Field Experience Reflection

I conducted my observation hours at STEM Magnet Academy, which is an elementary/middle school that “provide a rigorous and innovative academic program, while creating the blueprint for STEM education within Chicago Public Schools” through “the use of cutting-edge technology and an integrated, multidisciplinary approach to teaching and learning.” The classrooms I observed were math classrooms, in varying grade levels: two sixth grade, two seventh grade, and one eighth grade.

One literacy strategy that my cooperating teacher incorporates in her classroom is the idea of constantly showing why a certain calculation was done. It is important to note that the math done at this stage is rather trivial, but a lot of it, if not all of it, can be put into simple word problems! For example, in one of the sixth grade classrooms, this was a bell ringer:

What is cool about this is that students can just act this out. That way, they are practicing their integer skills with a competitive edge to it. They are too focused on the game that they forget they are learning. To add on to the idea of bellringers, since some word problems in these math classes use objects that a student may be unfamiliar with, such as a postcard, the teacher actually brought a postcard to show the dimensions of length and width.

Another literacy strategy that I found interesting is the act of self critique. The teacher conducted a scavenger hunt where an answer of a math problem will tell you “Go to station 3.” In order for a student to properly solve the problem in station 3, the correct answer had to be figured out in the previous station. The student must then go through his or her own reasoning again and of course, if no flaw is detected by the student, the teacher was always there for assistance, as well as walking around stations and making sure students were on the right track in their thinking. Now, when a student would come and ask the teacher a question, the teacher would always rephrase that question to get students thinking, or start from the beginning (“So, what is it that we are trying to find?”)

A mistake that happened on behalf of the teacher and I was that the next sixth grade class had the same bell ringer. In the previous class, a student came up to the board and wrote out his work. Nobody erased it, but the students found that out by the time the class was going over the bell ringer. Although this may be seen as a bad thing to occur, it proved pretty beneficial because the students were able to analyze the student’s reasoning and determine whether or not they agree with the work done.

Cultural modeling in an ESL classroom

Location and Population.

I work for a program run by UIC- Center for Literacy in conjunction with FAST (FAmily STart Learning and Support). They operate their program in South and South West neighborhoods of Chicago, with community partners such as Head-start programs and other partners, who provide the geographic space while UIC provides the resources and instructional staff. The students in my classroom are parents of pre-schoolers that attend Head-start in some locations and the general population in other locations. The purpose is to broaden accessibility of language instruction to an immigrant population that has very little access to the English language, in both instructional and everyday forms.  My students are all mothers of one or more children, first generation immigrants that have been in the United States for 1-20 years. There are 2-3 levels of language learners at one time in the classroom, and within each level, proficiency in oral literacy also varies a great deal. Students are tested on reading comprehension at the beginning of each year., however oral literacy skills have to be gauged during classroom practices.

Reflections on Practices.

The primary strategy used in the ESL classes focuses on the cultural modeling framework which attempts to create educational resources from the experiences of non-dominant students, outside of the classroom. The purpose is to engage the ‘funds of knowledge’ that students acquire through their life; a composite of community bonds, modes of reasoning and build on them, allowing the students to brings their cultural and language skills to class as well as explicitly identifying and connecting these skills to academic practices. 

This was done explicitly by creating activities designed to value student’s past and present cultural experiences such as, ‘the Day of the Dead’. This allowed students to share their unique cultural practices originating from their specific places of origin. The conversations which gave legitimacy to all experiences, create an atmosphere of trust, while affording them the sense that their experiences, values and beliefs matter. This discussion encouraged students to use oral language skills about cultural practices and beliefs that they felt deeply about, as well as reflect over the variations in these practices that exist; a discussion later tied to differences in cultures and cultural practices leading unto discussions of cultures that are viewed negatively.  However, making culture relevant and providing opportunities for students to make these connections is preceded by the student's ability to communicate with the instructor and the class. Group conversations are more culturally sensitive as they allow students to consult with each other regarding what they want to communicate and then collaboratively come to a decision regarding the best words to use for these conversations. One-on- one conversations that are more personal to students may become arduous and frustrating for students with difficulty in oral english skills.  

The aforementioned interactions are continued in daily lessons through discussions of the challenges that individual students face; if  students choose to discuss them in class, providing them with the opportunity to use the class as a sounding board, converse in their second language, and an opportunity to build their confidence regarding interactions outside of their ESL classroom.  Lesson are a composite of structured grammar and unstructured, organic topics that students may want to bring to the class regarding healthcare, children’s schools, shopping experiences and career goals. These are ongoing steps that we have taken as a class to create and maintain ‘safe spaces’ for all students (Lee, 2007). 

Interactions and conversations with students were really valuable in helping me shape instruction as the program developed and also allowed me to see that each classroom was different, with the students guiding the conversations and the projects. Conversations with students who already have a highly developed sense of agency revolved around their goals which centered on potential business and career opportunities that could be harvested after attaining a certain level of English proficiency. Culturally relevant pedagogy entailed that I understand the affordances that they brought into the classroom, and giving them repeated opportunities to learn and build their confidence about their learning.  Additionally, it was also important to  encourage students in the skills they wanted to learn while being aware that the same conversation with another group of students might be counter productive. 

Since students in the classroom are coming from very different backgrounds - with having completed their GED to not having access to any schooling -  socially just pedagogy entails that each student is given the scaffolding necessary for them to feel confident while being challenged at a level that engages them and provides appropriate, effective learning opportunities. For some students, this required that we bring a Spanish speaking English language instructor in the classroom, and this was made possible after two months into the program. For the more advanced learners, knowing when to encourage English language usage is important. Students at the intermediate levels informed me that they were happy when they didn't have access to a Spanish speaker, since it forced them to think about what they wanted to say in their second language. This also necessitated group involvement in translating peer comments into English.  Collaboration provided the students with increased access to language, contingent upon the student’s desire to communicate to their ‘language deficient’ instructor. This is what culturally sensitive pedagogy looks to me; creating classrooms as a ‘safe space’ that allows trust between the student and the instructor, as well as trust amongst the students, and always maintaining a sense that the content brought to the class by the students has importance and legitimacy within the educative environs the classroom.

Pedagogies of social justice have been employed in our conversation about the purpose of education, developing a ‘sense of self’ and ‘empowerment’, which is done by including student’s ‘funds of knowledge’ in the classroom as well as identifying that goals are self-designed and must not be dictated by social conventions. Conversations about the various discourses in the socio-political domain, especially the dialogue around the ‘caravan’ have created opportunities for students to substantiate their claims through videos from the ‘border’. These videos of central American refugees are considered representative of the entire population (Hondurans), which they have found to be deeply offensive. Exploring the roots of that feeling, making connections between the dominant discourse in the Mexican community and the racist discourses that immerse from the debate around immigration in the United States, exploring student perceptions, encouraging them to explore if those perceptions are substantiated by their own experiences, allows us to reflect over what we believe and how important it is to dismantle Foucault’s ‘self evident’ truths. 

Sometimes, conversations that maybe problematic in larger classrooms, can be navigated in smaller one’s when everyone is given the opportunity to express themselves without judgement or allusions to political correctness. But it is necessary to explore beliefs and the origins of those beliefs before we even begin to ask students to dismantle them in the face of evidence or critical thinking. Student views must be validated before they can be questioned and one must provide students with opportunities to question the instructor before this dynamic is turned around. Adult education is uniquely comforting in ways that perhaps educating adolescents may not be; the instructor is clearly the facilitator and there are no social norms that can counter this dynamic. 

Field Experience Reflection

I conducted my ten hours of Field Experience at Lane Tech High School, which is the high school that I attended as a student. The head of the Social Science Department, Mr. Carity, who was also my Honors Economics teacher when I was a junior, was nice enough to set up a schedule for me that involved me observing a variety of social science classes. More specifically, I observed multiple AP Psychology sections, World History, Honors U.S. History, Honors Civics, and AP Human Geography. In doing this, I observed ten different teachers: Ms. Nester, Ms. Shannon, Mr. Fitzpatrick, Ms. Smith, Mr. Parsons, Ms. McMahon, Mr. Ochsenhaut, Ms. McKnight, Mr. Tarbhai, and Ms. Spence. Although I greatly enjoyed observing all ten sections, some of these classes -- due to an approaching Thanksgiving -- involved students taking tests or doing work on computers, which yield limited or no discussion regarding disciplinary practices in those classes specifically. 

This being said, I definitely observed disciplinary practices being observed in some of the classes that I observed. One of these classes was Mr. Fitzpatrick's history course. Here, students were asked to consider how causes of the British industrial revolution actually lead to the industrial revolution. For example, the causes were listed on the left side of the table (i.e., The Agricultural Revolution, population growth, demand, government, coal, government policies, etc.), and each cause was accompanied by an empty space where students would answer the question "Why did it cause an industrial revolution?" The next part of the activity involved students ranking the causes in terms of their importance, and then categorizing them into specific themes. Apart from being a really interactive and useful way to learn about the industrial revolution, this activity allowed students to engage in contextualization, an important disciplinary practice in history. Here, students utilized background knowledge of these different causes and of the industrial revolution itself to infer why these causes resulted in the industrial revolution. They also contextualized in the colloquial sense of the word by putting the industrial revolution into the context of British history (i.e., The Glorious Revolution, the cottage industry, etc.), which is also important in understanding why a historical event occurred and what preceding events lead up to it.

Although I did not observe discipline-specific literacy practices in the other classes, I still observed practices that supported disciplinary inquiry. For example, in Ms. McKnight's class, students were given an article about the Great Migration, which included the subheadings: Context and Causes of the Great Migration, Did you know?, Life for Migrants in the City, and the Impact of the Great Migration. Students were asked to discuss the article in groups with each other regarding their prior knowledge of the Great Migration, but also what the article conveyed about it. This activity served as an effective introduction to the Great Migration, especially in terms of activating prior knowledge that students have regarding this event. Additionally, in Mr. Tarbhai's class, students role played the Cherokee Nation v. Georgia Supreme Court case of 1831, which was useful in that it allowed students to model historical figures and their ideologies, which can increase their understanding of their viewpoints in a very hands-on and interactive way. All in all, the observations that I conducted at Lane were very insightful, especially when looking at them through the lens of an aspiring expert in the social science discipline. 

Observation

Reflection on Classroom Observation

I observed at Amos Alonzo Stagg High School for 10 hours. Observing two different physics teachers. Just about all the students were Caucasian and while the teacher, Aron, said that about a fourth of the students are Polish, they were almost all native English speakers. Over the course of my observations much of the time was spent on group lab work.

The teachers used disciplinary vocabulary, such as “forces”, but not much more complex language than that at the time. Primarily the material discussed was how objects moved under the effects of gravity. There was a lot of physical demonstrations of movement both performed by the teachers and also within a video that was shown in class. It was standard lecture format, where the teacher would ask an occasional question and if someone answered it then move on. Meaning there was minimal assessment of the material being learned in those instances. No literacy strategies were performed. The only accommodation I had witnessed was of a student who came in during the teacher’s lunch to retake an exam.

Students lab instructions included diagrams and graphs, as well as instructions for the students to create graphs of their own, engaging in deeper discipline specific literacy.

Digital literacy was high for these classes. During labs the students interacted with several forms of technology, both the less familiar detectors to sense and record speed of objects as well as their chromebooks that all students possessed. The teacher said that often the technical equipment had a phone app companion software, and so the chromebooks were optional, especially since he said the student’s phones were often more powerful computing devices than the chromebooks and could take in the data from the equipment better than the chromebooks. The utilization of digital literacy did not end there. The students had regular homework assigned through Wiley Plus, a facilitator of online homework, that all students in the class were expected to be able to access and complete.

Assessment and Disciplinary Learning

In teaching there is so much focus on instruction, classroom management, building community, and other elements. However, when it comes to assessment, summative standardized tests are used to benchmark the abilities of students rather than formative authentic assessments. Many times, this is not the best practice to targeting the true achievement of students. In our educational system there is a major focus on standardized tests. These are unauthentic lengthy computer based tests that pose great challenges for our students.  In the article “Disciplinary Literacy Assessment A Neglected Responsibility”, authors Gillis and Van Wig call for a new strategy of assessment for students claiming, “Summative assessments of learning have overshadowed formative assessment for learning.” Their method uses the Strategic Content Literacy Assessment (SCLA) illustrating a shift to disciplinary literacy practices used by all core teachers, not just the ELA teacher. I agree with the authors about the importance of small formative assessment such as the SCLA, that can use used several times throughout the year to track student achievement. If assessment is truly meant to guide and inform instruction, then it is in our best interest as teachers to give assessments that provide better data on student achievement.  
Reviewing the social studies sections, the authors give a great explanation of how to create, evaluate, and reflect on the SCLA. In history we want to use primary sources, however, the authors state, “[using] archaic vocabulary and syntax can be difficult for students to comprehend without appropriate scaffolding.” This is where I believe many of our standardized tests go astray. They are not authentic or culturally relevant to groups of students such as minorities or emerging bilinguals. 
The most helpful section was the SCLA adaptation chart to specific literacy sources. The assessments need to be structured in a format that builds in cognitive rigor while forcing our students to practice skills such as contextualization, close reading, sourcing, corroboration, and identifying vocabulary. For example, in the past I have used unit tests for content knowledge. The first few questions will require recall and comprehension skills such as matching, true or false, or fill in the blank. The next level would include application, analysis, and evaluation of historical documents. Finally, the most difficult is the creation piece. Following this structure of Bloom’s Taxonomy will not overwhelm students as the assessment becomes more and more difficult.
What do we do with these assessments? “One of the hallmarks of good assessment is that the information obtained is useful to both teachers and students” (Alvermann et al., 2013 ). Teachers will use this data to adjust instruction practices and target students for tiered intervention. I think that SCLA has a great opportunity to motivate students to better themselves if teachers share results. “Such conversations can help students set academic goals and take ownership of their own learning.” With SCLA students will have multiple opportunities to demonstrate achievement, compared to the once or twice a year standardized test. 

Strategies/Instructional practices 
Targeting struggling readers can be difficult because of different factors such as classroom environment and subject interest. The Simpson article suggests using an observational checklist when screening for struggling readers. Having clear standardized norms for reading can help teachers better support students. I could see myself using this checklist in a grade level meeting to discuss struggling students and possibly comparing the result with other disciplines. Most importantly, this provides measurable goals that students can accomplish overtime. I think this checklist could be an easy indicator in identifying struggling readers and could be done quickly.
The other strategy that I found interesting was the learner autobiography. It is a collection that students create about their interests and interests in literacy. The article examines this strategy stating, “The idea is that students need opportunities to examine their personal histories as readers, writers, and learners both in and out of school. By exploring their past, students might better understand their current approaches and beliefs about learning.” This aligns directly with the RAAD framework of using read identity, reflection, self-tracking, and refining schema. If I were to use learner autobiography, I would include milestones in literacy along the way, such as book reports, essays, and other projects to show growth. This year, I have my students creating writing binders accumulating their work, feedback, and reflections from English and History. I find this strategy could be very helpful in making assessments more personal and meaningful.

Discussion Questions: 
How might student choice affect authenticity and outcome of an summative assessment? 
How might it be a truly relevant and authentic assessment?
-How would it be graded? 
What would be the roll of the teacher summative assessment? 
How could assessment results used? 

Observations

I observed my ten hours at Oriole Park School in Chicago. I do not have the exact
demographics, but my classroom was about three-fourths white and the other
one-fourth were a mix of Asian and Latino. I do know that the school is about
twenty-five percent low income. In my class of thirty-ish, five students had
IEP. These thirty students were all native English speakers. The teacher had
nineteen years of teaching experience.

Literacy in Science-

The teacher used science as a way to expand her students vocabulary, and
build skills that transfer into literacy skills; such as oral language development
that could lead to greater reading comprehension, better understanding of oral
language, including syntax or grammar, and complex measures of vocabulary.
The lab was simple, the instructions were “Cut up these vegetables, examine
the seeds inside of them, and analyze how you think these seeds are used.”
Afterwards was a guided inquiry that was heavily student centered, the main
part being a fairly toned down version of the Think-Pair-Share, where students
shared what they found about the seeds.

Digital Literacy-

Very little digital literacy was used in class. The greatest was the teacher using
the overhead to write out difficult words from readings and defining them. She
also wrote out vocab words that the students pointed out to her.(it was a class
motivator to point out vocab words to the teacher, she did this so the students
could remember the vocab words easier.) The classroom also had three I-Pads
for math, they used a website where they would play some game, but it would
ask them to solve math problems for points.

Literacy in Reading-

The class had an unbelievable amount of reading in it. You were talking about
how to make students read more, this class did not need any push towards reading.
They read whenever they could. They were also learning figurative language at
the time I was observing, so any time they found an example of figurative language
in their texts, they could point it out for tickets. They had to read fifteen minutes
everyday for homework, and once a month, there was a book report. Other than
private reading, they were reading a book together in class, and the kids loved it.
Also, every student was writing a “seed story” as an writing assignment, where they
would pick some moment, and then write all about it. This seemed like a version
of interactive writing with the teacher.  

12/3 Post

As a student, I loved big assessments like 100 question finals and the ISATs. I was great at the multiple choice and recognition skills needed to get pretty good grades on them. I know my experience is different because I used to hear a lot of moans whenever we had tests. The assessments I took were all for seeing end results. Bronzo & Simpson talk about not using assessments as something to do at the end of a lesson but is another tool for learning. They write, “acquiring information about student learning does not become an end in itself but is an evolving process of gathering feedback for the teacher and student so that instruction can become more engaging, more ties to real world issues and concerns and more personally meaningful (Brozo & Simpson, 2007 p. 88). These are all points that we bring up in class of making the class more meaningful and relevant to the students.

Bronzo & Simpson also talk about how effective assessment includes the students. Just like how a meaningful and effective lesson is catered to the different needs of the students, the assessment of that knowledge building should be changing with it too. This is a point that wants to make away with standardized testing. There are a lot of things wrong with standardized testing like the biases and the anxiety built up. It is also a measurement of knowledge on that day which there are many factors that can dampen how well a student can do. Bronzo & Simpson cite other authors who talk about this “phenomenon” of a student doing well on a standardized test and yet still struggle in the classroom. I have kind of experienced this in class especially in an English class because I could do well on the tests and have a good grade at the end but the day to day activities I struggled with. They explain this by saying that, “standardized tests cannot possibly measure students' background knowledge, their depth of engagement with the material, their metacognitive awareness, or the strategies they employ while they read (Conley & Hinchman, 2004; Unrau, 2004 p. 94). Usually preparation for standardized testing is not all content focused. There are strategies to answering multiple choice questions that are different from true-false and open choice. A student does not have to be an expert at the subject to get a good score on the test. They could just be a good test taker.