Denise Thornton

April 28, 2011

Current Research Question:

1. How do I bring progressivist methodology into the classroom?

- connect curriculum/content to student lives

- engaging students by letting them state opinions about techniques used in class and make suggestions

Key Data Sources:

Data Source	Significance	Remaining Questions
Student Journals - all my students in both my math class and science classes have journals for warm-ups, exit questions, notes, class activities, etc.	This allows me to introduce literacy into my math and science classes on a daily basis. It also gives me a way to have my students express their opinions without having them have to state them to the whole class. They can be more open and in turn I learn more about my students which enables me to create lessons that will connect with their background knowledge and their lives.	How do I more effectively use the journals? What makes students use their journals as a study tool, or even better, proactively use their journal as a learning tool (developing their own ways to effectively use their journal for class)?
LEA Classroom Activity - had math students write story problems involving a recursive routine and then read it out loud to the class. I then picked two problems for students to solve in their journals.	This activity had the students fully engaged. Not only did they get to infuse their own personality into the story problem, they also paid attention to hear what everyone else had written. It even extended into the practice work of solving the problems. It was the highest level of engagement I had during my work sample.	How can I convert/change/use LEA activities to use it more often in class? How can I get this level of interest/engagement in more of my lessons?
Math TV Exercise	This was an activity where the students watched a downloads of different instructors teaching the same equation. They then circled which instructor was the easiest to understand and which instructor was the hardest. The students used two different colors to circle the easiest and hardest to understand. This allowed me to not only see what type of instruction the students preferred, but the students explained why they thought it was easier to understand.	How do I get the students to communicate to me when I my instruction is easy or difficult to understand? Should I have students rate each different technique I use? If I let students rate the techniques will I get valid information?
Smiley/Straight/Frown Face Evaluation	This is a quick way I can tell in class if students understand a concept. My students responded well to this. I think this was because when we did a show of hands to see who had which face they weren’t stating I don’t know this, they were telling me what kind of face they had drawn.	Why do students respond to this better than the typical, “Does everyone understand this?” or “Does anyone have any questions?” What other ways can I have the students voice their level of understanding that they will want to use?
Unit Student Self-Evaluation	This is a bar graph self-evaluation that the students fill in through out the unit so I can see their comfort level and understanding of each content objective. It is great because I can see what areas the majority of the class is still not understanding, and I can also see what I need to work on with individuals so they don’t get behind.	How do I develop student voice? How so I turn student voice into students taking responsibility for their own learning, even at a middle school level?

Literature I have read:

Carrier, Karen A. (2005). Supporting Science Learning through Science Literacy Objectives for English Language Learners. Science Activities: Classroom Projects and Curriculum Ideas, 42, 5-11.

Dusterhoff, Marilane. (1995). Why Write in Mathematics? Teaching PreK-8, 25, 48-49.

Echevarria, J., Vogt, M., & Short, D. (2008). Making Content Comprehensible for English Learners: The SIOP Model. Boston, MA; Pearson Education, Inc.

Echevarria, J., Vogt, M., & Short, D. (2010). The SIOP Model for Teaching Mathematics to English Learners. Boston, MA; Pearson Education, Inc.

Hines, V. A. (1972). Progressivism in Practice. Part Two: The Classroom. ASCD Yearbook, 118-164. Retrieved January 13, 2011 from ERIC Database.

Knapp, C. E. (1994, August). Progressivism Never Died, It Just Moved Outside: What Can Experiential Educators Learn from the Past? Journal of Experiential Education, v17 n2, 8-12. Retrieved January 13, 2011 from ERIC Database.

Leo-Nyquist, D. (2001, Spring). Recovering a Tradition of Rural Progressivism in American Public Education. Journal of Research in Rural Education, v17 n1, 27-40. Retrieved January 13, 2011 from ERIC Database.

Loucks, K. & Gangloff, K. (2006, October). Reinforcing Math Skills. Phi Delta Kappan, v88 n2, C3. Retrieved January 11, 2011 from ERIC Database.

Moran, S., Kornhaber, M., & Gardner, H. (2006). Orchestrating Multiple Intelligences. Educational Leadership, 64, 22-27.

Osgood, R. L. (2010). Laggards, Morons, Human Clinkers, and Other Peculiar Kids: Progressivism and Student Difference in Shaping Public Education in the United States. Philosophical Studies in Education, 41, 1-10. Retrieved January 13, 2011 from ERIC Database.

Silcock, P. (1996, June). Three Principles for a New Progressivism. Oxford Review of Education, v22 n2, 199-216. Retrieved January 11, 2011 from ERIC Database.

Short, D., Vogt, M., & Echevarria, J. (2011). The SIOP Model for Teaching Science to English Learners. Boston, MA; Pearson Education, Inc.

Tomlinson, Carol Ann. (2008). The Goals of Differentiation. Educational Leadership, 66, 26-30.

Ward, Robin & Muller, David. (2006). Algebra and Art. Mathematics Teaching Incorporating Micromath, 198, 22-26

Significant Literature:

Significant Literature	Relates to Learning	Remaining Questions
The Goals of Differentiation Carol Ann Tomlinson 2008	This article identified four areas that help students take control over their learning and their lives: building trust, ensuring fit, strengthening voice, and developing awareness. This has helped shape my research as I am starting to work on letting the students have a voice about how well they understand content objectives, what kinds of review they think help them the most for tests, quizzes, etc., and how they like to review homework.	Develop student voice and see if there is direct correlation to student buy-in and/or students taking on responsibility for their own learning. How can I take my lessons and differentiate them even further? Developing a system of assessment that shows if a lesson had good levels of differentiation or not.
Orchestrating Multiple Intelligences. Moran, S., Kornhaber, M., & Gardner, H. 2006	This article talked about multiple intelligences and how to target different students during a lesson. This fit into my work sample for multiple reasons, but most importantly because I was teaching an ESOL Sheltered Content class. After my second observation, my supervisor and I talked about the need for me to differentiate my lessons more than what I was currently doing. With the help of this article, I tried to incorporate at least the following intelligences in each lesson: visual/verbal/linguistic/intrapersonal/interpersonal.	How can I pull the intelligences that are harder to use into my classroom? (music, movement) How do I continue to use techniques that work well without them getting boring and/or old to the students? What intelligence does a student feel most comfortable communicating in - to class, to me, to each other - not just learning in?
Making Content Comprehensible for English Learners: The SIOP Model. Echevarria, J., Vogt, M., & Short, D. 2008	Various techniques and assessments targeting ESOL, but beneficial to the whole class. (Graphic organizers, manipulatives, color, verbal activities, etc.)	Do SIOP techniques help students connect with background knowledge better? Does SIOP help students understand content objectives as life skills that can be used all throughout their lives?

Dialogical Analysis Posts:

Dialogical Analysis Post	Relates to Learning
Friday, March 25: Differentiated Learning	This is the week where I started to focus on building student voice and using it to help me assess my class. It is where I started to look harder at differentiation and what that actually means and how to differentiate more successfully in my lessons.
Sunday, March 6: Multiple Intelligences	This is the two weeks when I started using self-evaluation techniques in my class. This is when I started to realize the importance of student voice, and how powerful it can be for both my students’s learning and my learning/teaching
Saturday, February 19: Things Start Ramping Up	I talk about the LEA that I used in Math and how great the kids reacted to this. Looking back, this is the first time I had the students use their voice in my class and I did not even realize it until right now. I remember that this was the most engaged the entire class had been since I started teaching them. The only time I have gotten close to that level of engagement is when I did the warm-up self evaluation (student voice) and when I use manipulatives (angle wedges, flip books, etc.).

Codes:

SV = Student Voice

L = Literacy

DL = Differentiated Learning

Themes:

Student Voice - developing student voice in the classroom

Literacy - using literacy in a math classroom

Differentiated Learning - differentiated learning helps students connect content objectives to their own life, become responsible for their own learning, and develop skills that they will use throughout their lives.

What do these themes tell you about your teaching and your students? What insights are you gaining from the themes?

When I first started teaching my question revolved around a progressivist classroom and to see if making the material relevant to the students would help them retain the information so they could use it throughout their education and the rest of their lives. This basic question is still in tact, but it has evolved into how do I use differentiation in my lesson planning to create student voice and develop a student’s responsibility for their own learning. I think there is a direct link between giving the student an opportunity to be a part of the learning process (by stating opinions, knowing how to track their own progress, etc.) and their retention of content objectives. If they are involved, they have more buy-in or engagement. I think it develops a feeling of ownership in the student.

Also, I think using differentiated instruction, hitting on multiple intelligences as much as possible, and allowing the students to have a voice (the themes listed above) is progressivist in its nature as the students are learning not only content knowledge but tools they can use throughout their lives. And by making the connection to content objectives through something they are helping create, the retention level should be higher. They are learning instead of memorizing.

Finally, literacy in the classroom helps the students learn at a higher level because it forces them to look at content objectives from different perspectives. It forces them to think, to use their background knowledge to develop their own ideas about content objectives. Not their own misconceptions, but their own opinions about what they are learning and how it fits into their individual lives.

Data Table and Student Impulses

Data Table

This week I created a data collection table for grading the warm-ups and exit questions my students write in their journals. I needed a quick way that I could assess if they understood the content objective (see table above). I blacked out the column that contained student names. I created a system to track the level of understanding for each formative assessment:

minus symbol = did not answer the question

check minus = did not understand the question

check = answered the question partially right

check plus = answered the question mostly right, but missed at least one important part of the answer

plus = completely understood and answer was right

This enabled me to quickly go through the journals and assess each student in about 7 minutes per class period (so 15 minutes total). After I was done, it was easy for me to see how the class as a whole understood the content objective by just finding the mode of the symbols above.

Research Question

1. How do I bring progressivist methodology into the classroom?

- connect curriculum/content to student lives

- engaging students by letting them state opinions about techniques used in class and make suggestions

I was reading some of my research materials this week, and found a great description of students and their tendencies and impulses. Hines, in his article Progressivism in Practice, Part Two; The Classroom, states, "certain tendencies...were...categorized into four classes...a.) Children have a social impulse. They desire to share their experiences with their family and others in their immediate, though limited, world. b.) Children have a constructive impulse. They like to do, to make, to arrange, and to shape in tangible form. c.) Children have an impulse to investigate and to experiment. They like to do things to see what will happen. d.) Children have an expressive impulse, a refinement of the communicating and constructing impulses - they like to express in their own way what they see, feel, or think (1972, pg. 128)."

This does wonders to explain the classroom management headaches many middle school teachers run into. I have found that in the world of middle school teachers I seem to be less irritated by random comments and jokes, as long as they are innocent in nature. I think sometimes teachers can get too caught up in no talking, no personal expression, no 'disrespect'; they sometimes forget they are dealing with hormonal thirteen and fourteen year olds that occasionally have to blurt things out because it is their nature to be impulsive.

The article also talked about Dewey's assertion that all learning is from experience. "Experience involves the coordinate functioning of eye, mind, and hand in a social situation in which the individual becomes increasingly able to draw upon past experience to order and explain present experience, the better to direct future experience (Hines, 1972, pg. 125)."

My research is leading more and more to working on student voice and listening to what the students have to say about their learning and how they learn best. I really think that by giving a student a voice and the ability to discuss how he or she learns best is the first step in the student taking more responsibility for their own learning.

I have not had a chance to do the self-evaluation chart, but I plan to use it this coming Tuesday. We are in the middle of a short unit, and will be almost half-way on Tuesday, so it will be a good time for the students to do an initial assessment on all the content objectives for this block. I think this will be a good way to give the students more voice in telling me what areas they understand and what areas that are causing confusion. Also, it will hopefully make the students take more responsibility in finding out what content objectives they need to work on and then follow through and learn those objectives.

Either way, it will be interesting to see how they self-evaluate themselves and how they do on the test at the end of the month.

Hines, V. A. (1972). Progressivism in Practice. Part Two: The Classroom. ASCD Yearbook, 118-164. Retrieved January 13, 2011 from ERIC Database.

Differentiated Learning

1. How do I bring progressivist methodology into the classroom?

- connect curriculum/content to student lives

- engaging students by letting them state opinions about techniques used in class and make suggestions

2. In what ways does my coordinating teacher affect my thinking about teaching and my teaching?

Question 1:

The past two weeks were a mixed bag of successes and failures. The Four-Corner Definitions worked well, and the students wrote all the notes using the different colored pencils, but we did this whole section as a class, and I think it might have been more beneficial if the students had done them in groups. I was too concerned with the students getting the right information written down instead of using this great technique to help the the students learn. It was not a complete failure, but I think if I would have taken a different approach during the class period it could have been even more affective.

The self-evaluation was overall a success and a good way for me to see what areas my students still felt like they needed help. I had the students use the smiley/straight/frowny face system to tell me how they felt about each type of question they would find on the test. I compiled the results in the following table:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ane03cQCuly5dG1fYzdCNy1qdVAtWjZYVjhXVW1iQ0E&hl=en&authkey=CJ2_0JkH

This showed me what areas the class felt they understood and what areas we needed to go over before the test. It was a great formative assessment that let me know how the students felt about their grasp on the content objectives and it also helped me plan my review.

Which leads me to the review. I had a great plan of “I do, you do, we do”. I downloaded a visual timer on my computer so students could see how much time they had to work on each section. I separated students into groups of three so they could work and discuss the problems while I floated to help during group work time. The one problem I had was the review packet I put together was enormous. I wanted to have lots of practice questions to insure the students would get lots of practice, right? Well, my packet merely ended up scaring them and causing much confusion as to what to work on, how long to work on it, and would all of this be on the test. I learned a great lesson about having one example question on the board to work out together and then have one or two examples for them to do on their own, and then check with a partner.

I learned many things from the results of the block test as well, but here are the two most important:

I. I differentiated instruction extremely well to incorporate my ELL students.

II. I did not differentiate my instruction enough to help all of the students in my classroom. I reached my middle and higher level students, but was not successful in helping my lower level students master the content objectives.

Tomlinson, in The Goals of Differentiation, discusses differentiation as not only making sure students learn essential content, but also increasingly take responsibility for their own learning (2008). She also points out four main elements of differentiated instruction that help students not only take more control over their learning, but also their lives: trust, fit, voice, and awareness (Tomlinson, 2008).

Building Trust - I think that I have done this successfully. I definitely think the students feel that I want to help them learn, that I have equal respect for each of them, and that I have the same expectations for all of my students.

Ensuring Fit - I am still working on this, but I do think I have improved over the past six weeks. As discussed above, I have found good “fits” with my average to above average students. I have yet to get a good fit with my needs improvement students. It is important to keep in mind that there most likely is not one fit that will work for the students that I have not connected with and I will need to continue to try several different techniques to figure out what fits best with my different students.

Strengthening Voice - I really feel the students feel that I hear what they have to say. I think one thing that helped strengthen that is the smiley/straight/frowny self-evaluation. I was asking them to tell me how they felt about their knowledge, and then I asked them if they felt I had helped them understand it better. If I continue to ask for the students’s feedback they will begin to understand that I do value what they think and I do want to know if they think I am teaching them effectively.

Developing Awareness - Now that I have established that I value the students’s voice, I need to help them develop their awareness as learners that it is their responsibility to know their strengths, weaknesses, and what techniques they can use to enhance their learning potential. This is so important because the skill of self awareness, if I can successfully teach it to the students, is a skill they can use for the rest of their lives.

Question 2:

I have decided to stop pursuing Question 2, as the simple answer is just start inserting more of myself into my lessons and not worrying about what hammer, if any, will fall. I am going to expand question 1 into both contents, as it seems I have been focusing Question 1 only in my math classes.

Next Steps:

1. Start concentrating on successful differentiation for all students, all levels, all factors. One way I can think to do this in the next two weeks is to introduce a self-evaluation chart the students can use throughout the whole unit. It is a bar chart that has each content goal listed. As the students feel they are learning or mastering a content goal, they can shade in where they are in the process. Starting at “I know nothing” moving to “I am confused, but starting to understand” and moving through two more levels and then ending on “I completely understand this”. I will have them glue these into their journals and every one or two class periods will have them re-evaluate where they are on their Progress Chart. Then I can review those in their journals for a quick reference on whether or not my lessons have been affective.
2. Continue to strengthen the student voice by having interactive, formative assessments that communicate that I want to know what my students think about their understanding and my teaching.

Tomlinson, Carol Ann. (2008). The Goals of Differentiation. Educational Leadership, 66, 26-30.

Multiple Intelligences

1. How do I bring progressivist methodology into the classroom?

- connect curriculum/content to student lives

- engaging students by letting them state opinions about techniques used in class and make suggestions

2. In what ways does my coordinating teacher affect my thinking about teaching and my teaching?

Question 1:

During my last observation, Rebecca and I talked about differentiated instruction and its importance for student learning, especially ELL students, so this became my main focus for my math class over the past week. In the article Orchestrating Multiple Intelligences, Moran, Kornhaber, and Gardner discuss "Project Spectrum", an idea of blending multiple intelligences in a classroom activity. "Project Spectrum environments do not segment tasks strictly into one intelligence or another. Instead, they set up situations in which a student can interact with rich materials - and teachers can observe these interactions - to see which intelligences come to the fore and which are relegated to the background" (Moran, Komhaber, & Gardner, p. 26).

With this in mind I set up an activity using Math TV (www.mathtv.com):

a. as a class, the students watch two different people teach the same math problem.

b. the students decide which person was the easiest to understand and the hardest to understand and then designate this by drawing a different colored square around that person's name.

c. The students then get in groups of four and discuss their choices.

d. As a class, each group states what their group found and why they found that person easy or difficult to learn from.

e. After each section there is a sample equation for the students to solve, first by themselves, then with a partner's help, then as a group of four.

We did this for four equations. This exercise included linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and visual intelligences. Not only did it allow me to observe which students were strong and/or weak in each intelligence, it also gave me some insight on which style of teaching made it easier for the students to understand math. The students overwhelmingly liked the instructor named Betsy, stating that she "explained every part of the equation" and that she "explained it slowly and was easy to understand". She also used different colors in her math formulas making it easier for the students to see what part of the formula was the most important for that particular problem. At the end I asked the students to tell me, by a show of hands, if they thought Math TV was helpful. A few thought it was just boring, about half the class thought it was helpful, and one of my interpersonal students volunteered a "it was boring, but it was helpful, too" comment.

Another technique I tried in math class was self-evaluation. I had the students work on the warm-up and did not answer any questions, telling them they had to try to do their best and we would discuss it in a few minutes. Then, before discussion, I had them self-evaluate their understanding of how to do the problem. I had them write one of the following faces on their warm-up sheet:

smiley = I completely understand this and could answer this correctly on a test.

face with straight mouth = I sort of understand this, but I am not sure

frowning face = I have no idea how to do this.

Then we had, buy a show of hand, who had each face written down. After we discussed the warm-up, I had them write a second face on their page based on their understanding after we discussed the warm-up problem. I asked again who had written each face, and then I asked who had moved up to a different face, or who had moved down. This worked really well on a lot of different levels. The students like being able to communicate how they were feeling about the problem in a group setting. I had 100% involvement during this activity, and I would say at least 95% engagement, if not 100%. It also allowed me to know two things immediately:

1. how many students understood the problem and how many students still needed help.

2. how affective my explanation of the problem was. Did I help the students better understand that specific math concept?

This worked so well that I am going to make a student evaluation sheet for the students to fill out the class before we review for the block test so I can see what concepts the students fell they understand and what concepts we need to work on before the test. I am going to just put a problem down and have them rate them using the smiley face method (since it is established already). They won't need to solve the problems, just tell me their comfort level with each. This will also allow me to group students if needed to hit specific areas with different students.

Question 2:

An interesting thing happened during my science class one day this week. My cooperating teacher had a training day, so I had a substitute with me during my A2 class, and then later that day my cooperating teacher was back in class for A6. We were doing a relative dating activity during class that day, and I had pulled together some research about fossils so the students would have some background knowledge about what they were looking at in the pictures they would be using. My cooperating teacher was so preoccupied with other things, she basically left me no clear direction on how to teach the class...which is very nontypical. Because of this I was able to do the following:

1. Let the students read silently and take notes at their own pace (we usually read out loud as a class and stop to take the exact same notes).

2. Discuss fossils, how they are made, connect to individual background about fossils before the relative dating activity.

This may seem very small, but just being able to do these two things made me feel like the class was so much more MY class. I was even able to develop excitement and connection to background knowledge by talking about the movie Jurassic Park and how they used fossils in amber to create the dinosaurs. I asked the class if they knew how they had been able to reproduce the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and immediately received excitement and buy-in. This would not have happened if I had not discussed the different kind of fossils before the relative dating activity.

The difference I felt from the class where my CT was gone to the class where my CT was present was obvious. I felt more in control when my CT was not there. I also think the students responded to me more as the authority figure, and not just someone else in the classroom. It would be nice to have that freedom every day in science, but I don't see that happening. For example, when I asked if I could have the students develop a 'cheat sheet' together as a class, I was informed that the classes would be summarizing the Cornell Notes they have been taking as their review, and that this would happen the first half of class the day of the quiz.

Next Steps:

Question 1: I am going to start incorporating color into the different formulas I use during class. I am also going to use the following techniques during the two weeks before Spring Break:

a. Four-Corner Definitions (adapted for ELL students)

b. Self-evaluation about math concepts that will be on the test.

c. Multiple Intelligence Test Review.

Question 2: Obviously my attitude about my teaching changes when my CT is not there - I feel more in control and able to try things that I want to use in the class. I need to get to a point where I am doing this regardless of whether my CT is there or not. Because of this I am going to try to start putting my own ideas into the lesson in small chunks, starting with how I connect the material to the students' background knowledge. I think this can be done in as little time as a five minute set, and I think I can sneak these in without any sort of permission because I won't be 'changing' any materials and my CT does give me freedom on how I present the materials/activities we use in class. So the goal for this question is to do more "teach first, ask permission later".

Moran, S., Kornhaber, M., & Gardner, H. (2006). Orchestrating Multiple Intelligences. Educational Leadership, 64, 22-27.

Things Start Ramping Up

1. How do I bring progressivist methodology into the classroom?

- connect curriculum/content to student lives

- engaging students by letting them state opinions about techniques used in class and make suggestions

2. In what ways does my coordinating teacher affect my thinking about teaching and my teaching?

Question 1

Ok - so I didn’t get three for each content area, but I did manage to try three different techniques overall. The first was the LEA in math. I had the students think up their own story problems, read them out loud in class, and then wrote them down using the projector. I then picked two problems for the students to solve with their partner. This technique worked great. Not only did the students all write a story problem, they were all very excited to share them. Most of them were unhappy that we didn’t solve all of them.

The second technique I used was “The Mystery Box” review. I had a fancy black box that was filled with a mystery prize. I then divided the students into four teams and they could choose the level of review question their team wanted to answer. The harder the question the more possible points. The students liked this review, but because it was the first time I had ever done this I did not plan enough time and in both math classes we only got to review about three questions. In addition I learned that teams of four were too big because in some groups only two students would work on the problem. About half of the groups had 100% team participation and the other half had about 50% participation. I told them that there could be anything in the box: candy, pencils, toilet paper, etc. With some adjustments I think this could be a very powerful review technique.

The third thing I tried was a graphic organizer in science. I was not particularly happy with student reaction to this exercise, but I am beginning to notice a bit of apathy with many of the students in the science classes. [See Question 2 for more on this.] There is little teacher/student discussion during the unit. The students do a lot of reading, computer research, worksheets, and labs, but as far as I can tell, there is never any class discussion except for correcting the worksheets. I have talked to my cooperating teacher about this and I always get the same reason: there is not enough time because of all the standards that need to be covered. The point being, the graphic organizer was basically just thought of as more busy work.

One thing from science that I was very excited about was some of the responses to an exit question I asked them: What sort of review would help you get ready for the next quiz. Some of the students did not answer this part of the question (it was a two part question, and some students only answered the first part), but the answers I did receive were great:

• jeopardy game review
• making a note-cheat-sheet as a class (I would do this as students suggesting what they felt were the most important part of the unit). I loved this one and hopefully can convince my CT that we have time to do it.
• teacher leading a review the class before quiz is given
• giving the students 10 minutes to study before the quiz

These were all great suggestions, and they were student ideas. How much more progressivist can you get?

Question 2

I talked with five teachers, both active and retired, about their student teaching experiences. Some were more positive than others, but everyone I talked to said that there is difficulty jumping into a classroom that is not yours from the beginning of the school year. Even the teachers that had a very positive experience expressed how much better it would be once I had my own classroom.

That said, as discussed above, the feeling I am getting from my students in both of my science classes is definitely apathy toward the class. It seems each unit is taught in the same order:

1. Reading and vocabulary/main idea identification.
2. Read aloud (the same reading they just did the vocabulary for) in class.
3. Worksheet and/or activity related to unit
4. Some computer research
5. informal or formal lab (if warranted)
6. unit quiz

I think this monotonous routine has created boredom in most of the students. This is just my opinion, though, as I have not been brave enough to actually ask any of the students. As far as I can tell, there is no review as a class, but students are allowed on page of notes for the quiz. On average, only 10 to 15% of the students actually make this cheat sheet for the quizzes.

While I am teaching I am still having feelings that I would teach this differently. It is difficult to try to get students excited about something that I think is boring and not effective. The frustrating part is when I do bring things up to my cooperating teacher, she whole-heartedly agrees that it is a good idea, but then follows that up with the fact that we just don’t have time to do things “like that”.

Next Steps

Question 1: I am moving into my ESOL work sample in my math class (Sheltered Content work sample). I am excited to us SIOP and other techniques specifically designed for ELL students as I think all the students in the class will benefit from these techniques. Most of the techniques I have learned during my ESOL classes have been progressivist in nature so I think my work sample will lend itself nicely to my Dialogical Analysis. Also, I really want to try to incorporate the class-created cheat-sheet for the next quiz and I am going to push to do this with my CT in science.

Question 2: I think I need to try to convince my CT to let me try a few of my own ideas in class, even if it means that we have less time to do the material she has already pre-planned. This will have to be done very tactfully as to not step on toes, but I think in the end it will be worth it. So my goal for this section is to get at least one of my ideas incorporated into a lesson within the next two weeks.