. How to access whether a project meets the criteria.

However, after reading this article and understanding that projects should not be semester based as both of my experiences with it are semester, I think there are some serious benefits to project based. The first is that it provides ownership. Ownership is a skill and knowledge that is severely lacking in Hawaii and low-income communities. The other is that college and the job world completely revolves around projects. Therefore, its important for us to teach these skills.