The Student Mind

Recently my new school supervisor asked for my philosophy of education.  After giving it a lot of thought here is my response:

A Successful Classroom

I believe that students learn best when they are able to interact with concepts and then make their own meanings from them.  They need to “try it out” and then read, see, hear about or discuss the concept or skill.  Students also need to think about or discuss how they completed a skill.  This helps them repeat successful patterns and revise ideas that don’t work.  The role of the teacher in a truly successful classroom is that of a coach or master learner who helps apprentice learners (students) achieve mastery of the skills and concepts taught.  The teacher continually assesses students and reteaches or varies instruction based on that assessment as well as the input of her team of teaching peers.

Goals For Students

When my students enter my class I have two goals that guide my teaching practice.  First, I want them to become accomplished scientists with a clear understanding of background concepts and the ability to investigate new ideas using a variety of science skills.  Secondly, I want them to become 21st century learners and thinkers, able to use technology effectively, work in collaborative teams, and communicate ideas and results.

Implimentation

These ideals translate into action in my classroom.  I use a variety of instructional techniques including lecture, cooperative learning activities, socratic questioning, projects graded by rubric, as well as worksheets.  Each is a tool with an appropriate place and time.  As a learning coach I try to make myself and my class materials available at all times through my class website (mssigman.weebly.com).

I also feel that it is incredibly important to assess student progress often, using a variety of formal and informal techniques.  These include tests, quizzes, tickets out the door, and cooperative learning (Kagaan) techniques.  Because it is essential for students to understand their progress, I try to grade assignments and hand them back quickly.  Students can then use that information to improve.

Personal Growth

Over my eight years of teaching I have become more and more interested in helping my students too construct their own ideas and less and less interested in telling them what to think.  As this shift has happened in my thinking I have changed my classroom practice.  Currently I am more and more interested in shifting my classroom activities so that information gathering (what used to be lecture) happens outside of class and we spend class time practicing skills and interacting with the subject together.  My current syllabus reflects this.  My future goals include guiding students to prove competency using products that reflect grasp on the content and demonstrate skills that will make them successful in today’s workplace.  I would also like to extend learning outside of the classroom, both in a physical sense (developing the school’s swamp into functioning wetlands), and in a “cyber-sense” (collaborating with scientists and other classes over the web).

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I teach at one of the boarding schools for Native American students.  At my school we have students from 17 different states and 72 different tribes.  I teach one of the AVID elective classes at our school.  If you have never heard of it AVID is a school change program that promotes college readiness for all students at a school and not just the “smart” or well-trained students.

I am not Native.  This is important only in that it means that I do not automatically understand what my students are thinking all of the time.  I have to work at it.  Sometimes I feel like the blond girl in a blond joke.  Everybody in the room “gets it” except for me.  I have come a long way towards understanding but sometimes I still get things wrong.

As a result of my AVID class last year I am attempting to make my class more accessible to my students.  I want to value the way they learn and to present content in a way that is accessible to them.  Because AVID deals so much with the skills that are required to be successful in college and life after college in our dominant culture, we consistently try to teach students those success skills.  Success, however, is a culturally defined concept.  You might think someone is very successful and I might see them as only moderately successful or even unsuccessful depending on our differing frames of reference.  Because my class contains students from so many different traditions and backgrounds that definition is different for every student.

You might think that the students’ home culture defines their ideas of success.  I know I certainly did when we started but I am learning that their ideas of success change with every person we invite into our class to speak as well as their feelings or goals that day.  Ideas of success that resonate with a vast majority of my students are successful people who give back to their community.  These people use their own traditions and beliefs as the setting for their success.  They use the tools of the dominant society but never forget their home.  They use their own understanding and ways of learning and they integrate skills from the dominant society to achieve goals that usually involve contributing to their own communities.

My challenge is to help my students base their success in their own tradition (keep in mind this is different for each child) while they are at the same time isolated from that tradition.  I also need to teach them the skills and tools that define or lead to success in our dominant society.  Then they need to learn how to adapt those tools to their own definition of success and their own goals.

So far I try to listen a lot.  I try to bring in speakers who are Native and have become successful.  We as a community do not let others come into the class and tell them what their definition of success should be.  I teach the skills that are sometimes so foreign to them.  I try to teach using many different tools because they all came from different traditions that learn in different ways…but most of these ways have nothing to do with the Socratic methods of direct instruction and the assembly line model of education today.   I feel like these things are not enough.  There has to be something more I can do to help them….

Ideas always help

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Filed under: AVID, Boarding School, Native American, Success

While reading an article sent to me by my principal about lesson planning, I ran across a term I think is perfect!  “Desk Potatoe”!  This is the essence of the student who is visually awake and working.  They write down everything you write down, but they never engage their brain.  They expect you to do the mental work for them.

What do we do with desk potatoes.  To me these are some of the most frustrating students.  When you ask them questions they say, “I don’t know” or stare blankly at you and will even go so far as using other avoidance techniques like putting their heads down or trying to re-direct you attention.  They just stare at you instead of trying.  I know there is a brain in there somewhere but accessing it is difficult.

I have tried many different techniques for engaging the desk potatoe brain…I’ve tried rapid-fire questions, giving “think-time”, random questioning, banning the phrase “I don’t know”, cooperative learning techniques.  I know students do not like to risk themselves so I try to be sympathetic but sometimes I find myself wanting to reach inside their brains and pull out what I know must be in there somewhere.

I find also that often it really is in the “desk-potatoe” mind.  They have the ability to answer questions but are not used to being required to in class.  I have many current strategies I use but could always use some more.  I will list mine.  Please feel free to respond with some of your ideas and strategies:

• Set the expectation in class.  I tell my students that when I ask questions no one is allowed to say, “I don’t know” and they have to give at least some kind of answer.  No one likes to look like they don’t know.  This can be motivating.
• Cooperative learning techniques.  Often the requirement to talk a question over with a partner will help students collect or solidify enough ideas that they will feel more confident about speaking their ideas before the entire class.
• Brainstorming.  I will have each student read a different paragraph of an informational text we need to read for class and then brainstorm 1 sentence to present that content to the class.  Asking them to write it down improves their chances of coming up with something that helps them.

What are your ideas???

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Directions

Summer can be a great time for professional development. It is an opportunity to learn more about a topic, read a particular work or the works of a particular author, beef up an existing unit of instruction, advance one’s technical skills, work on that advanced degree or certification, pick up a new hobby, and finish many of the other items on our ever-growing To Do Lists. Let’s make Summer 2009 a time when we actually get to accomplish a few of those things and enjoy the thrill of marking them off our lists.

The Rules

NOTE: You do NOT have to wait to be tagged to participate in this meme.

1. Pick 1-3 professional development goals and commit to achieving them this summer.
2. For the purposes of this activity the end of summer will be Labor Day (09/07/09).
3. Post the above directions along with your 1-3 goals on your blog.
4. Title your post Professional Development Meme 2009 and link back/trackback to http://clifmims.com/blog/archives/2447.
5. Use the following tag/ keyword/ category on your post: pdmeme09.
6. Tag 5-8 others to participate in the meme.
7. Achieve your goals and “develop professionally.”
8. Commit to sharing your results on your blog during early or mid-September.

My Goals

• Try to spend less time just listening to the global conversation happening about educating and do more participating.
• Get into the habit of writing 3 blog posts a week about what I am passionate about (students, science and education).
• Articulate my goals for the 09-10 school year in the areas of reading, science, technology and student development.

I tag Christina Ochoa, Michelle Carpenter and Melody Milgrim, fellow teachers at my school. What do you want to learn this summer?

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Filed under: pdmeme09, Technology Literacy, Web 2.0

Having taken classes online and in the classroom and taught in the classroom both with computers and without computers I have learned a few things.
1. 21st century skills include CREATIVITY, collaboration, time management, problem solving…and a few others I can not name off the top of my head.  Students need to have a very different outlook on education than the one they are currently taught in the classroom.
2. Just because you use a computer either to access the class or in the class does not mean that you are learning or teaching 21st century skills.
3. If we use technology to teach the same way we have been teaching then we are not moving forward.
4. Students and teachers must collaborate together to create the new learning environment.

I propose a new classroom and a new idea of education.  I believe that computers are essential to this new learning environment only because they provide the tools for students in interact and be fully engaged in their education.  I do not believe that this is happening in most classrooms today.
My new idea:
- The teacher poses a question, on a chalk board, white board, SMART board…whatever.
- The student must then creatively answer the question using proof of his or her thinking.  This response must be posted online in a class blog or something like it.  I believe that this could really only be possible using tablet PCs which would allow non-traditional responses, diagrams, formulas and other non-typed ideas to be expressed.
- The entire class then reads the responses of the other students in the room and must rate and respond to at least 3 different answers in that blog environment according to the rubric agreed upon and developed by the class for answers to questions.
- Students would then re-write their answers based on the ideas they gained from looking at other student work.  All student answers would be posted to the blog and all students would then vote on the best solution.
- The role of the teacher in all of this is not unlike the current role of the teacher in the classroom.  The teacher maintains the class’ online and physical environment, monitors participation and manages students.  The teacher also acts as a coach answering procedure questions, moderating discussion, and generally facilitating the learning process.  The teacher would need to control internet/intranet access (for this question do students need access to the full internet, only selected web sites, or only to be able to access the classroom blog space?).   The teacher would need to have the ability to project and manipulate student answers to questions, showing mistakes in logic process or helping to lead the class in new thought directions.

This kind of learning is not that different from the current approach to teaching that we use in our classes today, except that it more freely facilitates the exchange of ideas and is truly a student-centered learning environment.
This kind of learning would require a few things not currently present in most classrooms.  They include:
1. 1 to 1 student tablet PCs
2. an online intranet/internet communal classroom space like a blog
3. teacher control of the class’ access to the internet/intranet.  The teacher would need to be able to limit websites the student could and could not visit.
4. a program like synchroneyes where the teacher could monitor/project student screens.
5. a creative teacher
6. students who are used to creating, re-creating and not having to always be “right” the first time

What do you think?

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Filed under: internet access, Technology Literacy, Uncategorized, Web 2.0, WiFi