Know Yourself

A local teacher was a guest speaker in our class today, and she had some great, thought provoking ideas to reflect upon as a teacher. She has been a teacher for 22 years, and after only talking for 5 minutes that she is a perceptive, innovative educator who knows how to integrate instruction with application.

She only allows herself to repeat one book every year, and completely strips and sets her room up from scratch every school year. Nothing like keeping the classroom fresh, and making sure that you never get stuck in a rut! And what a way to make sure that lessons and the entire classroom is for the unique students that enter your classroom each year! I'm not sure I could strip everything at the end of every year, but this is a good idea to keep in mind; sometimes we just have to strip everything away and start over again.

One of her first points was that every teacher must learn what type of teacher they are.

Am I process-based?
Am I inquiry-based?
Am I more inclined to guided instruction?
Am I direct instruction-based?
Am I discover-based?

As a teacher you must know your style, but your style is ever developing and evolving. For the first few years you try a lot of different styles that you pull from your Mary Poppins' bag of tricks. Over time, you will decide what you like and what becomes most helpful for the students in your classroom, but the best teachers are the teachers that utilize all techniques that help your learners.

She gave us three tips for our future classrooms:

1. Create a healthy, safe place for students to learn where making mistakes is a normal growing process.
"Always have more questions than answers."

2. Vary the way you expect responses to literature. Only expect them to come ready to engage in a book chat.

3. Never assign anything that you don't respond to with a few detailed sentences, and expect that some students will write back as well.

Give students choice because this will intrinsically motivate the students to learn.

Know your kids; know when to push and when not to push. Education is about relationship, it's about knowing people, about bringing out their best, and how to take them from where they are to where they can be.

Learn how to answer a students question with a question. This generates deeper thought and discussion with the students. Good thing I already do that!

Individualized Instruction: What is "Fair"?

What should instruction look like? How does a teacher differentiate instruction in such a way that the needs of the "lowest" and "highest" achieving students are met in a deeply personal and academic way? These questions rose to my mind as I worked in a group during my teaching social studies class; we were given a topic, a framework, and in class we created a lesson for a specific grade level on the spot. Differentiation proved the most challenging area of focus for our group because the activity and assessment already implemented choice as a way for students to use multiple materials in order to express themselves. My group specifically struggled with how to challenge more advanced students without just assigning more work.

Many times I have heard that we should not simply dump more work on students who finish work early, or who show excellent and efficient skills when completed the classwork given; some professionals adamantly claim that these students should also not tutor other students, despite the studies that show this can be beneficial to both parties involved, specifically the research on PALS and other tutor programs (Rafdal, McMaster, McConnell, Fuchs, & Fuchs, 2011; Codding, Chan-Iannetta, George, Ferreira, & Volpe, 2011). Peer Assisted Learning Strategies, or PALS, when implemented with fidelity, benefit both parties involved, and can be done in such a way that students are not privy to which partner is higher or lower because the class is ranked, split in half, then paired off so that the "highest" achieving individual on the "upper level" list is paired with the "highest" ranked individual on the "lower level" list (with exceptions for incompatibility).

As a group we reached a consensus: if all instruction is to be individualized in such a way that each student gains the most from every activity, how can we judge what is fair? If one student can do 30 problems in 20 minutes, and another student takes an hour to complete eight problems, would a teacher be unjust in making sure that these students are challenged yet not frustrated by the amount of work they are assigned?

One parent may complain that their student is having to do too much, while the other parent may complain that their student is falling behind, but why is it unfair to allow students to rise to a challenge? I understand that in America we value equality and fairness. However, we deliberated and reached the decision that equal treatment does not always mean that every student is treated in exactly the same way. If every child received the identical, rigid education, there would be no room for individuality, for personal creativity, for real, substantial growth. 

Education needs to continue to move towards individualized instruction for all, instruction that recognizes each students strengths and weaknesses, and allows students to grow in their area of weakness as they also have opportunities to use their strengths. At the end of the lesson we created, our group decided that having students write journals about the activity was a great wrap-up activity, and we decided that some students were given the liberty to write paragraphs while other students were not demanded of more than they could produce. While some may disagree, there were other forms of assessment used, such as the models, drawings, and presentations that students also did during the lesson. We took into consideration that in first grade, the gap between the struggling student and the overachiever may be wide, and that instruction should meet students where they are.

References:

Codding, R. S., Chan-Iannetta, L., George, S., Ferreira, K., & Volpe, R. (2011). Early number skills: Examining the effects of class-wide interventions on kindergarten performance. School Psychology Quarterly, 26(1), 85-96.

Rafdal, B.H., McMaster, K. L., McConnell, S. R., Fuchs, D., & Fuchs, L. S. (2011). The effectiveness of Kindergarten Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies for students with disabilities. Exceptional Children, 77(3), 299-316. 

Social Studies and Special Education

This semester I have not had much time to create posts! With eight graduate courses, field placements, and interviewing candidates for jobs at camp this summer, I have not had much time to really reflect on all the information that I jam into my head. In all honesty, that is my one regret this semester; many times I finish an assignment or reading and have to move on to the next one without reflection or expansion. The best teacher is a reflective teacher, and that is why I have decided to break this cycle and begin to reflect upon the lessons and activities that I have been doing.

One passion I have rediscovered this semester is history and social studies; currently I am enrolled in a teaching social studies course for elementary education, and I have been increasingly aware of how social studies is often overlooked, especially in special education. Many special educators do not consider this a pertinent subject for students with disabilities, and I cannot help but wonder how many historians, politicians, archaeologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have undiscovered passion or untapped potential because social studies is rarely considered an integral part of a student's academic experience.

Throughout this course I have been reading about the methods used in secondary social studies, which focuses mostly on reading comprehension, and I cannot help but wonder if there may be better interventions for these students. What if there was a way to scaffold note-taking, so students with disabilities begin with fill-in-the-blank notes, then gradually gain more and more proficiency until they simply are filling in an outline. This would require much more work on part of the teacher, but that effort would be worth it when that student benefits and excels in note-taking and studying for history class. While reading comprehension is imperative, there are many other skills that historians need, such as examining artifacts, interpreting primary or secondary documents, and recognizing cause and effect relationships. There is a stubborn part of me that refuses to believe that reading comprehension is the only intervention worth suggesting for students with disabilities in secondary education, yet there are few other suggestions found in the research.

In general I have increasingly noticed how the social studies, when implemented, focus on a patriarchal, political historical narrative. Before this semester I have never considered how women are affected by this framework that excludes many of the great cultural movers and shakers, as well as many important women in the tale of history. In essence, women grow up learning about how important men have become with few role models that are not musically talented or extraordinarily beautiful. From my limited experience, this seems to create a self-fulfilling prophecy; women do not see successful women besides musicians, actors, models, and they begin to think that beauty is the road to success. But let me stop before I digress.

For my teaching technology course I taught a lesson that was created for eleventh graders to my college level peers on the Emancipation Proclamation. The lack of already present background knowledge astounded me. I simply asked what they already knew about the Civil War and I received blank stares from even the history majors in the room. Shocked, I decided to back up and ask them fill-in-the-blank questions such as: We talked about how the president of the North was... and they would answer Abraham Lincoln. After doing that for the critical background knowledge, the students started becoming more comfortable so I moved on to the portion of the lesson where the students compared the Constitution to the Emancipation Proclamation; specifically, the students looked at how the documents treated slaves in order to find the similarities and differences. They answered the questions: Was the Emancipation Proclamation Constitutional? Then the students evaluated whether the Emancipation Proclamation pulled through for the newly Freedmen, and what had to happen for those who were former slaves to gain their promised freedoms.

After this lesson one of my friends asked what I had learned. I must have given him a quizzical look, because then he asked, "What did the students learn? You both should have learned something, that's the point of teaching." He was right; as a teacher, I should be learning with my students. Not only should I be challenging them, but they should be challenging me. Which caused me to realize that I have not been a reflective teacher this semester. Thankfully, this epiphany only strengthened my resolve to become more reflective and more innovative with my lessons.