EDU 6526- Meta Reflection

Meta Reflection

 

Overall I have found this class very useful and practical. Looking back, I think that it would have been more beneficial to have taken this course while I was teaching during the school year. The class is so rich with ideas that are spawned from the readings, that it would be so wonderful to be able to implement them right away, amidst the excitement of learning them. That being said, taking the class over the summer also has it perks and allows more time to explore and think about the different models of teaching and philosophies behind them.

For my meta-reflection, I would like to look back at some of the strategies and models of teaching that I plan on using in my teaching this coming year.

One of my favorite strategies that I have used in the past in my teaching and I read more about this term is non-linguistic representation. I love this particular strategy because I really believe that it opens up the material to so many different types and levels of learners. “When teachers use non-linguistic representation strategies, they help students represent knowledge as imagery. These strategies are powerful because they tap into students’ natural tendency for visual image processing, which helps them construct meaning of relevant content and skills and have a better capacity to recall it later (Medina, 2008)” (Dean, Pitler & Stone, 2012, p. 64). Examples of this could include using manipulatives in a math class or using graphic organizers (enchantedlearning.com is a great website with graphic organizers) in a Language Arts class. This strategy was in fact what I chose to write about as one of my focus strategies for this course because of its’ effectiveness and it is a fun strategy to use! Here is the link to my post on this strategy: https://rebeccaaf.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/strategy-1-edu-6526/

 

Another strategy that strikes me as particularly effective is concept attainment. Although I have taught many subjects over the years, I still feel like my strengths are in the areas of science and math. That being said, I think part of that is because of my affinity towards categorization and logical thinking. This particular teaching model is all about categorizing “item based on an analysis of their characteristics, or critical attributes. Critical attributes are the characteristics that define an object or idea and help explain what makes it unique” (Dell’Olio & Donk, 2007, p. 112). This is a useful tool because it teaches students how to categorize and organize so they can learn to apply this to new information they gather on their own in their future studies. I believe that any strategy we can give our student that teach them the “how” is the most powerful tool we can give them-one they can use when we are not around. (http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=162537– here is a video demonstration of the strategy).

It seems to me that in some ways direct instruction is a teaching model that has gotten a bad rap. I think it is less about direct instruction being “bad” and more about teachers losing what direct instruction really about. I find that a lot of teachers use what they call direct instruction, but it is really just frontal teaching; standing at the front of the room, giving a lecture and then have the students work on an assignment. This is certainly a piece of direct instruction, but without the rest of direct instruction, this piece is really not useful in reaching most students. Actual direct instruction is broken down into several parts, sometimes these parts are done in different orders, but most successful and true direct instruction lessons will include each of the following steps: Focus activity (or hook), stating the objective, giving over content and modeling, check for understanding, guided practice, independent practice, closing of lesson. I think that this strategy is so important because almost any other strategy in some way encompasses this. Even if you are working with other models of teaching, such as non-linguistic representation, you still need to employ the steps of direct instruction in order to teach your students. I particularly like the idea of modeling for your students, then guiding them, and lastly giving them independent practice. This idea is also related to one of our readings last week about character education.

As it turns out character education is something that different schools teach their students in different ways some schools choose to explicitly teach children, morals, or character traits that are important o function in our society. Others choose to model behaviors; still others incorporate it into their teaching and tie it to content. And some do all three. However, I think the most effective curriculum for character education is modeling, this can include tying it to content as well, but any good character education curriculum must be accompanied by teachers who model the appropriate behavior. As Kirk Russel said in an article we read by him, morals are “caught not taught”. So this idea of direct instruction really is a way to teach anything, and all types of models can be incorporated into it.

Another aspect of this course I particularly appreciated was the readings on Howard Gardner. As a Special Education teacher, I truly appreciate the idea of there being different types of learners and the earlier we recognize that and use differentiation in our classroom, the more chance each child has at success. Gardner and his team spent years researching and developing the idea of eight intelligences, which helped define the idea that people learn differently and the importance of finding different ways to reach our students. The eight intelligences he identified are: Musical, visual, verbal, logical, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalistic.

I appreciate the books we got for this class because they are both so clearly laid out and describe the teaching models/strategies in a way that makes them both appealing and give easy to follow examples. I look forward to using these books as continuing resources throughout this coming school year and on. The two books are Models of teaching: Connecting student learning with standards by Jeanine Dell’Olio & Tony Donk and Classroom instruction that works: research based strategies for increasing student achievement by Ceri Dean, Elizabeth Ross Hubbell, Howard Pitler & Bj Stone. I highly recommend them both!

 

Dell’Olio, J., Donk, T. (2007). Models of teaching: Connecting student learning with standards. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

 

Dean, C., Hubbell, E., Pitler, H., Stone, B. (2012). Classroom instruction that works: Research based strategies for increasing student achievement 2nd ed. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

 

Russell, K. (1987). The wise men know what wicked things are written in the sky: Can virtues be taught? Washington D.C: Regnery Publishing Inc.

 

Davis, K., Christodoulou, J., Seider, S., & Gardner. H.The theory of multiple intelligences. Retrieved August 6, 2013 from http://howardgardner01.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/443-davis-christodoulou-seider-mi-article.pdf

Meta-Reflection EDU 6120

 

I have really enjoyed this class. I learned a lot, but my biggest take away is that there is so much history and there is so much more to the history of education than I realized. The funny thing is, based on my 11 years in the field of education, there have been so many changes, why would I not expect that over hundreds of years there would be more history than I can even sift through in a summer class. What I appreciated about this class is that it exposed me to so many facets of history and to so much more of the details of how we got to where we are than I realized.  In fact I have often felt that classrooms today still seem so traditional that it really seems like education has not changed much at all over the last hundred years, but after all of the readings, I realize that there has been a lot of thought into how we pursue education for our children. It still does not change the fact, for me, that there seems to be the need for change in the classroom in terms of differentiating education. I do think that over the last few years there has been exponential growth in the right direction here and I am really excited looking forward in so far as how technology will begin to inundate  education. I think it took a long time and technology has taken way longer than it should have to filter into education, but it is and I think things are going to change quickly now. I am sure that there were times in the past that people felt just like that, that things were going to change quickly. In the mid 1700’s Ben Franklin along with many other like-minded people met regularly to discuss education and share knowledge. This pursuit of knowledge and finding more effective ways to educate our children is not new and I am excited to be a part of this exciting time of new technologies in education. There was even an article about Sal Khan in Costco’s magazine this month!

“Franklin also noted the value of individual correspondence as an enterprise in self-education. He engaged in extensive correspondence with knowledgeable men and women on both sides of the Atlantic, tapping into their investigations and opinions on matters relating to science, religion, politics, agriculture, and scores of other topics” (Jennings & Urban, 2008, p. 60). The engaging discussions across the world have been happening for generations and will continue in the years to come.

Wagoner Jr., Jennings L.; Wayne J. Urban (2008). American Education: A History. Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

EDU 6526- Implementation of Strategy 2: QAR

QAR has many uses and can be used across subjects and levels. I will focus in on a 5^th grade resource room lesson on character traits. The first lesson in this unit was defining character and physical traits. We spent time sorting traits into categories and then came up with a definition for each. Physical traits are what someone looks like- what you can see when looking at them. Character traits are what their personality is like or what they act like. The student also began filling in a miniature picture of a human body and on the outside she put physical traits describing her and on the inside she put character traits describing her. We added to this at the end of each of the four lessons in the unit to help tie each lesson to a concrete example.

For the second lesson in this unit I had the student read a story on Thomas Edison. She was to place sticky notes at places in the biography that either explicitly stated a trait, or on sentences that alluded to a trait. On the sticky notes she was to write what the character trait was that the sentence referred to or the physical traits. Here is an example of what that looks like- this example is using a different book than the one I used in the lesson, but it shows how the sticky notes can be used.    

The following website, http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/question_answer_relationship/, as mentioned in my previous post on this strategy, goes into some detail about the QAR and different types of questions. This type of exercise and interaction with the text would be, “Right There Questions: Literal questions whose answers can be found in the text. Often the words used in the question are the same words found in the text” (Reading Rockets, 2013).  The student is being asked to find something specific in the text and identify it.

In my experience as a teacher (11 years) I have found that students gain more comprehension when they are asked to interact with the text. The QAR provides them with different types of question that force student to interact with the text in a way that increases comprehension.

 

There is research to support the use of this strategy as well, according to the article entitled Question answer relationships (QAR) in the primary grades: Laying the foundation for reading

comprehension, it is important to start this strategy in the primary grades to increase reading comprehension in students as they move onto upper grade levels.  “’I have read the chapter three times and still can’t find the answer to this question!’ Third, fourth and fifth grade teachers continue to hear this statement from their students as the students look through the text expecting to find the answer written in one sentence. Students continue to become frustrated searching for answers to questions, in both narrative and expository text selections. Question Answer Relationships (QARs) might be one solution to student frustration in upper grades if primary grade teachers introduced this strategy early in students’ education.

The authors’ belief that Question Answer Relationships (QARs) can be effectively taught to students in grades K-2 was explored when early elementary teachers implemented the QAR strategy in their instruction. The outcome confirmed the effectiveness of using QARs with primary grade students” (Kinniburgh & Prew, 2010).

What I like most about this strategy is it also lends itself to both differentiation and integration of several subjects. For example, in the situation I used it in above, I am teaching reading comprehension strategies while the student is also learning about Thomas Edison- Social Studies. This could also easily be used in science as well. As for differentiation, a teacher could provide different questions for different levels. The teacher could either group students in pairs or students can work individually. The teacher could hand out questions according to level. This way each student is working at the level appropriate for him/her and the students can still be reading the same text, so everyone can participate in turn and talk or full class discussions.

The following standards relate both to the QAR and to identification of character and physical traits when reading.

 

GLE:

2.1.6 Apply comprehension monitoring strategies to understand fiction, nonfiction, informational text, and task-oriented text: monitor for meaning, create mental images, and generate and answer questions: Organize information in a graphic organizer that is appropriate to the text and purpose for reading in order to organize information and comprehend text.

 

2.2.3 Understand and analyze story Elements: Use knowledge of the situation, characters’ actions, motivations, feelings, and physical attributes to determine characters’ traits.

 

CCC:

The following standards offer a focus for instruction each year and help ensure that students gain adequate exposure to a range of texts and tasks. Rigor is also infused through the requirement that students read increasingly complex texts through the grades. Students advancing through the grades are expected to meet each year’s grade-specific standards and retain or further develop skills and understandings mastered in preceding grades.

Reading Standard for informational text 1.Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.

 

Reading Standards for literature 1. Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.

 

References:

Dell’Olio, J., Donk, T. (2007). Models of teaching: Connecting student learning with standards. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Kinniburgh, L., Prew, S. (2010). International Journal of Early Childhood Special Education (INT-JECSE), June 2010, 2: 1.

Reading Rockets. Question Answer Relationship, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/question_answer_relationship/

EDU 6526- Post 4

This was my discussion post for class this week. I got some really helpful feedback from it and wanted to share it here.

“Advanced organizers are a model for helping students organize information by connecting it to larger cognitive structure that reflects the organization of the discipline itself” (Del’Olio & Donk, 2007 p. 388). The idea behind advanced organizers is a good one; give students something to relate to so that when the new information is presented, it is easier for them to make connection, and then remember the information. In the example in the book of Ms. Wolters class, she gives them an advanced organizer that presents them with a dilemma about oil and the cost/benefit of it. She asks the students to engage in a discussion where they begin to form opinions using the organizer and prior knowledge. By doing this she is giving them a context for what they will be learning and more importantly, she is giving them a connection that she can keep referring back to. This will help them to retain new information. In this particular example, she is also making it personal by asking their opinion, which will help solidify the information in their memory as well.

I can see using this with a small group in the resource room. Although we do not typically learn social studies units or science units and typically we focus on reading, writing, and math skills. I can see this being useful when supporting what the students are learning in their gen ed classrooms. For example, I know that the 5^th grade studies the Revolutionary War, it could be cool to make an advanced organizer, similar to the one used by Ms. Wolters, and have it end with a question about who was right, the Colonies, or Britain? This will help them in class and I can refer to it when we work together. I can also provide it to the teacher so she can help support the students we both work with when they are in her Gen Ed class.

One piece of feedback I received was in reference to what my organizer could look like per the specific example I gave above. He suggested finding an appropriate picture of the Boston Massacre as illustrated by Paul Revere and have students read text that presents the perspectives of both the British and the Colonies. This seemed like a great way to present this particular organizer. He also pointed out the idea of working with the Resource Room and how my discussion post solidified the importance of this the cooperation for him; as well as was a reminder to share materials he develops in his class with the Resource Room. I found his response helpful and I think the corporation between a Resource Room and gen ed teachers is crucial to students’ success, so I was really pleased that my post helped perpetuate that relationship.

I was also reminded that the idea of advanced organizers can help with the teacher assessing (informally) for prior knowledge and was glad that was pointed out to me as well.

 

Dell’Olio, J., Donk, T. (2007). Models of teaching: Connecting student learning with standards. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

EDU-6526-Strategy 2: QAR

An important concept in my instructional setting is the Question-Answer Relationship (QAR). This is a model that can be first introduced at a young age and as children progress through the grades this strategy can be made more complex and taken further and deeper. “This model can be used for content area reading or narrative types of text. It is useful for helping students find the relationship between questions and their answers and for providing language to describe those relationships” (Dell’Olio & Donk, 2007).

This model of teaching is helpful because it teaches students how to interact with the text in a way that is meaningful and will help the students remember. According to Models of teaching: Connecting student learning with standard (2007), the research on this model was done in the 1980’s and it was about the effectiveness of this model, which it was. The more recent research however was done in the late 1990’s and focused on, “whether or not students continue to use QAR over time” (Dell’Olio & Donk, 2007).  The results again were positive and the study showed that students did maintain the use of QAR over time.

This can be useful for me working in the resource room. I work often with students on the topic of reading comprehension. This is an area that can be hard to teach children. When the student is reading with me, I can ask the kind of guiding question that the students need to answer in order to understand text. This strategy will teach them to gain comprehension on their own.

I also like to have some kind of graphic organizers available for students when doing this kinds of QAR. My favorite graphic organizer (usually for kids 4^th grade and up) is sticky notes. These are convenient because it allows students to make notes and thoughts right on the spot of the text that they are thinking. It is also a good idea to have some of the guiding questions written down; this is important because most students (especially ones that I work with in the resource room) benefit from both hearing the questions (auditory) as well as seeing it in print (visually).

Here is a user friendly link that explain the QAR well and gives some great examples of how to use it with some specific curricula: http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/question_answer_relationship/

Dell’Olio, J., Donk, T. (2007). Models of teaching: Connecting student learning with standards. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Strategy 1- EDU 6526

Non-linguistic representation, when I first read about this strategy I was not sure what this meant besides pictures. After reading more about it I realize that there are so many ways that this strategy can be employed. What I like about this strategy is that it is a way to differentiate the instruction and reach learners who may have different needs. For example, according to the Ohio department of Education website, “Kinesthetic activity – Specific knowledge associated with a specific physical movement generates a mental image. Most children enjoy learning and expressing ideas in this way (Marzano et al, 2001).” Some children learn best when they are using their bodies. It also helps them remember what they learn.

Pictures are another great way that you can help children learn. According to Classroom instruction that works, “Psychologists believe that information is stored in memory in two ways; as words (linguistic) and as images (nonlinguistic)…Imagery is expressed as mental pictures or physical sensations, such as smell, taste, touch, kinesthetic association, and sound (Richardson, 1983). Such nonlinguistic representations provide students with useful tools that merge knowledge presented in the classroom with mechanisms for understanding and remembering that knowledge (Jewitt, 2008; Kres, 1997)” (Dean, Hubbell, Pitler & Stone, 2012).  It seems to me that any way we can increase a child’s chance of remembering information, we should. This type of learning includes many different modes, such as, kinesthetic learning, mental pictures, graphic organizers, and manipulatives. There is a way that one of these styles of learning could be incorporated for every lesson.

As I mentioned earlier, this also helps with differentiated instruction because it often helps students who struggle to be able to physically hold something, or act something out. By incorporating this style into a lesson you are allowing for a broader range of learners to retain the information. According to the National Council for mathematics, “Researchers frequently focus on manipulatives (or hands-on physical models) as tools for teaching students with learning disabilities. And they have based most studies of the concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) learning sequence on work with learning disabled populations. However, evidence is emerging that shows that manipulatives and CRA can be very effective tools for teaching certain concepts to all students ” (Berkas & Pattison, 2007). As this quote emphasizes, manipulatives are great for Special Ed students, but they are in fact useful learning tools for all students.

In thinking about the implementation piece for this post, I will be focusing on math. Math is an area that lends itself to the use of manipulative, but I like curriculum or lessons that really try to incorporate other subjects with the math. This helps give math context in the world outside of the classroom. I taught 5^th and 6^th grade math for a long time, so I will be focusing on that age group for the purposes of implementation of a lesson using this strategy.

Some websites that share great graphic organizers are readinga-z.com, and enchantedlearning.com.

Here is a graphic organizer I have used to help students identify the problems and solutions in a story:

Problems and Solutions graphic organizer

 

Dean, C., Hubbell, E., Pitler, H., Stone, B. (2012). Classroom instruction that works: Research based strategies for increasing student achievement 2nd ed. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Using effective instructional strategies: Non-linguistic representation. Retrieved from http://ims.ode.state.oh.us/ode/ims/rrt/research/Content/nonlinguistic_representations_what_we_know.asp

Berkas, N., Pattison, C. (2007). Manipulatives: More than Special Education intervention. Retrieved from http://www.nctm.org/2007_11nb_intervention.aspx#sthash.fsp4dAcl.dpuf

P2- Practice differentiated instruction

P2-Practice differentiated instruction

Differentiation is an important skill for a teacher to employ. Finding ways to reach all of our children through differentiation can be difficult. However, there are a lot of resources available that I found helpful in planning for differentiation. One such book is called Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom: Strategies and Technique Every Teacher can use to meet the Academic Needs of the Gifted and Talentedby Susan Winebrenner M.S.

One idea from her book that I really liked was called “most difficult first”. This is a way to help plan for students who are gifted and talented. What you do is choose five problems that are representative of a unit and the student has to get 4/5 correct. If the student is able to get 4/5 crest the student can move onto the next unit. When I first saw this I thought, why not have the student get 5/5 correct? The answer has to do with the student’s feeling the pressure to be perfect, and then he/she may not try at all.  I used this method with a student I have in my 6^th grade math class and it has worked great (although I used more than five problems to get my representation of his knowledge. It has helped give me direction as to what topics I should be planning for him. It has also made him more confident and happy in class since he is working at his level. He is so excited that he is having the opportunity to really show what he knows and learn at his level.

Weekly Reflection 12: Math Lesson 2

I taught a lesson to my 5th grade math student on equivalent fractions. Before we started we wrote down our learning goal for the lesson.

Here is the assignment:

   

This student likes to work using a white board.  Here is some of her work:

Technology: Meta-reflection

I have truly enjoyed this technology class. I feel like each of the assignments have led me to be able to “practice the integration of appropriate technology with instruction”, which is one of the Principles of HOPE at SPU. At the beginning of this course my feelings toward technology, were accepting, but cautious. Too cautious. For this class we read two books, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and Brain Gain by Marc Prensky. When I first started reading these books, I thought, “how was I going to get through reading these two books, on a topic that can’t possibly be that interesting, and to top it off I would be reading it on my computer?! At the very least, couldn’t I just go buy the book? Then we were asked to join G+, which is similar to Facebook, in that it is a social networking site, but we were going to use it as a way to share websites and resources about current technology. I was wary of this medium of sharing information as well, but as time went on I began to see the value in each of the class’ assignments. The books even began to grow on me. In fact I learned to like reading a text book on the computer because I was able to so easily highlight my work, take screenshots and put them directly into my blog. Using G+, learning about hash tags, and becoming better at searching the web for resources has also been valuable to me. All of these skills lead back to the standards stated above, “practice the integration of appropriate technology with instruction” .

Becoming more comfortable myself with technology and being shown so many resources by my classmates has made me more familiar with the technology that is available for me to integrate into my classroom. The books we read also have really enlightened me. I feel like they were a perfect balance of the different feelings or arguments people may have when struggling with the idea of technology. It seems to me that we are really not given any time to process the technology; it is happening so fast! It is reasonable for people to be wary. This class has helped me past the hump of wariness.

I, in fact, thought I was incorporating a lot of technology in my classes over the years. I have used websites to show videos, websites for students to do HW on; I have made web search assignments. But somehow, I realize now that there is SO much more I can be doing to incorporate technology into my classroom. I may have even realized this before, but I was never quite comfortable enough with technology to really delve into it.

Now not only do I have so many more resources from my classmates and teachers, but I am more comfortable being authoritative about technology. This has given me more confidence to not only integrate it more into my classroom (I am doing a flip class with Khan Academy for my 6^th grade math!), but with other teachers as well!

Weekly Reflection 8: Child Find

Last week I went to a meeting at the Seattle Public Schools about Child Find. Child Find is the Seattle Public Schools obligation to find and evaluate children in private schools. This meeting was basically about a chunk of money that could go to the private schools for children who are not in IEPs, but who need more support than they are receiving. This money was referred to as equitable participation or proportionate share. We were at this meeting to help decide how the money would be spent. Students on an IEP cannot receive money from this fund. However, the student can be on a service plan or student accommodation plan.

An example of a child who would qualify for this proportionate share money would be someone who is evaluated by the public school and who qualifies for an IEP, but is not on one. A reason a child would not be put on an IEP, for example, is a situation in my school. We are a dual curriculum religious school. It is sometimes not worth it for the parent to choose to have their child sent to the public schools and miss out on some of the short amount of time the students have in general studies (since this would then defeat the purpose of a double dose of the subject) or the student might miss some of the religious studies, which the parents also don’t want. We (meaning a decision between the parents and teachers) often choose not put children on an IEP and send them to the public schools because it is not worth the time.

At this meeting we were asked to decide how we would use this money to support these students. One more important detail that played a part of our decision was that, if we have a student on an IEP and they are currently getting services from the public schools, we are to encourage the parents to keep their child on the IEP and not access this proportionate share money. The reason being they get more services through the IEP and the students are then being served through FAPE, which then requires us to service the student and move them forward. Where students on a service plan are not covered under FAPE and may receive services only once a week or not enough times to move them forward at the pace they deserve. And once this proportionate share money runs out for the year, and then it is gone. This is also the first year we have this money, so there is a lot of unknowns and we will just have to see how the decision we make works out.

We decided that a lump sum of the money would go towards equipment, such as FM systems. Then the rest of the money would go towards hiring tutors, particularly in reading. The tutors can be hired by the schools individually, but SPS would also provide a tutor that would come to each school for 1.5 hours a week. This was the proposal put together by the team that was at the meeting. It still needs to be approved. It was pretty cool to be a part of the decision making process that determines where and how a chunk of money is used to support our students.