Internship Reflection– Week #8

Assessment, I have come to believe after this week, is the most difficult part of this job. Not classroom management issues—but perhaps I am blessed to have few serious behavior issues in my classes—or grading papers or curriculum planning. It’s assessment. In our district, we are given a set of standards that students must be taught. Each student must be assessed on each standard twice, so they are given multiple chances to learn and master that standard. However, our language arts class has something like 66 standards. So, if we are to assess every one of those twice… you’re looking at an awful lot of assessment, and an awful lot of material covered on each assessment.

Throughout the MAT program, I have come to believe in teaching less and deeply. Instead of skimming off the top of every subject, hoping students learn something, I’d like to be in a position to explore something in-depth to ensure real, lasting mastery. This may not mean that we get through every single subject unit in a year, but the learning that students do achieve is knowledge that has depth, substance, and staying power. However, this internship has shown me that a mindset such as this is difficult to reconcile with the realities of school. If I were to spend enough time on each standard to really teach it well, including two assessments, I seriously doubt I could get through all 66. It takes time to administer an assessment. Students waste time and don’t do work outside of class, so more class time has to be spent as dedicated assessment-taking time. If not, I will see about a fifth of my students actually complete and turn in work. Then, I want to give them time to learn from and correct their mistakes, so that can take more class time. Last week’s assessment, which I had blocked out a day and a half for, ended up taking an additional class period, not counting time I gave later for redos.

I struggled this past week to find a way to assess what I needed to assess in the short time that I had. I want to allow my student enough time to process and learn the material, but I also have a limited amount of time in which to complete this unit. I needed to assess my students a second time to monitor their progress toward mastery of my key learning targets. This was a task I really struggled with. How could I do what needed to be done while ensuring my students were set up for success with my instruction and the amount of time they had?

Slowly, the realization set in that I needed to consider alternate forms of assessment. My mentor teachers have largely relied on written paragraphs to assess their learning targets. My first assessment on this unit was similar; I asked students to complete a graphic organizer on the topic and then write a paragraph. It took days for students to complete this assessment, and some students, who I could tell understood the bones of the concept, struggled with putting their ideas into paragraph form. So for my second assessment, I decided to do away with the baggage added by the dreaded paragraph. This second assessment, on the same learning targets, was composed of short-answer questions and a set of multiple-choice questions. While short answer and multiple-choice are not my favorite forms of assessment, it allowed the students to show their knowledge without worrying about how to put their thoughts into an organized paragraph. Sometimes students need to be assessed on their ability to write a paragraph, but not always. In the MAT program, we’ve talked a lot about authentic assessments that are actually assessing the learning targets. Requiring students to always put their learning into a paragraph or essay format adds an extra layer of skill students need to have mastered in order to even begin to answer the assessment prompt. If I’m not explicitly teaching how to write paragraphs or essays, there is no reason to always assign that form of response as an assessment. There is a reason driver’s ed teaches you the rules of the road before putting you in a car—being tested on the rules of the road while in the car learning how to drive would not be an accurate depiction of your understanding of the rules!

My new assessment was completed in a shorter period of time, which was my goal, and I was also able to modify it with different texts and slightly different questions to meet the learning needs of my ELL and special education students. I don’t pretend to have found the ideal way to teach deeply while covering all the required content, but this week I did manage to break out of my assessment box a little bit. In fact, I’m beginning to think that the only real way to meet all the demands for this job is to not be afraid to continuously think outside the box. My hope for the remainder of my internship is that I can expand my thinking so that I am not limited by “the box” in finding effective, authentic learning activities and assessments. I already have a few unconventional ideas in mind for our next unit…

Internship Reflection– Week #4

Week four was full of ups and downs. The eighth graders in my language arts classes spent the week finishing writing assignments that concluded their Holocaust unit. As I wrote last week, each of my mentor teachers presented the assignments a bit differently—one gave the students all three writing prompts at once and let them go, and one teacher gave them one prompt a day with designated time to work on each assignment. It seems that students in both teachers’ classes did fairly well with the assignment; in both, I saw students doing work who had struggled to complete assignments so far. Though I think this was partly due to students being seated in rows this week instead of in groups, I think the slower, more measured pace in the classes where the assignment was broken up helped students focus on one task at a time instead of becoming overwhelmed. We were encouraged to see several of our students who are normally distracted or reluctant to do any work actually complete all three assignments.

The sixth grade language arts class also spent the week writing. They finished up the essays they drafted last week, peer edited them, and crafted final copies. My mentor teacher and I were impressed with how well they did. I felt like we helped them through the essay very methodically and purposefully and it showed in their writing. A poster project I did with the students a few weeks ago served as very helpful visual aids while students were writing. So many students learn through pictures and images, and I think we often forget that these can be useful even when the assignment is writing. My mentor teacher and I have talked about including a second essay in the curriculum for the class later this year based on their success with the format and our desire to prepare them for the many essays they will write as seventh graders. However, we have also had several conversations about how we will modify the assignments for the students who are writing proficiently and don’t need to rely as much on a formula. We’d like to help them see the formulas as a tool and not a rule, so they can learn when to use it and when it is okay to deviate from it.

While I had positive experiences in language arts this week, world history has been a bit of a struggle. The current world history curriculum uses a book that is almost as old as I am and relies heavily on reading and note-taking. My mentor teacher in that class and another sixth grade teacher we work with have both admitted that they don’t feel the curriculum is effective, but they don’t know how to make it better. We’ve been trying to branch out and include new sources of information, activities, and learning tools to engage students more in history. Last week’s yoga experiment was a success, but we’ve struggled this week in finding and creating appropriate texts and engaging activities that will effectively teach the learning targets students need to master. We soldier on, however. These students are too inquisitive to be stuck with dry information when they have the desire to really see it come alive. We’ve made some changes to the curriculum for next week and I’m excited to see how students respond.

From Wednesday to Friday of this week were also student-led conferences. I had the opportunity to participate in many conferences with my students, and due to a rush of many parents at once, even ended up flying solo for a few of them. I appreciated the time to get to know the parents of my students and begin a dialogue about how their student can be successful. My mentor teachers and I were able to make a few specific plans with families for supporting their students, and I think having plans in place that we know the families are supportive of them should make a difference in their student’s education. Conferences were an unexpected time to also get to know the students better, especially some of my quieter students who rarely open up in class. I liked how the conferences were student-led, which meant that students had to take responsibility for explaining their work to their families. Both of my mentor teachers had students fill out self-evaluations prior to the conference. The evaluations described their work efforts, strengths, and weaknesses. Parents seemed interested to read through these, and, coupled with the student’s work samples, I think the self-evaluations gave parents an insight into their student’s self-perception and how it was helping or hurting their work. I’m glad I was able to experience the conferences and meet the parents, especially as I will be assuming more of the responsibility for the classrooms in the coming weeks.

Internship Reflection– Week #3

As this week began, we started showing the eighth grade language arts class the movie “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” as part of their Holocaust unit. Students were to watch the movie and then complete a 3-question writing response to the movie, the texts they had covered in the movie, and what they had learned. Since I have two mentor teachers, I often have the chance to see how they do things differently. One teacher wrote up the writing assignment and a rubric to give to her students. My other mentor teacher, thinking her students would be overwhelmed by the writing assignment as-is, elected to split it up into three parts and go over each one separately. This teacher has more students who have IEPs or are classified as ELL, so we decided that her classes could use some more scaffolding to help everyone be successful on the assignment. After watching students go through the writing process for previous writing assignments, we also elected in that class to focus heavily on the vocabulary (“academic language”) that students would need in order to do their assignment. I had the chance to lead one brainstorming session for the students on the first part of their writing assignment, which asked students to explain a moral lesson taught by the movie. This gave me the opportunity to help students think more deeply about what they had seen in the movie and to gauge their comprehension. I was impressed with the lessons they came up with and was able to pull in a few students who don’t normally participate in discussions—I think because the movie was so engaging that everyone had something to say about it.

The sixth grade world history class has been finishing up their study of ancient India this week, and my mentor teacher and I elected to draw some connections between the ancient traditions of India and our modern society by teaching about yoga. Students had the opportunity to read about the history of yoga, including its roots in Hinduism and its involvement in Buddhism, practice a few poses (including a contest to see who could hold tree pose the longest), and talk about how yoga survived over 4,000 years. Wednesday was my turn to lead the reading and discussion. As a group, we read paragraph-by-paragraph a short explanation of yoga’s historical context. While students read, I modeled how to highlight important information and how to identify and understand new vocabulary words. My mentor teacher noted how important it was to show the students good reading strategies. We focused on vocabulary and putting complex ideas into our own words. Students seemed to really enjoy adding the physical component of yoga to the class—one even told me the next day that he felt calmer for the rest of the afternoon because of our short yoga session. I admit that adding active elements to the classroom is one of my weakest areas, so this was a good opportunity to see how it can be done simply.

We also began teaching the sixth graders, who I have for world history and language arts, how to write a five-paragraph essay this week. Designing a set of lessons that would clearly explain the process was a lesson in intentionality, clarity, and the necessity of breaking something into its various parts. My job was to explain to students how to write a body paragraph. I learned that just because I think something was explained clearly doesn’t mean that all students understand it at the same level, so it is important to ask questions and frequently check for understanding. I was able to circulate around the room and check on the progress of many students, who seemed to be on the right track, so I am looking forward to seeing their rough drafts next week. I do love writing, and teaching it to sixth graders has made me take a close look at my own writing process so I understand better the differences between how I do things and how my students do them—and then address those gaps.

Friday, all the teachers went to an in-service day. I found this fairly interesting. However, my favorite part of the day was when I had the chance to sit down and do some curriculum planning with my mentor teachers and other teachers on the team. We came up with some great ideas for how to better teach history and how to introduce reluctant eighth graders to poetry, so I am excited for the weeks to come as these units take shape and are implemented. I love designing curriculum, but at the same time I am afraid my lessons and units will completely flop. But, as one of my mentor teachers said, if it does, we will talk about it—and I will learn from it.

My goals for this week have been to open myself up to more input and feedback from those around me who are knowledgeable, and to focus on providing my students with valuable, useful feedback that clarifies their understanding and aids their mastery of a concept. I don’t want to fall into a rut of avoiding critical, though essential and helpful, advice in fear of making a student “not like me.” The learning of my students comes first, and I am certain I can provide them with feedback that is respectful and compassionate, but still holds them to a high standard and helps them reach it.

Resultant Reflection II: Adapting Assessment

Every single student I will have in my classroom will be a unique individual. They will have their own strengths and weaknesses, reach for different goals and priorities, and learn in their own way. Each student will also bring their own prior knowledge to the classroom that will affect how well they are able to grasp the concepts they need to learn. We can find out what our students know about a topic before we cover it by assessing them prior to the target lesson or unit. This is called preassessment, and it gives us a picture of what students already know, what misconceptions they may hold, and what they are interested in learning about.

Prior to this class, the word “preassessment” brought to mind week after week of dull spelling “pre-tests” in middle school. While I hated them at the time, they were a great way for my teacher to know who needed to learn the words, what errors they were making, and who had already mastered them. This is how preassessment helps us individualized instruction: we can’t give our students the specific help they need unless we know what skills they lack, and we will lose student engagement if we are constantly repeating things they have already mastered. If we don’t know where students are when we begin teaching, it is likely that we will not use the most effective instructional strategies (Shermis and DiVesta, 2011).

I have been trying to incorporate informal preassessments more often in my current job at an after-school program. For example, before we started our week on France, I asked my kids what they already knew about France and what they wanted to know. This gave me valuable information about their unfamiliarity with the topic, but also told me that one student’s ancestors were from France—helpful information for involving that student in the curriculum! However, I failed to adequately preassess before reading the kids a book about the Iron Curtain while studying Eastern Europe (Peter Sis’ The Wall). I realized while reading that most students had no knowledge about communism, dictators, or even where the countries mentioned in the book were. Had I prepared by preassessing them, I would have known that they lacked this information and could have taught it prior to reading the book. They would have gained far more understanding of the story had they been given that background knowledge.

By utilizing preassessments in my classroom, I can teach lessons that address specific needs of every student. Preassessments show me which students are lacking specific knowledge or skills as well as which students have already mastered them. I can give extra help to students who need it, including pre-teaching vital background knowledge, and have other students act as tutors or explore the topic more in-depth. Knowing what my students need and don’t need enables me to provide individualized, effective instruction for all students.

Read my previous post on adapting assessment, itself a sort of preassessment, here.

Reference:

Shermis, M. D. & DiVesta, F. J. (2011). Classroom assessment in action. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield.

Advance Reflection II: Adapting Assessment

In every classroom, students will be performing at a variety of levels due to their different needs and backgrounds. As a teacher, it will be my responsibility to adapt my instruction and assessment to meet the needs of all of my students, and ensure that my assessments are accessible to all.

One of the keys to adapting assessment is to ensure that I am assessing students only on what they were meant to have learned in the related lessons. Students can get tripped up on tests or assignments that are supposedly assessing their learning, but in reality may require them to share that learning in ways that are not accessible for them. If I want my students to learn the elements of a persuasive speech, I may assess that by asking students to write a persuasive speech. However, for students who have difficulty writing, they won’t be able to demonstrate their learning effectively even if they know the elements of a persuasive speech by heart. My assignment might be assessing the target objective—the elements of a persuasive speech—but it is mostly about their ability to organize and write a speech. I would actually be assessing something far different than I claimed, and as a result, my assessment would be difficult for students at some ability levels and potentially inaccessible for others—and it would not provide me with effective data on their achievement of my learning objective.

By offering choices in my assessments, I can provide opportunities for students of all ability levels to demonstrate their learning based on their skill sets and interests. For the assessment of my persuasive speech unit, I could offer students the option to write a speech, film a video of them giving a speech, or create a presentation that teaches someone else the elements of a persuasive speech. Students could then choose the method through which they could most successfully demonstrate their learning. There will be a time in my classroom where I will need to assess their ability to create a written work, but this particular time does not necessitate it.

Bloom’s Taxonomy can also be of use to create assessments that are adapted to students of different ability levels. The taxonomy points out the difference between lower-order and higher-order thinking skills, but more importantly, it helps teachers see “the sequential emergence of understanding” (Shermis and DiVesta, 2011, p 42). Students cannot suddenly jump from the knowledge level to the higher application level. Comprehension emerges gradually. Lower performing students may be working at the lower levels of the taxonomy, such as knowledge or comprehension, while higher performing students may be able to analyze information. If I provide options for assessment that test their grasp of the same content, but at different levels of thinking, I can adapt the assessment to be accessible to lower performing students as well as challenging to higher performing students—all while assessing their learning of the same content. Bloom’s Taxonomy can also help me know how to draw my struggling students into higher-order thinking skills smoothly, preparing them to form a deeper grasp of the content over time.

Reference:

Shermis, M. D. & DiVesta, F. J. (2011). Classroom assessment in action. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield.

The challenge of detracking

I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about tracking, especially for “gifted” students. Tracking, placing students in higher or lower level classes based on their perceived ability and achievement, is a topic that has come up in several classes so far this year, always accompanied by the fact that it seems to favor the advantaged students. Low-income and minority students, particularly African American and Latino students, are dramatically under-represented in higher level classes, and over-represented in the lower or remedial tracks. This is true even when the minority students have the same test scores as white or Asian students (Oakes and Lipton, 2007). Clearly, tracking is not providing our students with a socially just education that is sufficient to meet the needs of all students. But how do we fix it?

In discussions about tracking, I often hear people advocate detracking as a solution to social justice issues in schools. While this sounds obvious, I’m not sure it is that easy. Simply detracking and placing everyone in mixed-ability classrooms won’t meet the needs of all students, either. I would have hated school if I was forced to be in the “regular” math and English classes, simply because they moved too slowly for me and didn’t offer opportunities to explore topics more in-depth. I absolutely loved my AP literature and calculus classes because they challenged me. If we are going to eliminate tracking, then we need to make sure the classrooms we place all students in are equipped to challenge and support learners of every ability level. Most classrooms and curriculums would need to change for this to happen.

One form that detracking is taking in some schools is to place every student in the higher-level classes. Oakes and Lipton (2007) write about this scenario in Rockville Center School District in New York. Rockville started by having all middle school students take the advanced math class, and eventually succeeding in graduating 82 percent of African American and Latino students with an honors diploma. The achievement gap narrowed and all groups of students improved (Oakes, 2007). Federal Way School District adopted a similar program this school year, automatically placing all students who met standards on a state standardized test in AP classes (story here). As a result, students who wouldn’t normally see themselves as capable of being in an advanced class are seeing themselves rise to the challenge.

Even if all students are not studying the same advanced curriculum, detracking could work if the classroom was able to adapt for all learners. This could involve changes to instructional strategies, assessment opportunities, and content that provides opportunities for students of all abilities to be challenged and supported. A Philidelphia study found that both low- and high-achieving students benefit from detracking when it includes such classroom changes (Oakes and Lipton, 2007). Detracking isn’t as simple as sticking everyone in the same class.

Working toward social justice in the classroom and providing every child with a quality education suitable to his or her skills and interests is a goal that every educator should work for. The elimination of tracking seems like it would help accomplish this goal, given the racial and socioeconomic implications of tracking. However, we must be careful how we go about doing so. Simply dumping mixed-ability groups of students in a single classroom won’t help. Providing all children with a mediocre, standardized education is no more socially just than tracking.

References:

Oakes, J. and Lipton, M. (2007). Teaching to change the world (3^rd Ed.). Boston: McGraw Hill.

Oakes, J. (2007). Democracy’s Canaries. In Oakes, J. and Lipton, M. Teaching to change the world (3^rd Ed.). Boston: McGraw Hill.

ISTE Standard 5: Professional development and my favorite PD tools

Standard five from the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) concerns professional development. It encourages teachers to participate in professional development networks, both locally and globally, to share ideas and resources that will increase student learning and contribute to the effectiveness of the field. Teachers should also be regularly reviewing current research to ensure they are using the best tools in the classroom.

I appreciate that ISTE included a standard about professional development because it is just as important to improve myself as a teacher as it is to improve my classroom and school. If I am not constantly learning, reflecting, and growing, how can I expect the same from my students? And how can I meet their needs in a world that is in a constant state of flux if I don’t stay up-to-date? Professional development is vitally important to share ideas as well as provide, and receive, support. The events in the news as of late remind me that teaching is often a difficult job with many critics. This makes it all the more important for teachers to have places where they can be a part of a community and be supported by other professionals. A teacher who feels alone and isolated will have a very difficult experience.

Fortunately, the internet has brought professional development directly to us in hundreds of different forms. No longer do we need to travel and attend conferences to continue our professional education (although conferences continue to be a rich source of information and inspiration for many). We now have tools that can contribute to our professional development daily, anywhere. In the course of this unit I have been working out a professional development strategy that works for me. As I continue in my career I predict that this will grow and change, but for now I am finding that the most helpful sources of professional development for me are the English Companion Ning and Twitter.

The English Companion Ning is a social network for English teachers. It contains articles and a community forum where teachers can share ideas and request help. There are topics for adolescent literature, new teachers, literature circles, classroom management, how to teach Shakespeare, and even a book club. It is a wealth of information for current and potential English teachers. I was just reading the Adolescent Literature forum (a topic I am especially interested in) and got ideas for over a dozen YA novels that I’d never heard of before!

However, the crown jewel for professional development that I’ve found is Twitter. Sure, many of my friends use it to share what they had for lunch or their current location (a practice which almost turned me off to the tool entirely), but I’ve discovered that Twitter really can’t be beat for gathering information, ideas, and resources quickly, conveniently, and often directly from the source. Twitter, for those not familiar, is a social messaging platform where users can create a free account and post messages up to 140 characters. Users “follow” others to see their “tweets”, and anyone that follows them can see their tweets as well. By following teachers who teach in my subject area (for example, English teachers and middle school teachers), professionals who write blogs I am interested in, and other individuals, I can see a vast amount of information in a very short time. One blog author noted that they had “found more resources and got more useful advice for professional development in 3 months on Twitter than in the previous five years without it” (Olafelch, 2010). Every day, I spend a few minutes (or more!) perusing my Twitter stream and find wonderful articles about using technology to teach writing, up-to-date information on current events, and links to projects being done by teachers around the country. Yesterday, I participate in an “edchat” on Twitter, where I was able to join with other teachers and professionals to discuss whether or not homework was actually valuable. I even follow Diane Ravitch’s Twitter feed, which allows me to connect with one of the country’s leading and most vocal educational reformers.

It really is incredible how much I feel that I have learned from using Twitter as a professional development tool, even though I have been using it for just a few short weeks. According to Ferriter (2010), Twitter’s real strength is that it provides individuals with differentiated learning. Information gained from Twitter is automatically relevant to the user because the user only has to follow people or organizations that are of interest. It creates a support and idea network tailor-made to the individual. Says Ferriter, “I now turn to Twitter friends for help in the same way that I turn to teachers on my hallway” (2010, para. 11). He adds that Twitter could be a useful tool for older students as well, enabling them to create a personalized learning network tailored to their specific interests and passions. If you are considering utilizing twitter for professional development, the Twitter for Teachers Wiki is a great place to start.

Twitter will be a wonderful resource for me as I move into teaching, but it is only one of the hundreds of tools out there for professional development. Which tool you use isn’t important—what is important is finding a way to keep learning and stay informed. A teacher’s focus should be on their students, but they will benefit their students the most if they don’t neglect themselves and their own professional development.

References:

Ferriter, W.M. (2010). Why teachers should try Twitter. Educational Leadership 67 (5), 73-74. Retrieved from http://ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/feb10/vol67/num05/Why-Teachers-Should-Try-Twitter.aspx

Olafelch. (2010, January 3). Re: Twitter as a PLN [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://whatsnewintheworld.net/2010/01/twitter-as-a-pln/

EDU 6526: Instructional strategies end-of-quarter reflection

Well, it is already nearing the end of the quarter. When I look back on the past ten weeks in my instructional strategies class, I realize just how much I have learned. This course was a great introduction to the specifics of how to teach. Last quarter, we examined teaching from more of a philosophical angle that left me inspired to be an extraordinary teacher but at a loss as to how I would accomplish that. Our instructional strategies course has started to provide me with those tools, and I appreciate how practical and applicable it has been. I have even thought about using some of the strategies in my current work at the after-school program, since those kids deserve quality instructional practices as well.

This quarter we have covered a wide variety of instructional strategies in four different strategy “families”: Information-processing (like scientific inquiry and advance organizers), social models (cooperative learning and role play), personal models (nondirective teaching and self-esteem promotion), and behavioral systems (direct instruction and simulations, for example). I’ve wrestled with the appeal and concerns of Dewey’s constructivism, revisited Gardner and his multiple intelligences theory, been inspired by Carl Rogers’ Priorities of Affective Education, and examined the differences between nondirective teaching and direct instruction.

Bloom's Taxonomy, from edorigami.wikispaces.com

Fascinating as these all have been, I think that the most (currently) useful things I’ve learned in this class are the transdisciplinary concepts and Bloom’s taxonomy. The transdisciplinary concepts, which have been especially useful as I’ve shaped an integrated unit plan for another class, consist of these: cause and effect, commonality and diversity, systems and patterns, scale and symmetry, cycles and change, interaction and relationships, time and space, and equilibrium and order. I appreciate this list because it gives me something that will tie units and subjects together for my students, fostering connections between pieces of knowledge. Bloom’s Taxonomy, which constructs six levels of intellectual processes from knowledge to evaluation, is also helpful as I seek to move my students into deeper understandings.

Many of the other instructional practices we have discussed have inspired me and provided me with valuable tools, and I will explore a few in-depth in my final paper (which will be posted later on this blog). As I said before, this course was a very informational and practical introduction to effective classroom teaching.

EDU 6133: What I’ve learned about transformative multicultural education

Prior to reading Banks, I thought that teaching language arts provided me with the best opportunity in the educational world for being multicultural because of the wealth of literature present in every culture. All I would need to do is pick some novels from African and the Middle East, some poetry from Mexico and Japan, and study some famous speeches by world leaders, and bam—there’s my multicultural classroom.

But Banks has challenged me to see that this does not go far enough. My goal as a teacher should not be to create a classroom that simply acknowledges the existence of other cultures—or worse, holds them up as token examples of diversity. My goal should be the creation of a learning environment that respects and affirms students for everything that they are. This means recognizing differences and the ways in which a student’s individual background affects their experience in my classroom. It means valuing the contribution of people from all cultures and not seeing the world as “us” and “everyone else.” Banks calls this transformative multicultural education.

“Transform” means to change, and this is why my previous strategy wasn’t enough: it wasn’t changing my students’ ideas about differences. My priority is to create an environment in which change happens. Some students need to have their stereotypes and prejudices challenged; some students need their differences to matter to someone; some students need to know that someone is aware of their existence. A transformative multicultural education does all of those things by viewing diversity as a normal part of everyday life that should be acknowledged, affirmed, and recognized as impacting a student’s day-to-day experience. Differences become expected, instead of problematic.

Part of creating such a learning environment involves cultivating and practicing cultural competence. Being culturally competent means understanding that everyone sees the world from a different point of view, and attempting to see the world from that view as well as your own. I demonstrate cultural competency in the classroom by speaking in respectful language, avoiding ethnic slurs or offensive phrases, and not assuming that my students will act or speak in a particular way. I treat each student as an individual. Not everyone thinks, reacts, or has the same priorities as I do. To be culturally competent, I welcome such differences and create a curriculum that can accommodate the needs of all my students and their families.

This leads me to the other part of a transformative multicultural classroom, and, I would argue, the most vital part—differentiated instruction. My classroom will have 25 to 30 kids in it. Each student will come from a different household where the values and authority styles are different. Some of the kids identify with a religion, some don’t. Each has a family heritage that may be rooted in the United States or not. Boys and girls will have different relationships with their socially ascribed gender norms. The students will live in different neighborhoods, like different things, and some may speak different languages. They have different abilities and needs. Can one single teaching strategy enable all of these kids to succeed?

No. And if I try, I am making my classroom inaccessible to certain kids. Differentiated instruction, on the other hand, uses a variety of instructional techniques and forms of assessment to meet each student’s needs. Rather than planning for 30 individual lessons, differentiated instruction is applied to one lesson and allows students the room to learn in whatever way they learn the best. To differentiate instruction in my classroom, I can use individual as well as collaborative work, or allow students to paint their responses to a novel instead of write them, or give kids the opportunity to report orally. There are limitless ways to differentiate instruction. The most important thing is that the classroom is set up to expect and effortlessly include differences, making diversity “normal” instead of a cause for problems.

There is no better way to respect my students and value who they are then to create a classroom where there is space for them to be themselves. Such an environment teaches students to cherish their own identities and value the individuality of others. Differentiated instruction and cultural competence transforms a classroom from “us” and “them” to “we”. As educators, this is exactly where our priorities should lie.

Banks, J.A., & Banks, C.A. (Eds.) (2010). Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives (7^th Ed.). Wiley.

Prensky, Chapter 5: Planning for partnering with guiding questions

Prensky focused chapter 5 on planning for a partnering classroom by using questions to guide the curriculum. According to Prensky (2010), the best way to plan for partnering is by focusing on what questions you can ask students instead of what you can tell them. These questions need to be overarching questions that don’t have one right answer, preferably starting with “why” and able to be followed up with “how”. The best guiding questions, says Prensky (2010), are those that cause students to say, “That’s a good question!” and lead them to take action in the real world.

This method of asking students to find the answer to a complicated question intrigues me. It would definitely place learning in a student’s hands, and I think as a student I would have been positively giddy at the chance to discover information instead of sitting bored while someone told it to me. However, this chapter really brought to light a concern I’ve had with the partnering approach since the beginning: how well would this work for students with disabilities? Many students with intellectual disabilities wouldn’t be able to understand more abstract guiding questions, and they wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get the answers. They would need a lot of guidance from a teacher and their work would need to be much, much more organized than other students’. Direct instruction is often lauded as the preferred method of teaching skills to students with intellectual and other disabilities, and this approach is about as far away from that as possible. In addition, students with ADHD, Asperger Syndrome, autism, or other disorders may find it difficult to function in classes that are less structured, more unpredictable, and often noisy. I value the possibilities that partnering instruction offers, and I love the idea of using guiding questions instead of lecturing at kids, but I wonder about its usefulness as we see an increase in inclusion. I think with heavy modifications it could work for most students, but would it be the best way for all of them to learn?

Prensky does acknowledge that most every student will need assistance in connecting their work to what they are learning how to do. Utilizing guiding questions does not guarantee that students will be able to connect everything on their own, and it is important that kids recognize they are acquiring skills, not just information. To remedy this, teachers must explicitly state the connection between a student’s work and the learned skills (Prensky, 2010). This reminds me of writing analytical papers for my English degree. Just because I understood how a certain paragraph fit with my thesis didn’t mean that someone else saw the connection. I always had to be careful to relate every point back to the idea I was trying to prove. I would often even put my thesis on a sticky note attached to my computer so that I could refer back to it when crafting each paragraph. In the classroom, teachers must point out that doing a certain task is teaching the student a certain thing. This might even be reflected in an objective that is shared with the class each day. For example, if I am teaching the students to analyze poetry by identifying similes and metaphors, I may write on the board that our objective is to “analyze poetry through the identification of similes and metaphors.” Our students are smart, but we need to make certain things perfectly clear so they don’t get lost.

Image from ReadWriteWeb.com

In Kindle news, Amazon announced this week that they are adding page numbers to the Kindle—and my first thought was, “It’s about time!” I first read about it in the New York Times article here.  Interestingly, the article also mentions the advent of the public highlight feature that they supposedly already had but hasn’t been working for our class for weeks. When I signed in to the page today, I noticed that the interface was difference, but I didn’t notice an abundance of public highlights suddenly showing up. I’ll believe that feature exists when I see it actually working, Amazon! But thanks for the page numbers.

Prensky, Mark. (2010). Teaching digital natives: partnering for real learning (Kindle ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Highlights and notes made public by readers of this book can (hopefully) be viewed here.