Preparing Students for the 21st Century
Reflections on education
I feel very good about navigating my first graduate level course. It’s readily apparent how much sincere feedback can have an effect on a student. I’m very grateful to everybody in the class and sharing their thoughts and talents. One of the great things about seeing everybody’s presentations is catching the differences in how we approach the same problem. There was a little bit of overlap between projects but still each group brings their unique life experiences to the table. That’s one takeaway I liked from the course: your life experiences are great material for your students – bring in your outside expertise.
After hearing the elevator pitch for be.tech, I’d really like to go and observe some classrooms. Just looking through the website paints a picture of a very different experience compared to the comprehensive sites. I have all of this in-lieu time stocked up from covering other teacher’s periods. Maybe I’ll make the administrative secretary happy and actually use my time. I can now happily return to my summer sleep schedule!
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Chapter 5: Learning Through Interests and Pursuing Passions
1. Imagine you’ve found out that a kid you know is really interested in astronomy (or cooking, or video games, or fashion, or baseball, or music, or police work, or whatever). How would you help her go into depth in this area? What might she learn by exploring her interest more deeply? One way to help this student would be to have her do research in her interest within the context of the classroom. Something I’ve always liked about teaching science is that it’s not hard to talk just about anything in a scientific context. Science education is generally leaning more towards developing skills and less towards specific bodies of knowledge - so what’s to say this student couldn’t practice data analysis while looking into police work? Exploring her interest more deeply could help her gauge whether she would like to pursue it as a career. I had to experiment with many different possible career fields before I finally found the right fit. I took many classes only to discover that I wouldn’t be happy working in a particular field. Experience is unparalleled as a teaching tool. 4. Did you save any of the papers you wrote for school? Why or why not? I’ve saved most of my work in general from college. My mother was the type of person who saved every scrap of paper my sister and I would bring home from school and some of that behavior likely rubbed off on me. I currently sleep over a long plastic tub full of lab reports, math work, and a few essays. One of the reasons I’ve kept undergraduate and credential program assignments has been the notion that I might need it for reference in the future. However, there is some work I have kept just because I’m proud of the result – it’s high quality material. It has been interesting to look at the boxes of work my mother has saved from K-12: mostly in a historical sense of what schoolwork looked like 15+ years ago. Ch. 6: Real Work in the Real World 1. Why do so many students describe their educational experiences as boring? One reason many students find school boring is a lack of perceived relevance to their present and future. If you’ve ever heard or spoken the words “when will I ever need this” then you already know. Ever since I had access to a computer, if I wanted to learn about a topic, I would just look it up. This remains true 20+ years later as I randomly google things that come to mind while surfing the web. Unsurprisingly, I don’t look up things that I’m not interested in or that I don’t need to know for work. Traditional school settings make the claim that well-rounded students must have a specific body of knowledge but they don’t always convince us that it’s true. 2. If you could have an internship in any area, built around any interest, what would it be and who would you want to have as a mentor? Why? It would probably involve instrumental analysis, which was one of my favorite aspects of chemistry. Getting to work with expensive machinery and learning how they function was immensely satisfying, but the course was towards the very end of the program. I wouldn't mind doing an internship at a place like Gallo Winery - which I mainly mention because I have an old friend who has been working there as a chemist for a few years. Today's book debriefs really focused on the idea of giving students a voice. We talked about students feeling disenfranchised with the leaders surround them. Why would I speak up if I don't believe I'm going to be heard? By the time they exit K-12 education, some students have been taught that their input will always be ignored. Feedback or results, whether positive or negative, have immense power to shape behavior. We have to be cognizant of the messages we are reinforce through our actions (or inaction).
I mentioned to my group that I really appreciate being able to choose the chapter responses. There are certain questions that I feel well equipped to answer and others where that is not the case. For example, how do you get somebody to want to learn? I felt that if I knew the answer to this question, I'd have it made: my name would be on a book somewhere. So I chose other questions that I could access more easily. Another colleague put it simply though: you make them good at the subject/skill; which made perfect sense when I heard it - everyone likes being good at things, that's not a revolutionary concept. There are students who maybe don't have good grades overall but also have that one class that they really enjoy/are proud of. Getting better increases enjoyment which encourages you get better again. It's a positive feedback loop and once again, feedback is strong. I've had very little experience with the APA style throughout my life. I have pretty strong memories of MLA from high school and my college experience revolved more around ACS - the propriety citation style of the American Chemical Society. Sometimes I worry about academic writing again because the chemistry journals I wrote in undergrad were very streamlined. Professors really stressed the importance of "just tell me the important stuff: the big numbers and whether your experiment panned out or not". So it was comforting to hear Griggs mention that the annotation write up should be concise. Now I just have to figure out what my topic for the project will be. Chapter 3: Atmosphere and School Culture
2. How could a school go about showing its students that they are trusted and valued members of the school community? Give students opportunities to advocate for themselves and here’s the important part: act on that input. Disenfranchised students often do not know that there are forums in which their voice can (and must) be heard. I was talking to a class about the annual district Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) survey; my thesis was “if you have something to say, they legally have an obligation to read this”. The reality is that in many places, student input is ignored. People learn not to speak up because nothing ever comes of it – it becomes a wasted effort in their eyes. “I’m not going to vote, all politicians are [BS] anyways,” as one of my recent 18-year-old students put it last year. In the end, results reinforce behavior – positive or negative. 5. Do you and your colleagues share the same philosophy or vision about your school or workplace? Why or why not? How does this influence the way you work together and think about your work? I feel I’ve been lucky enough to work at a school where most teachers are on the same page; maybe that is a byproduct of having a small ten person staff. Most of us view our position as one of facilitating and enabling – not gatekeeping. We are trying to show our students that they can in fact succeed in school. Because of this, many of my colleagues are very flexible with students and classes at large. If a student needs more time with another teacher and they’re up to date with my class – why would I deny them the chance to catch up? Chapter 4: One Student at a Time 5. Tell about a time when you were in school and your learning matched your interests. How was that experience different from times when your learning didn’t match what you were interested in? One of my many majors in undergraduate studies was Recording Arts. I was always interested in music but I didn’t feel like I was a serious musician, so the idea came forth: “what if I worked with musicians instead?” One of the classes that I took was primarily focused on working with studio equipment. It was the most hands-on course I took in nine years of undergrad coursework and I absolutely ate it up. At the end of the course, I aced the final and the professor offered me a letter of recommendation (which I should have accepted in hindsight). Compared to my experiences with other courses where I had to drag myself to class out of obligation. My community college transcript is riddled with withdrawal grades from classes I stopped caring about midway. 6. What do we have to unlearn about traditional schooling so that we can educate one student at a time? First thing that comes to mind is the notion that all students should be mastering material at the same rate. I used to do a good amount of private tutoring in community college: accounting and chemistry. After 3 years of working with individuals and small groups, I felt very confident that if you gave me enough time with a student; I could absolutely teach them the most complicated things about introductory chemistry. But the time it takes people to process the same ideas varies wildly, some people get it right away and others drove me to pull out new examples and analogies until it clicked. It brings to mind the concept of having a growth mindset. Do I aim for a student to X/Y/Z by the end of the semester, or is it good enough to just have them know more than they used to? I can think of senior student who had an elementary level reading ability, and once you know that then some of their behaviors make more sense. At that point I could try different things to make sure that kid was fully participating in the class. Am I going to miraculously bring their reading level up to “12th grade”? Probably not, but I can do my part to help them be better in the short amount of time I have. I’ve been really enjoying the use of Mural in the course. I actually preferred the Mural gallery walk to a normal physical activity. Maybe it’s because you can see the final product altogether at the end. All of the prompts and answers remain accessible; as opposed to ending up with a bunch of big pieces of paper on the wall that can be cumbersome to refer to later. And if you have multiple classes then you have the issue of taking things up and down so that past ideas don’t influence future periods (my school has one-minute passing periods). But with Mural you could easily pull up a blank or completed slate for a given class.
The PMUs were actually pretty interesting as a person who is generally unexcited about “breaking the ice”. It’s a very clever way of doing things in the age of distance learning, but I really want to try it in my physical groups. I would have actually liked to do all six activities. My district/admin did not require the use of Zoom at all; So, it was really intriguing to see the different ways the professor used the breakout sessions. Having these isolated chatrooms really facilitated talking about the book in increasingly bigger groups. My favorite line of dialogue concerned the trepidation that many students seem to have in the classroom. Our favorite students are those who have the courage (or maybe lack of shame) to ask whatever question is inside of them. I’ve personally known students who did not succeed at a comprehensive site specifically because of their inability to suppress their curiosity. It doesn’t feel right that a student who wants to learn ends up getting pushed out of the system. This ties in a bit with Sir Ken Robinson’s animated talk, specifically the idea of divergent thinking. Education has been modeled after old world economic interests (which is the same idea put forth in the Mirel article). Workers needed to be able to perform a specific straightforward task, not necessarily search for new ways of thinking. The deterioration of lateral thinking as children get older is sadly not surprising; when they are told year after year to regurgitate specific answers. I don’t know if I agree with his claim that grouping students by age is misguided. I understand the argument – to group by ability instead of an arbitrary number. But maybe it just stems from my experience in alternative education, where I couldn’t imagine having to work with new freshmen alongside seniors who have a freshman amount of credits. I feel as though the unique nature of my site has really colored my view of education in a short span of time. Chapter 1: The Real Goals of Education
1. What are your “real goals of education”? My personal journey in education is one of failure and experimentation. When I got out of high school, I had no direction – just an “adult” who knew things about multiple subjects. It wasn’t until two years later and 5 major changes that I decided to study chemistry; a subject that I enjoyed in high school but had received pretty low grades. As a current science teacher, I don’t worry about creating a chemist – I don’t even technically teach chemistry. I want to foster a knowledge is what makes the physical world tick, because the older I become the more I see random claims which purport to be “science”. It’s important to me that students have the tools to answer their own questions and more importantly – to have questions to answer. 3. What is your reaction to Dewey’s statement that “education is not preparation for life; education is life itself”? I absolutely agree with the statement. I have come across the idea that learning ends with school, but I’ve always thought it was ridiculous. People are learning from the day they are born until the day of their death. To “not be learning” is to say that someone isn’t having any experiences. Learning is growth; it means one can change as a person. Whether it’s the workplace, social engagements, an academic institution; humans are always encountering something new – something which can inherently change them. Chapter 2: Kids, Schools, and the Bigger Picture 2. If our society committed itself to the idea that we care about kids more than we care about schools, what would need to change? As a person who work in alternative education, the main change would have to be a focus on the social, behavioral, and emotional needs of children. Our staff has tried to communicate the needs of counseling for our students to the district. I have heard more student stories than I expected. My students want to share the problems with somebody but the educational system is not designed for empathy. If it was, my kids wouldn’t make it to eighteen years old without the tools to handle the trauma in their lives. 5. If you agree that the ability to believe in yourself and to love learning are important skills schools should teach, how would you go about teaching them? For one, I would focus on setting goals and meeting them. Students are always collecting data about their surroundings – that’s just life. They have interests and questions inside of them that sometimes never emerge in a traditional school setting. I feel that if students were given more opportunities to decide the details of their learning, they would take more ownership and be proud of their results. However, I would also importance of “failure” and how to move past it. Students are placed into an arbitrary situation where they have to learn certain ideas by certain checkpoints. But in the real world, you often get multiple chances to demonstrate learning. If you didn’t pick something up the first time around, you try again. I would like to give students the chance to develop empathy for themselves – that everyone is their own greatest critic and therefore can understand that things can be hard. This first day of class has me feeling hopeful. Funnily enough, I had already watched the Rita Pierson talk in a staff meeting. Her core message really reminded me of what I believe to be the most important concept from my credential program. Education is dependent on belief and hope: students must always have a hope of success and students must believe that you want them to succeed. Robinson’s talk on creativity and the importance thereof also struck a chord. I graduated with a science degree and my undergrad education almost completely focused on building a foundation for knowledge. I didn’t learn everything about chemistry, but I did feel confident that I knew were to look I if I wanted to learn more. What I didn’t get a lot of was experience with research – with developing my own questions. My first experience with open-ended research was after I had received my degree and credential. To be frank I was mostly along for the ride, observing how others began to determine how to answer a question. That research experience happened the summer before my first year of teaching and it’s something I have wanted to share with students for the last few years. However, it’s mostly fallen to the wayside of trying to keep my head above water as a newer teacher. I particularly liked the in-class idea that limitations foster creativity. It sort of brings Dungeons & Dragons (DND) to mind, the fantasy role-playing game from the 1970’s. For those unfamiliar, DND is really a collaborative storytelling effort at its core. One person creates an overarching setting while the “players” drive the narrative through choices. The results of those choices are often determined through a bit of underlying math and probability. Nothing can throw somebody off guard than presenting them with the question “OK what do you all do?”. If a scenario is too broad, many people don’t know where to start. Another quick sidebar into limitation and creativity is the Nintendo Game Boy – the 1989 portable video game console. The Game Boy had dedicated music hardware that could only produce 4 sounds at a time: 2 pulse channels, 1 wave channel, and 1 noise channel (basically 4 instruments of your own design). Because the system itself is so inherently limited, I have often been amazed at the complex works that people have produced with this hardware. I’ll link a track from an album that has remained important to me for the better part of a decade. |
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