I wasn't sure what to expect from this program. What I have found is a renewed sense of curiosity within education. This program has pushed me out of my comfort zone and into a realm of trying to connect and engage students within the classroom in different ways. My previous experience had a lot to do with how I taught math. Collaborative groups, working within specific group roles on low-floor, high-ceiling tasks, I thought was a good as it gets. At my current site this format didn't work. Adaptation was needed and through various tools and ideas presented in this class, I feel more prepared as an educator to be that agent of change these students so desperately need.
Providing students with opportunities such as: access to teacher created videos through Google classroom to learn specific content, or to share responses via Flipgrid and preview what others had to say, to being able to edit a community Google doc has brought a new vibe to the classroom. I see students start to independently access information which was not the case last year. I can see this shift pushing me and my students forward, more to an environment of self advocacy and a learner centered approach.
1 Comment
When I look back into how I was taught math, there is a variety of pedagogical strategies used throughout the years. From the standard lecture-based approach with an infinite problem set as practice, to collaborative groups with a focus on an investigative approach to an online format, where through a community blog, questions shared and answered by the learning community. I can explain from personal experience which strategy worked best for me. This might not be the same for everyone though.
The flipped classroom seems in theory to bridge this gap. Knowledge is front-loaded and then applied in the confines of the class, where all the "hard stuff" can take place with professional guidance. Why would we waste precious time, when we are all together to do something that could be done alone. With that, a flipped classroom is of great interest to me. I can see this being put to use in a couple of ways. When diving deeper into previously learned content, a series of short videos to be used as a skills practice would be useful as we got into the applied content during class. The flipped class could also be used a though provoker. This could be a mental or written brainstorm involving a driving question that you wanted students to come into class with. Much like we often do within our current cohort, if you are have some ideas coming into a class, a richer conversation will follow. Obviously the connecting theme is creativity. When digging into what Brown, Gardner and Robinson were speaking about, I have drawn the conclusion that creativity is a learned skill, but how to teach creativity is full of tons of mishaps, dead ends and hasn't been done right within our current educational model. Through our educational system, students become less creative because of the specific pathways we inflict on them as they "master" course work in specifically valued content areas. Sir Ken Robinson's story about a girl who just wanted to dance is a great example of this, which happens to feed into Gardner's idea of Multiple Intelligences (which he didn't directly speak about, but the work he is known for). All the while the speakers are talking about increasing, valuing and nurturing creativity, we first must start with Sir Ken Robinson's quote,"...Rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children" because if we are to adapt to what is being asked of the future work force in 5, 10, 20 years, education as an institution must evolve to meet the new demands from our economy. As our classrooms are inundated with technology, we really need to push ourselves to use technology as, "curiosity amplifiers" as stated by John Seely Brown.
I admit, I have a bias towards Sir Ken Robinson. I enjoy watching him speak, find his jokes humorous and timely and think that his attitude on education is spot on. It is not surprise that I find myself nodding my head during ALL of his presentations. In his presentation Do Schools Kill Creativity, he is quoted as saying, "Creativity is as important as literacy". As a math teacher, I can link literacy as the equivalent to basic numeracy skills. As technology helps us correct grammar and spelling and calculators help us perform operations on numbers, what is a skill that you cannot google? Is knowledge a commodity anymore? As we have learned in this course, the 4 C's are the intangibles of being educated. Creativity falls into this category. Recently, I have thought, why do we still break school days into specific content areas such as math, science, english but instead, maybe it would make more sense to create 4 C (or 5 C) specific courses. Period 1 could have a critical thinking focus while period 2 could have a collaboration focus. Course listings then could interweave each emphasis as students grow within each focus area (I can envision using a rubric such as the one created by NVUSD). As Robinson introduces the term, "Academic inflation" I think about what employers want out of educated persons. Perhaps this is because jobs that used to require a BA that now require a MA are doing so because of skills such as the 4 C's skills. Maybe these skills are more developed in Master's programs as opposed to Bachelor's programs? It is fair to say that most of my students come to us with a negative opinion on the educational system. Many have had little success within classes, been told they were wrong more often then they were right and have been relegated to a variety of support courses that alienated them rather than support them. This is a generalization, but serves true for most of our school's youth. Knowing that mistakes happen and it is not always about the (right) answer is a great starting point. I see this correlating with Mobley's 1st and 6th insight of a "Non-linear way of thinking" and "permission to be wrong". Allowing students to be creative and fostering this skill is not only aligning with the majority of Mobley's insights but also with Gardner, Robinson and Brown. How does fostering creativity in a school look like? What does it look like in a math class? These are tough questions and it is even tougher to admit that I am not doing as right as I could be by my students. But, this is why we are all enrolled in a master's program, right? John Dewey's quote, "What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must we want for all children in the community. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy" is rooted in the idea of 21st Century teaching. Dewey's philosophy on teaching as summarized by PBS.org is that students' education must be relevant for students to engage and that education is in place to lead learners to be productive citizens. In this sense, we as a society, as educators and as parents have a moral and ethical obligation to meet the needs of the students as it relates to our societies needs. Dewey's philosophy is aligned with the instructional and assessment shifts proposed by Darling-Hammond.
Darling-Hammond's proposal for assessment is of great importance given that within education we almost exclusively use these scores to quantify success. While teaching math in Oakland, we gave 3 sets of assessments during a school year. The SBAC, The mid-course assessment and the end-of-course assessment. The mid and end of course assessments were task based assessments that were created by the district math team with teacher leader inputs. After administering the assessments, all math teachers from across the district came together at a central location, aligned our scoring with rubrics and scored every students assessment. We then used data dives at following professional developments to inform our instructional practices and curriculum changes. In juxtaposition was the high-stakes SBAC that administered at the end of every school year. Little was ever done at our site or district level to use the data to inform our instructional practices and many parts of the assessment were a mystery to most teachers. As said by Darling-Hammond in regards reimagining assessment, "Such efforts are unlikely to pay off, however, unless other central changes are made in the ways tests are used and accountability systems are designed. so that new standards and assessments inform more skillful and adaptive teaching that enables more successful learning for all students". In the past when meeting with parents or administration to discuss students growth, the conversation related to content retention and application. We would talk about the child's ability to show understanding and accuracy within discrete standards. Often times I would think, how is this preparing the child for what they will encounter in a job market 5 years from now. Over the last few years, I have focused my conversations on broader skills such as which strategies the students use, how they ask questions in class or how they support their partner or group when completing an investigation. While there is validity in discussing how a student performs in say, using operations on integers, education is more than checklist with a series of standards that you check off as the student shows fluency within them. In a post Darling-Hammond educational landscape, I could see a place where teachers were supported by being given opportunities to grow both within classrooms and as a professional. This would include input on assessments and curriculum and a professional learning community where isolation was replaced with collaboration and communication. In this landscape, students would be supported as a result of educators being supported. Teacher's would have the skills and time to meet the needs of a diverse classroom by using authentic data that is used a springboard for instruction, student support structures and pedagogy. Our federal and state institutions would view education with an equity focus, that puts stronger support structures into struggling schools to help close achievement gaps. With this, students would be able to clearly see the connection between education and society, and time spent in school would focus on experiences that would mimic the professional, post education world while providing students with opportunities to explore various careers through connected learning experiences. I realized this year that I have been stereotyping our youth. Like the mid-thirties person that I am, I speak of days that were pre-cellphone, involved looking up books at the library using a card system and finding/siting sources using the encyclopedia (a special shout out to s-sh for keeping my alphabet game tight). So how have I been stereotyping our youth, for lets see, the last decade. I have been stereotyping by believing that all youth are tech fluent.
Monday, September 18th, 2017 is when this fact hit me. After explaining to a student how to complete a selective screenshot, rename the image and then upload it to his drive, it hit me; I know more about technology (that matters to me) than 95% of my students. Now, if your following, the key word is "matters to me". Snapchat, Instagram and making phone calls through Facebook (which is another funny story) do not play into my daily routine. Now, I understand this is a completely bias way to view technology, but I wonder if students can teach themselves the ins and outs of apps mentioned above, why is accessing documents within the cloud and creating flawless looking slideshows feel like you are forcing students to write their name over and over again? Somewhere, there have been a disconnect and Mishra puts it perfectly as the "New Media Ecology". Through various personal investigations, professional developments and a steady stream of emails aimed at pitching new technologies, I have became "tech flexible". I have had to use technology to design lessons, respond to admin, post observation notes, communicate with friends, send invitations, build curriculum and pay utility bills. Most of our students have done one, maybe two of these. To build in this idea of tech flexibility, exposure and time are needed. Recently, students collected data from a school waste audit, sorted the data and expressed the data within Desmos. Man did kids have a hard time with Desmos, until they didn't. It took about 2 separate attempts before they got the hang of the program. There graphs are accurate, the are labeled and scaled and they even printed them remotely before taking the prehistoric ruler and putting a trend line on it. Now it is on to Flipgrid. So, how does technology look in my world? Messy. Fun. Playful. Engaging. Frustrating. I am convinced though, that exposure is the key. Build a slideshow, answer a question with a video, access a Google doc via Google classroom, it is these actions that are going to advance our learners into the 21st century. It is also this flexibility that will allow students to have choice over their technologies which creates ownership and engagement. What an exciting and frightful time to be an educator! I have been interested in Mathematics since as far back as I can remember. Growing up, we didn't have a lot of money and a game I would play is to add up the contents that went into the shopping cart (you know, to keep a keen eye on my mom's spending). All those price tags of 3.49, 6.79 and 1.29, gave me a real world use for using estimation. This practice also allowed me to build skills with number fluency, operations and at the root of it all, what numbers mean.
Within my classroom I push for this fluency. What does this mean? What do you mean by this? At first I was asking these questions because I wanted students to appreciate numbers the way I appreciate numbers. After several years in the classroom it dawned on me, that those questions I was asking extended beyond the Mathematics classroom. Formulas, facts, conversions and theorems can all be looked up, watched, listened too and utilized using other more simple algorithms. What we are doing as educators is helping prepare students for future classes, post-secondary, success within the job market and so on. Being able to know what you mean by this or knowing what this means are essentials to "adulting". I use this example because I want education to divert away from what doesn't work. To find this, we need to ask ourselves, what does this mean? Or, What do we mean by this? If we are giving a Do Now, why are we giving a Do Now. If we have classes structured to separate Science, English, Social Science, P.E. and Art why are we doing this. If we are assigning homework 4 days a week, what do we expect from this. Why, why, why gets a little monotonous, but it is essential in what we do as educators. This year our small site team has decided to stray away from traditional classes. We have short skill classes, long Project Based classes and frequent rotations within the quarters. Why are we doing this? Simple, what we were doing before wasn't working. So we asked ourselves, why are we doing this? Exactly 288 hours until my wedding day, a graduate program that is just beginning, a house we just closed on and moved into and a school year that starts tomorrow. With all of these major life events happening at once, it has given me an opportunity to organize, prioritize and most importantly, find my zen mental space (which at the moment is HARD). While stressful, or as the title says, "Whoa...This is a lot" it is these experiences that define our human existence. With every uncharted endeavor emotions of joy, excitement, fear, self-doubt, stress and many other describers will come out to play. For emotions is what makes our human experience so profound. Now to find my zen mental space yet again. |
Joseph WilliamsI have a love for getting students jazzed about math, art and food. Currently educating youth at an alternative high school program in Portland. Archives
November 2017
Categories |