First Semester of Teaching

- Guacamole Goalie - Flickr

Well, my first semester as "the teacher" has come to a close. Looking back it seems so long ago, but also, it feels like it has flown by. I remember feeling anxious, excited, and not knowing what to expect on day one. I didn't know what my students would think of me, if I could actually teach them what I was supposed to teach them, and if I could handle all that is required of being a full-time teacher. Well I guess sitting here writing this is a sign that I've made it...at least physically.
There were so many highlights I don't know where to begin. After my students and I got through the feeling out stage I found it a lot easier to loosen up a bit and be myself more of the time. Even though I only spent one semester with some of the grade 12's I found it really emotional when I saw them walk across the stage to receive their diploma. I am, by trade, a numbers and logic type person and what I realized is that teaching is more of an emotional occupation than a practical one. I've learned that it is the daily interactions with staff and students that enriches the teaching experience and makes what we do in the classroom meaningful.
I found it really challenging to adapt the way I interacted and taught different grade levels. For instance a grade 9 class versus a grade 12 class. One thing that was a must for any grade level is a sense of humor. No matter what type of student almost all of them could appreciate and relate to humor and having a sense that there teacher was just a "real" person just like them.
As I reflect back over the semester I don't think I could have asked for anything more. I have built incredible relationships with amazing staff and students, had so much fun along the way and best of all...I can't wait for the fall to do it all again!
I realize that my reflections may be modest compared to a seasoned veteran of 20 years but this is my starting point and I know there will be greater insights and revelations as I journey through the profession of teaching.

What's wrong with education today?

The semester is coming to a close and I am finding it hard to keep students motivated and interested in being in the class. So I was trying to think of a way to get my grade 12's to stay on task during the last few weeks of their final semester of high school. I decided to do something with a topic that I knew was important to them.

What is the purpose of high school?

I decided to raise the question, what is wrong with education today? Most of my students really took this question to hart as they all had serious accusations as to why education (the way it is now) is pointless, in their point of view.
How I sparked this little debate was by showing them a couple of videos I have as a favorites on Youtube. The videos are called "A vision of students today" by Mike Wesch and "Education Today and Tomorrow" by Dean Shareski.



I showed the students the video's and then posed this question; "Does our education system meet the needs of today's students?"

The students had plenty to say in their responses. The responses included such things as:

"Teachers are lazy and don't do a good job at motivating students to learn."

"Most of our classes are pointless, I will never use most of them once I leave high school."

"I don't have the option to study the things that I am interested in."

"I wish we could do things more practical and apply it to the real world."

"We should do things with more technology in all our classes."

"I think we should be able to specialize in the things that we like and not have to take the mandatory classes like math and English...when will I ever need to write and essay later in my life if I don't go to university?"

"School doesn't challenge me and I get bored and don't feel like doing any of the pointless assignments."

As you can see the students had a lot to say and we had to end the discussion early as we ran out of class time. Obviously the students were passionate about this topic and wanted to speak out. I could tell, as can you I'm sure, from their responses they were asking for more from their public education than they are receiving.

I decided to take this one step further for two reasons: 1) to give them an opportunity to speak out and let their feelings and opinions be heard and 2) to give myself an inside look at what it is exactly that students want today and how can I better adapt my teaching and influence change in the system to meet those needs.

I decided to add an assignment at the end of all this.

PROPOSAL TO REVAMP EDUCATION (HIGHSCHOOL)

Refer to the following youtube videos:
a) Education Today & Tomorrow
b) A Vision of Students today
c) 3 Steps for 21st Century Learning
d) School of the future

Requirements:

1) What subjects/content would be taught? (I.e. math, science, religion, politics, horseback riding??)

2) How would they be taught?
I.e. Setting: in a school, outside, multiple locations, others?? Resources: labs, computers, digital equipment?? Instruction: projects, lectures, experiments, research, work experience??

3) How would students be assessed? (How do you find out what the students know) i.e. exams, reports…??

Provide as much detail as possible when you answer these questions. You can present this in any format you chose, essay, PowerPoint, video, play, collage…be creative)

You will be marked on the following:

a) are all the questions answered
b) is there enough detail in your answers
c) are your answers practical

Be sure to reference any resources that you use.

The assignments will be coming in at the end of the semester, which is in about a week. I am eagerly anticipating what the students will come up with. I will have a follow up post to report on what the students hand in.

Should be interesting.

Redefining my role as Teacher

[... first rays of light]
Originally uploaded by Stefan Mendelsohn

As each day goes by I find myself thinking more and more about what my new role as a teacher is in this digital and technical world we call teaching. I have come to an early conclusion that my goal as a teacher is to teach students how to teach themselves. It doesn't matter if I am teaching Math, Physics, Drafting...fill in the blank, in the end students may remember a few things from the content but the bigger picture is; did I teach them something about themselves and about how they learn best?
I find I am focusing more on being a resource and providing valuable resources to my students that help them achieve success in the content and understanding about how to learn. I have discussion weekly in my classrooms with students about "what is the point of school"? Through our discussions I get the sense that students are frustrated with the way schools are set up and how "pointless" some classes are. They make the point, "when will I ever use this again in my life?" My comment is that true, you may never need some or most of what you learn in school, but the important thing is that you learn how to learn so that you can teach yourself anything that you will need to learn in your lifetime. Most of the content I learned in school I had to reteach to myself if I needed it in University or at a job. So to me, the bigger lesson, the bigger picture is; can I teach my students what their learning style is and can I provide resources to help them discover and take advantage of what their learning strengths are?
To me this simplifies my teaching and makes me a more efficient teacher because I know where I should be focusing my energy and time. I am sure this philosophy of teaching, I guess you could call it, will change and evolve as I embark on my teaching journey but I feel I am on to something more foundational and valuable than trying to convince kids to learn this because they have to if they want to graduate or because they may need this if they go to University. If there is a method to the madness then maybe the madness might just make sense and be worth something in the end.

What's wrong with traditional math assessment?

Ever since my first experience as "the teacher" in a classroom I've always felt uncomfortable with the way we traditionally assess math. The traditional unit exam breeds last minute cramming and memorization of procedures and questions by the student. This is followed by an all to common brain dump of useless information (i.e. math content) about 10 seconds after they hand in their exam. There must be a better way. Now after reading a post from a student on Students 2.0 it seems as though some of the students feel the same way!

Students 2.0 via kwout

Could this be the sparks of something new burning in the future of teaching and assessing of mathematics?
Personally, as I went through my university career I learned that I would never memorize all the questions that could be asked or all the different scenario's that I could possibly encounter, but what I could do is understand the principles and key ideas underlying all the questions and thus be able to apply those understandings to whatever I faced on the exams. Ironically enough it took less time to study this way then it did when I tried to do one of every type of question I might face. This discovery didn't come until about my second year of university, which was preceded by my k-12 schooling, two years at a technology school, and a year of university classes...oh the wasted hours memorizing and agonizing over all the information to take in.
Now with this new found outlook and a desire in our students to want to be tested more meaningfully I feel the time is now for something new to develop. There is a difference between knowledge and understanding. Wiggins & McTighe have a great book out called, Understanding by Design, that explains this idea and how we can design our teaching and assessing to facilitate understanding. Closely related to this is the idea of Bloom's Taxonomy, which was published back in the 50's but wasn't very popular until recently. The idea is to get students to think about the content (no matter what it is) and to bend it, twist it, shape it, and make it fit into scenario's, contexts, and applications that differ from what they have seen it in before. Basically we are looking for the student to demonstrate the ability to transfer knowledge across into other areas or applications.
In math this may come about as problem solving, projects, presentations, or research into real life applications. I have found one great resource on the net that has a collection of great higher level mathematical thinking objectives involved in the assessment tasks. It was put together by Harvard graduates from 1993 to 2003 (a fairly credible source, don't you think?). Here is the link.
So as I make my way through this crazy world of teaching I learn from the past, refuse the status quo of the present, and anticipate change for the future of education.

Students teaching students

During my internship I was having a discussion with one of the teachers in the math department and she described a situation that she had with her grade nine math class. Basically they took the students from one class into another class (same grade and subject) and basically they had the students from one room be the teachers to the students in the other class. So peers were teaching each other. Below is the description from the teacher involved.

"My grade 9's had already completed sections on adding/subtracting with polynomials. I had introduced them to alge-tiles as an aid to do this. I made sure all my students were comfortable using the alge-tiles. The other gr. 9 class we went into had not started this section, so I matched my students in pairs making sure the pairs complemented each other as far as ability. Stronger with weaker etc. I prepared a teaching guide sheet for my students to make sure they taught all the concepts to their group. The learners(Gr. 9's who had not covered the material) had worksheets they had to complete to show their understanding of the lesson. Each group had 2 teachers to 3-4 learners. Some of my teachers were not ready to take on this role as they had not completed their assignments so they worked on those in the same time period. Alge-tiles were given to each learner. It was most impressive how on task 50-55 Gr. 9 students could be all in the same classroom. We had used a science lab so there was lots of room to spread out. I had numbered all the work spaces so I assigned my teachers to an area and the other teacher assigned his students. We had agreed to place my strongest teachers at stations were they would be matched up with his weaker students. I used 8 stations. The students enjoyed the activity and accomplished the objectives. We hope to reverse this process at another point in time where the teacher/learner roles will be reversed between the two classes."

From the responses that the students had and the excitement that the teachers showed from this activity makes me hope that I might get to try this idea out for myself someday. As we all know, teaching something is the best way to learn it and I think that the students that get a chance to experience this for themselves is very powerful for their understanding and long term storage of the material.

What if...

What if we let students study what they wanted and we taught them the math, science, social, oral skills and reading skills that go along with it. Instead of forcing the students to learn what we want them to learn why don't we teach them what they want to learn? I recently read an article on student learning and how they retain knowledge. It spoke about how we don't store new information in our long-term memory until we ascribe meaning and relevance to our prior knowledge. Being in the discipline of mathematics I spend a good deal of my time going over concepts and ideas that were covered in the course or sometimes even the two previous courses. Students ability to recall prior learning is becoming a serious stumbling block to further learning built on prior knowledge.
My feeling is that if a student is allowed to select some topic or idea to study then the relevance and meaning will be more likely to occur since the students motivation to learn is intrinsically driven because of the self declared interest in the topic. For example, when a young boy is all of a sudden introduced to the land of dinosaurs they will read every little bit of information about them and can recall names and facts that I'm sure most paleontologists would have to look up. If we are there to guide them in their discovery of learning we can emphasize the math, science, English, etc. within their selected area of interest.
Now obviously their is going to be questions of how can we guarantee all students will be getting the same education? And, how can we assess and evaluate what they do know? First of all, I don't think we can say that even now every student is receiving the same education. The gaps in resources from one school to another and various curricula being taught throughout the country is preventing students from getting equal opportunities in our education system. Secondly, the way we have traditionally assessed and evaluates students is superficial and irrelevant in my humble opinion. So would we really be that far off than we are now if we just let them learn what they wanted to learn and guided them to the different avenues of leaning along the way? At least they might remember something.

I have recently come across some software that incorporates such an idea. Now I am not endorsing this companies software but I think it has huge potential to open students up to discovery and expose them to cross-curricular learning. I will give you an example. Let's say a student was interested in birds and wanted to make a bird house. During this process the student could learn about the birds that might inhabit their bird house (biology). Along with that they may look at environmental issues(which could lead to social issues) that may be affecting these certain species of birds(Science, Social Studies). Also, the student could learn about ratio and proportions of the house, slope of the roof, cost to make it (math). The student could also learn about different types of wood to use, which is strongest, easiest to build with (physics). The student could learn about supply and demand, marketing and budgeting if they wanted to produce for distribution (business/accounting/English). Maybe they could look up how different cultures view birds and what role they have in their society and how birds have been viewed in the past (History). This is just an example but you can see where it can lead.
This may not be the answer or maybe just the tip of the iceberg, but I think the way we approach leaning has to be changed to incorporate and encourage student inquiry and love of learning.

Student Concentration

So I gave my Physics 20 class their unit exam on Waves the other day. I thought it would be neat to try something to test how students take exams. Here is what I put in the first paragraph of the test, "You may use a calculator for this exam. Be sure to state any formulas you use and be sure to keep track of units in your solutions. Any formulas that you need will be provided for you on the formula sheet. If you have read all of this and get to this last sentence (within the first 5 min), raise your hand and point to the last word in this paragraph and I will give you a mark!" I had 8 out of 24 students notice this and get the extra mark. So this shows me that students don't even take the time to read all the instructions. So no wonder they have problems solving questions...they probably don't even read the whole question. I can remember one of my university prof's doing this with us. Only he stressed reading the whole exam before you started to get an overall idea of what the exam was like and for us to get an idea of how to budget our time. So we had to find the little note somewhere in the whole test to get a mark. My students couldn't even read the first paragraph! Is it that students today don't have the patients? They just want to get in and get out without to much pain. Or is it the form of evaluation? Perhaps there is the pressure that they feel they have to get done in a certain amount of time, therefore, they feel they don't have time for the details.
Maybe this little experiment will teach them to READ the test!
Student Concentration

Passing the Blogging bug on

Today we had our third Digital Literacy Club meeting at school. Today I introduced blogging and got my students set up with their own blog. They seemed pretty excited about it. It will be interesting to see where they take it. At some points the seemed to be overwhelmed with all the options and possibilities. I can remember feeling this way myself when I first started.
Here are some links to their blogs.

Sam
Ben
James
Tyler
Brandon
Kailey