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.