10/15 blog
This week’s readings, from my understanding, talked about the importance of the paying attention to the adolescents’ experiences and bridging those out-of-school factors into in-school learning from different perspectives, focusing on the black adolescents and the students with the histories of underachievement. The article Modeling as a Multidimensional cultural space emphasized a concept of Cultural Modeling, of which the main objective may refers to structure learning environments in which teachers can help and encourage students to develop abilities of solving complex problems in using their prior or obtained knowledge (p33-34). Thus, to accomplish the objective of cultural modeling framework, teachers ought to know students’ cultural backgrounds and experiences, including their peripheral participations in the variety of activities out-of-school, and then establish connections between their out-of-school lives and in-school learning scientifically, which requires teachers’ cognition and deep understanding of the objectives and contents in their disciplines. 
In addition, I quite approve of the concept of heuristics mentioned and emphasized in this article when the author Carol D. Lee demonstrated the specific approach used in Cultural modeling classrooms. In my opinion, the ultimate goal of teaching should not be training students to be men who have same logics and ways of thinking as their teachers’. If so, school tend to be machine factories, in which all students are taught to be one-type. Therefore, teaching should be heuristic, through which teachers can teach students the essential and basic knowledge and skills for solving problems, and then lead them to solving complex problems in learning independently. It is helpful to exploiting adolescents’ potentials and further realizing their interests and what they may be excellent at. As a result, a confidence in learning can be built, which can bring a positive influence on adolescents’ lives as well. It was also mentioned in Carol D. Lee’ article that according to the research, students who are always with underachievement are black adolescents. This issue was focused in the other two articles, Tatum’s Anatomically Complete Model of Literacy Instruction (2008) and Kirkland’s Books Like Clothes: Engaging Young Black Men With Reading. Four categories of vital signs of Literacy Instruction were mentioned in Tatum’s article including “vital signs of reading, vital signs of readers, vital signs of reading instruction, and vital signs of educators”, which were regarded as “essential elements for improving students’ reading achievement” (p.158). Focusing on students’ reading skills and their lives were emphasized with regards to vital signs of reading and readers, which were argued to be important for addressing students’ reading achievement gap. When I read the interview about an African American male adolescent named Quincy in the article, his answers made me think a lot. “I like this book for a reason, so I’m going to try to read, and then I seen this say “Street Smarts” right at the top. I know I know a lot about the street, so I just read to see what they was talking about.” It can be seen that Quincy was attracted by the book because he thought he knew about the content that the book wrote about. Exactly as the words “Before one learns to read, one must be interested in reading (Dyson, 2008)”, mentioned in Kirkland article. However, the interests are not sufficient to support adolescents’ to keep reading. Quincy added that the book he was interested helped a lot of people, but it would be a waste of time because of teachers’ neglects in the classroom. Furthermore, It was mentioned that without the instructional supports, adolescents stopped further meaningful engagement with reading, even if they longed for reading. Accordingly, the teacher play an essential role in students’ reading. However, teachers always ignore this.
Quincy’s experience just reminds me of my own experience in middle high school. My Chinese teachers asked us to select one book we had read and recommend it in the class. I thought it was a good chance to share our various reading interests among classmates, however, after our introductions, the teacher did judge the values of our readings. I remembered that I recommended a book contained many fables in the classroom, however, my teacher said I should not have spent time reading this type of easy book, but more famous literature. Indeed, I was upset at that time and what my teachers said kind of affected my enthusiasm about reading.
Thanks for sharing, Yutong. I agree with you that students should learn how to solve problem independently. I think that each adolescent or student is unique. As educators , we should't want to teach each student looks like the same. And we should more focus on their own individual characteristics. It is important and helpful for their development. About reading, I think we can make reading more attractive for students. For example, not only let them read text, but also we can use social media like letting them watch some study relevant videos.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your post. Your point about Carol D. Lee and not teaching all students to be the same person particularly stood out to me and is something that I strongly agree with. We shouldn't teach students to be a certain thing but, instead, we should give and teach students the literacy skills, discipline-specific knowledge, and overall academic knowledge that they can apply to the disciplines that they wish to pursue. Also, the machine analogy you brought up reminded me of this model of teaching called "banking teaching" (I think that was what it was called) that I learned about while taking ED 200 with Ms. Lipman. This form of teaching stresses conformity and is just about the teacher telling students information, where teachers "deposit knowledge" into the students, who act as passive learners. Clearly, this form of teaching is something that we should stray away from.
ReplyDeleteThank you for telling me the concept of "banking teaching". I do agree with you that teachers should teach students the discipline-specific knowledge and some other basic learning skills first, and then sometimes they should give students enough space to think and solve the complex problems independently. I think this may help them improve their abilities to solve the problems not only in learning but also in their lives.
DeleteI would like to thank you for pointing out the idea to bring out of school factors into the classroom. I had a friend who moved like 3 times in a year, and sometimes did not even have internet at home for online hw, or a desk to write on, but did not say anything to the teacher because he thought she wouldn't care. Teachers really need to remember that students do have outside problems, and sometimes, sadly, school has to take second place so the student can make it through it.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing and I agree that teachers should pay attention to students' outside problems. I think that is very important. Teachers should know that their students live in different contexts and have different experiences, which causes students' different engagement and performance in classroom. Thus, teachers ought to know more about students' out-of-school lives, then they can find the appropriate teaching approaches to teach and help each student.
DeleteYou mentioned establishing connections between the students out-of-school lives and in-school learning, which I agree with. I think this can be done by getting to know your students better. By taking the time to know your students hobbies, activities, and interests, it can help you better understand them as individuals and as learners.
ReplyDeleteI remember in high school I had this friend who was struggling. She lived 1.5 hours away from our school, had family issues, and physical therapy at the time. There were nights where she would only sleep 3 hours because she'd wake up at 3AM to study or do homework, leave at 5AM to get to school on time at 8AM. She would mention to me how she was worried about grades and stressed, but never mentioned how a teacher stopped and asked her how she was doing. Maybe if a teacher had taken the time to talk and understand why she wasn't succeeding to the capacity she could have, things would have turned out differently.
Thank you for sharing the story and it just reminds me of one of my classmates in high school. He also lived very far away from our school and had to get up about 4am and arrived at school at 7am. Thus, he were always tired and sleepy in class especially in the morning. However, the teachers did not know the condition and criticized him in front of class for he did not concentrate on what teachers said. I agree with you that teachers should take some time to communicate with students and try to find out the reason why they do not have good performance.
DeleteI thought one of the most interesting things in your blog post was the idea that you included about knowing your student's out-of-school life. I worked as a counselor at a youth camp over the summer. One of the key things that we practiced was the idea that we needed to get to know our campers before we ever thought that we could help them achieve life change. Investment into their personal lives was key to show that we value them. And if we show that we value our students holistically in school, they are more prone to learn and grow into functional adults.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your experience and I think the idea you said about get to know your campers should be applied in teaching. I believe if teacher spend time trying to know their students, it will be helpful and meaningful both for their teaching and students' learning.
DeleteHi Yutong. I also think the concept of heuristics is very important. As educators, we shouldn’t just tell answers to students directly and let them memorize things like robots. We should help them think independently and draw the conclusion by themselves. By this way, students will have deep understanding of some knowledge and can draw inferences about other cases from one instance. I remember in undergraduate university that I remember few what I have learned after the final exam because of the cramming-leaning way.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing, Yutong. I agree when you say "establish connections between their out-of-school lives and in-school." By creating these connections, you connect with the student on a more personal level, allowing the student to be more confident. As a teacher, if I don't care about my students, why would my students care about me? By creating these connections, it eliminates the idea that schools are just "machine factories." Personally, I only remember the teachers that had a personal connection with me, the rest, I dread going to their class! Also, a students outside experiences impact how they do in school. So by having this information, a teacher can use it to adapt the way they approach certain subjects/topics.
ReplyDeleteI like what said about establishing a connection between teachers and students and I think it is very important. This connection may help teachers know more about students and make students give more trust to their teachers as well. And then students may be willing to talk more with teachers and participate more actively in the classroom.
DeleteHey Yutong, thank you for sharing. I also think that it is important to pay attention to the adolescents’ experiences and bridge those out-of-school factors into in-school learning from different perspectives, focus on the black adolescents and the students with the histories of underachievement. As the society developing, the movement of population become more and more common and at the same time the students in a same class may have different backgrounds and different experiences. So, there will be different characters of adolescents which needs we educators to pay more attention to and help them not in the class but also after school, so that they can communicate better with teachers and the teachers will also know what are the advantages and disadvantages of his or her students. I think this is really significant.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing. I think it is important to bring in students' out of school experiences into the classroom. I think students do that sub-consciously anyways, so I think doing it as teacher would be very beneficial. I think your example of your school experience would be great to do in a class. Students are able to read something they actually enjoy, and they get to talk about it in class.
ReplyDeleteHi, thank you for posting. I agree that we should support non-conformity in students. Although there are specifics that each child should know because of their importance, however forcing students to conform to one way of thinking, reading, or learning is counterproductive. It does not help the students grow as learners nor does it help them learn at all. This kind of teaching should be avoided and discouraged.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the points you made in the post. In particular, I do not think that teachers or any adult figures should be criticizing what students enjoy reading. Encouraging students to read books that they might find challenging or that teachers feel are valuable then that is more constructive than criticizing what students are reading. Furthermore, I think that modeling how much we enjoy and value reading for its own sake is important. I know that growing up my mom was an important role model for me and as an avid reader, she encouraged me to do the same.
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