Recently I began teaching a math course in the evening at a neighboring school district. The students within the Evening Scholars program needed to be there due to a failing grade, missed classes or a sub-par performance the first go around. By all means these students identify as reluctant math learners. As students entered the room, there was an equation posted to act as a number talk, the equation was 300 = 10(10 + x). This alone taught me so much about the students enrolled in the evening program. I saw fear and discomfort and I heard comments such as, "I don't know this" or "I am here because I am not good at math, I don't know anything". Fast forward to an hour into class and students were discussing scenarios with each other, asking questions of their peers and myself and growing increasingly comfortable with not being right.
This story is not told to brag about my success or offer some prescriptive method for engaging traditional non-engagers, because in actuality I play such a small role in this transformation. The students coming into the class already had knowledge and understanding. What mattered is the classroom was designed around a simple fact, you are going to make mistakes, in math, in life, in whatever. That's not important. How you react to these mistakes is what matters. In a math class, do you sit back and allow yourself to get frustrated and give up? Do you look at someone else's work and scribble down their thoughts? Do you ask questions of the people around you? Or maybe you trace your journey back to the point where things became muddled. By reinforcing this mantra, creating a comfortable place to explore, ask questions and seek understanding, this group of students were able to excel at a rate that they didn't believe they could. Lesson design as a focus. As students came in, I asked them if they had a phone and if it was charged. I then gave chargers to those you had low battery. I told them to keep their phones out because we were going to use them. Within the first 15 minutes we were completing The Red Cup Staking Challenge (something I do with all my classes the first day to reinforce group skills), then accessing a Padlet prompt through Google Classroom to have students write about their previous math experiences, then after a few additional transitions, a Quizizz about simplifying expressions, followed by another group task. I had observed these 3 hour classes before where teachers gave a pile of photocopies and students slugged through the work for 180 minutes. It was painful! I couldn't imagine being in school for 6 + hours, then having to come to a class from 5-8:30 and perform for a teacher that put in zero effort to creating a space that students actually wanted to be in and work that would actually engage a learner. This story is important within the context of my personal inquiry cycle because while I wouldn't have given a stack of photocopies or made students solve question after question just to prepare for an assessment, as recently as last year I wouldn't have folded in technology into my lessons. The group tasks were still in place, the room for discourse and mistakes was still at my core, but this Innovative Learning program program has unleashed a desire to do be better, be better. Bringing in technology in a meaningful way is engaging and plain fun. As I design units for my day job, where reluctant learner isn't even a title that would correctly categorize my students (I would say, disenfranchised learners) this integration of meaningful content presented in a way that allows students to build more than just content skills is what I am cycling back to. Being 3 designed units in, each one improves and seeing students gain digital literacy, content and interpersonal skills is what keeps pushing that cycle around.
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Over the past few weeks within our new Bridge Building unit, Padlet has taken center stage as our tool of choice for warm ups.
Why: The Padlet came about because we wanted our students to write more and assist them in refining their sentence structure. Previously, we have done this through Google Docs but ran into the issue that we couldn't add daily prompts to a document once students made a copy of it. How we use it: As students come into our block class, we track our unit through a shoots and ladders like 3 week guide (12 days with each day acting as a class todo list). The students then transition into their Padlet prompt that is accessed through Google Classroom. The prompt includes 2 questions, sometimes with images, sometimes without. At this point we are having students post anonymously but this will change once this cohort is switched out (I will talk about the reason later). As students answer the prompts, we stamp their 12 day guide and then spend a couple of minutes debriefing the comments as a class. Pros: Students are beginning to read other's comments (I wouldn't had guessed it would take several days for students to realize that they could read others' comments to get ideas but...), participation is pretty close to 100% each day and instead of students saying, "I don't know how to answer" or "I don't get it", they are looking up concepts that they do not know (GASSPPPP!). Initially, we were not going over the comments the first week, but since we have been, students are making a deeper connection with the tool our unit design and asking questions about the prompts. Cons: As students find that they can read others comments and ctlr+c is copy, we have had to open a discussion about their own thoughts, work and plagiarism. This in itself is a pro because it is a topic that we should be touching on anyways. Currently, students are posting anonymously, which came about because we wanted students to feel safe writing what they thought without fear of being wrong. As we enter into a new cohort in the following week, we will have students sign in to rid the anonymous postings so we can get back to our original goal of using Padlet as a writing tool. Being a comment thread design, it is difficult to use Padlet as an individual assessment tool. This is countered as its usefulness as a whole classroom understanding tool. In Day 5 we asked about 3 types of bridges, students were unsure of what we were asking and started listing bridges in Portland by name (Portland is bridge city for those that do not know). We instantly knew that as a class we had to as a class begin grouping the Portland bridges by design before the lesson. Closing: Padlet is a tool that I will continue to use in my class and can see its use extending beyond the warm up prompts. Earlier this year, I used Flipgrid and recently was told that Padlet has a video response functionality that I am interested in providing as an option for responses. Skip down to Paragraph 3, unless you want context, fluff and personal opinions/biases. Teach this, follow this scope and sequence, use these assessments, nope, sorry, curriculum is changing, adapt, scaffold, yadayadayada. Yes, this seems like a pessimistic view and I apologize that it comes off this way, but this is the feeling I had when teaching in a traditional, comprehensive school setting. Fortunately, I got to help design and use a curriculum I stood behind, was able to have input on assessments and was allowed to design my lessons in whatever manner I proved was effective. Rabbit hole, back up for air. Now back to the question at hand. Finding space within the daily tasks to design and implement digital literacy. The buzzword, 21st Century skills come to mind and if we as educators are charged with the task of teaching these 21st Century skills, then we must also be drawing from content that is 21st Century relevant. Teaching technology should no longer be thought of as snippet that is introduced as we hand out Chromebooks are assign iPads. Digital literacy is part of the education, woven into our daily lives much like Restorative Justice practices and should not be thought of as a stand-alone lesson. These are the 21st Century skills, these are the reasons that we value education. Off the soapbox, time for action! Being in a 1:1 classroom has pushed me as an educator. Looking back a mere three years ago (pre 1:1), my classroom looked differently. Chromebooks came out on special occasions, after we signed up for a cart and patiently await "our day". The SBAC's were done on Chromebooks, so were a few basic transformation (Geometry) tasks but that was it. Today, students engage in discourse through Padlet, answer questions through Quizizz, access shared docs through Google Classroom, create zines through online templates and use Desmos to compare functions. With this great power comes great responsibility. The way that I have begun to teach digital literacy involves: 1) Modeling/Moderating online communication - Using apps such as Padlet for warm ups, quick writes and debatable topics, gives the students a chance to communicate digitally. Within a comment thread that is similar to Facebook, students can piggy-back off of others ideas, debate and get ideas from others. Having this sort of communication within the safety/confines of the classroom allows students to help build online awareness (and online writing and grammar skills). 2) Using various sites and resources to analyze validity of online content - Specifically, teaching some basic "look-fors" when digging through content such as official accounts often have a blue check box and locked Wikipedia pages are more trust worthy. I Lately I have been using resources from Stanford's Civic Online Reasoning site and using these mini tasks as a quick warm up or segue into a larger project. 3) Taking charge of their learning - This year, I have been creating YouTube videos and screencasts to teach supporting skills for our content. Instead of students receiving direct instruction from the teacher (live) they have the power to watch (or not watch) a demo/instruction. The goal in this was two-fold, one, if students already had the content knowledge the could skip this resource, two, it allows students to work at their own pace with the power to rewatch, pause and go back. These videos are posted to Google Classroom for easy access. An area that I would like to push myself and students into is the Creation realm of Digital Literacy. This year has been a first for many of our students integrating technology into their daily classroom routines. Much of their comfortability relies on being told exactly what to do. After reviewing the Hyperdoc site as well as many of the samples, I believe this is a route to scaffold independence in relation to technology, allowing students space to explore while still being pushed towards an end product. Making sense of The Sense-Making proved to be a stretch in understanding in itself. Up until this article, I would describe the process of making sense as learning. How can we best help someone to learn? How do we know that they have learned this? These questions sent me back into my classroom for concrete examples.
How can I tell if student A learned how to write a function from a pattern? What was the process that the student went through to understand? How did they make sense of writing a rule from a pattern? How can I tell if student B learned how to cook dried beans? How did the student see the process of cooking dried beans? What helped them bridge the gap between not knowing and knowing? Seems simple enough. Dervin presents the idea of sense-making as how people "gap-bridge" between situations and uses of the desired information. Looking deeper at the above examples, what questions did the student a ask to project patterns once the pattern was identified? How did student B internalize the process of cooking beans? Was it seen a just a set of instructions? Or did student B visualize the beans taking in liquid, selling and softening during the cooking process? To personalize this information, a quote from Dervin stating, "...the individual use of information and information systems is responsive to situational conditions as defined by that individual". Dervin continues with "...focusing on how the actor in moment defined by that moment and attempted to bridge that moment when conceptualized in gap terms". These two passages help me make sense of what is meant by a gap and how "gap-bridging" is a way for people to make sense of not only information needed, but how is that information useful and specifically how does that information fit into the construct of the individual and the individual's situation. What Dervin goes on to write is that, "the methodological approach that is called sense-making is an approach to studying the constructing that humans do to make sense of their experiences". I see this on an individual level, however Dervin brings in studies where in order to make sense of how others make sense, peoples responses must be lumped into categories to analyze trends and similarities between each individuals experiences. With this, I am sure each additional read of the article will lead to a deeper and more personal understanding of the content and how this article ties into the larger structure of our graduate program, education and society. |
AuthorHello, I'm Joe. Welcome to writings about my thought process throughout the journey of Touro's Innovative Learning Graduate Program. Archives
July 2018
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