Field Experience- History

My observation hours were completed at one school, Benito Juarez Community Academy in Pilsen. I believed it was a great school to have done my field work because this school has been implementing a new grading system and styles of learning. My mentor teacher has also been teaching for eight years, and therefore, has a lot of experience that she shared with me. Not only did she allowed me to observe her classroom, but, she took time after each visit to discuss with me her reasoning and any questions I had. 

            Some of her practices that I often saw was a lot of group work. She would set the tables in groups of four to allow for ease of collaboration. She would begin every class with a bell ringer, then proceed with brief direct instruction. After each topic, the students would break off into groups and discuss the questions the teacher had prepare for them and shared those ideas. 

            There was also quite a bit of handouts that was used for the students reading to help them with primary sources. The handouts would have a few general questions that students should be thinking about when reading and open boxes for them to write down their thoughts of the reading. 

            Overall, she was a great teacher to observe. While I would listen in to their discussion, I saw that a lot of students were learning and majority were engaging into the discussion. A major aspect of her teaching style was relating the material being learn to the students and I believe this was one of the reasons why her students had a high interest in her class. 

Field Experience-Think Scientifically

The readings for this course have emphasized the importance of teaching literacy in the different content areas. As the readings suggest, this practice will arm students with the necessary skills for them to be able to engage with the text-in any discipline-in meaningful ways. Along the same lines, it is important that educators model for students how to think mathematically, scientifically, historically, etc. I had the opportunity to observe a freshman biology class. From the first day, I knew that this teacher understood the importance of teaching students how to think scientifically. She started her class by having something called “Community Call,” a sort of bell ringer. These community calls were problems that a person or scientist from the community was trying to understand or study. These prompts were always connected to the concepts of the unit, the lesson, and the students’ lives. The teacher gave the students time to read it and identify specific structures of the experimental design in that prompt, such as independent variable, dependent variable, constants, and hypothesis. I believe this practice was very impactful as it was teaching students how to approach scientific reading (research paper, experiment, and lab report).  This practice also helped students meet the science and engineering practices requirement for Next Generation Science Standards.

Field Experience - Robin

This semester, I completed field observations at two schools (for this and another class) with very different atmospheres and teaching philosophies: we’ll call one Fine Southwest Metro-Suburban High School (FSMS) and the other one Intense Selective Enrollment High School (ISE). FSMS is located 3 milies southwest of city limits, beats state levels of ISA proficiency by 1%, and has a demographic makeup of about 50% White, 35% Hispanic, 10% Black, 2% Asian, and 3% Two or More Races. ISE is a large CPS college preparatory school (over 90% of graduates will attend college) with a demographic makeup of about 40% Hispanic, 35% White, 10% Black, 10% Asian, and 5% Other. I was able to observe some strong practices/norms and disciplinary practices in one of the schools, and some in the other. To simplify it, I would say that FSMS’s strengths were in the social and personal dimensions, while ISE’s strengths were in the cognitive and knowledge-based dimensions.

ISE was ideal when it came to disciplinary practices of science. The physics teacher I observe uses only the curriculum from the American Modeling Teachers Association. This means that she spends zero time lecturing on the board, and all the material is learned through group work. She presents a physics problem with a novel concept, and teams of students work to find solutions, writing their work on their team whiteboard. After they’ve worked on the problem, they all look at the other groups’ boards and have the opportunity to ask each other questions about why they did what they did. This is how they introduce new concepts and learn the material.

A huge strength of this method is that it encourages the norm of multiple pathways to a correct answer. This is a fundamental piece of scientific disciplinary thinking that gets lost with traditional lecture methods to teach problem solving. It also fosters the norm of activating prior knowledge, because prior knowledge is basically all the students have to work with when they’re presented new problems. The modeling curriculum also contributes to the social dimension of learning, in that the students do feel like they’re on a team with each other, all working together to solve problems.

Other aspects of the social dimension, however, were not as well developed at ISE. The sheer magnitude of material covered (there was also nightly homework and weekly quizzes to be assessed and discussed) kept the teacher very busy, and I noticed that there was minimal time for her to interact with students on a human-to-human level. This is a shame, because the modeling curriculum so perfectly sets up an environment in which the teacher is on an equal playing ground in the discipline. There’s nothing wrong with being efficient, but at the end of the day, I felt like this class was down to business from before the bell rang to after it rang, so it was missing that personal element that helps students fully engage.

As a very different experience, FSMS excelled in the social and personal dimensions. The physics teacher I observed was spending 2 days teaching a lab that would have been a 10-minute lab at ISE, but this was because at every turn there was an opportunity for students to interact with each other, the teacher, and even me. The teacher was admirably open with them, particularly about the fact that we had actually gone to that high school together years ago. Murals of previous teachers painted by students hung on the back wall of the room.

Some of my preferred norms of the personal dimension were also practiced at FSMS. Three of the four teachers I observed there had no deadlines on assignments and generous test retake policies. In addition to that, students were encouraged to draw on and share their interests with the class, which created higher engagement. For example, FSMS’s zoology class takes weekly in-class trips to the zoo (FSMS shares a campus with it, so this is easily doable) each week in which students observe an animal of their choice within a given habitat, and they come back to the class to share what they saw the animal doing. As the semester goes on, students start to develop distinct areas of interest (e.g. one young man always goes to dog-related animals), creating a classroom in which students value and draw on each other’s knowledge.

The active social dimension of FSMS really does make it feel like a community, which makes it a shame that the academics were simply not up to par with ISE. For example, while observing a physics lab at FSMS, I noticed that about one third of the students (juniors and seniors) deeply struggled with how to use and read a tape measurer, something that they just really should be up to speed in. With the exception of the zoology class mentioned, the classes I observed relied almost entirely on at-the-board lecturing to cover material, which often falls short in meaningfully engaging students cognitively.

In my mind, an ideal classroom would draw upon the positive cognitive and knowledge-based dimensions of ISE and the positive personal and social dimensions of FSMS. Where exactly this happy medium lies would probably depend a lot on the school context.

Field Experience Reflection

I observed the 7th and 8th-grade mathematics classes at Telpochcalli Elementary School. Telpochcalli Elementary School is a Chicago public school with 98.3% of students are Hispanic and more than 60% of students have "limited English proficiency". Most of the teachers and teacher assistants are fluent in Spanish. 

By the time that I observed the 8th-grade class, they were introducing linear equation. Literacy strategies were applied at the beginning of the lecture by passing out a paper sheet which contained a data table and three questions which were: what information is given? What do you know? What information do you need? Students were asked to try to read the information on the table and answer these questions by themselves. The teacher tried to engage her students to move on with a faster pace by repeating explain those three questions and what they should look for from the table.   She walked around the classroom to check if everyone were working on those questions. I saw some of the students were struggling and started talking something else that was not related to the math content. The teacher reminded them to stay on the task with high voice volume. It seemed she tried to hold the class back to learning climate, unfortunately, it was not easy.  Discipline in this classroom seemed a challenge. The teacher had to stop lecturing and asked the students if they need extra help instead of blaming them. Providing a positive learning environment probably was one of her teaching strategies. 

 The teacher demonstrated her problem-solving strategy on exampling how to calculate the slope and y-intercept in order to complete a linear equation. After she finished all the steps, she went back to guide the students to answer those three questions. Now, students more understood the mathematics literacy by looking the real math example. The teacher did a very organized job on showing students step by step to find out the linear equation, but she was not very familiar with how to solve the once linear equation that contains factor fractions. She spent over 10 minutes on it which distract students focus from the lecture. I thought she should prepare the lecture better before the class because it should not be a problem for a math discipline teacher.

I learned differently in this experience. The teacher more focuses on how much the students learn than how much score they got from the quizzes by giving them more chances to make the correction on the quizzes instead of recording the original scores, which keep students' positive learning attitude.

Field Experience Reflection

I fulfilled my observation hours at two high schools: a small private high school on the Southwest side of the city and a public, select-enrollment school on the North side of the city. These two schools both offered me insight into the norms and practices of history albeit in very different ways.

At the private school, I observed much less implementation of the norms and practices we learned about. This school focused much more on the "traditional" type of learning where teachers talked to the students with notes on the projector while the students took notes. I did see some implementation of some of the basics we discussed where teachers gave out guided note taking hand outs along with their notes, however this seemed to be the most they did to address different learners and learning styles. I was kind of disappointed in these field experience hours because I didn't get to see the proper implementation of what I learned about and hoped to see in real life. One class did utilize different technological literacies as we have discussed however it was limited and did not seem to be intended to enhance the lesson.

The public school I observed at was a much better experience. I saw firsthand a handful of the ideas we have discussed implemented in the classroom. In one class, think-pair-share was used. I walked around and observed with the teacher how the students were doing and the conversations seemed to highlight that the students were comprehending. Furthermore, another teacher I observed at this school used a guided reading approach while analyzing a historical document. This seemed to help the students as after this, they worked in small groups and I observed their discussions. I did not hear any students talk about not understanding the reading so it seemed to be effective. For history specific practices, the same teacher had students discuss the sourcing and biases of the historical document studied. This is a very specific aspect of history as studying this part of documents assists in further understanding it. Seeing this practice utilized in a high school classroom was surprising for me since I did not experience this in depth until college.

Both experiences helped me shape understanding of how to implement the practices we have learned about in the classrooms. Although one school did not offer these to the level I had hoped, it did paint for me more of a picture of what classrooms are like when these kinds of practices are not implemented. My other experience was much better and evidenced for me how student learning can work when these practices ARE implemented. It seemed the public school was much better equipped to implement these literacy practices. It also seemed that they yielded better results however the private school classes didn't really offer much room for students to show off their learning throughout the class period.

12-3 Student Assessment and Standardized Testing

We have learned a lot about the importance of incorporating disciplinary specific literacy strategies into lessons, as well as the importance of adapting lessons around the specific literacy needs of the students who need further assistance in certain fields of academic capabilities and literacy demands. However, the key to achieving these goals is purely conditional based upon ones ability to properly interpret and assess a students strengths and weaknesses. In this post I will be comparing the use of standardized testing as an assessment strategy vs. the teachers personal strategies of assessing a students academic strengths and weaknesses.

   
    Standardized testing is helpful in some ways but should not be used as a perfect singular strategy for student assessment. Brozo Simpson says "Assessment of literacy and content should use multiple data sources across multiple contexts" (88). This means that in order to properly facilitate assessment in a comprehensive manner, students should be assessed through multiple different strategies. Standardized testing is flawed and should only be used as a way formulating a hunch that a student may need more focus on a certain content area or literacy demand. Although I'm sure you are all aware of how Standardized testing can be inconsistent with one's literacy and academic capabilities.

For instance: How many of you become so stressed out from testing that it causes your performance to drop significantly? Do you feel like these tests adequately assessed your academic capabilities?

      Since testing is only one form of drawing assessment, and many students have poor test taking skill; the data from these tests can be inaccurate or even tainted. This is why truly successful assessment needs to be achieved through multiple different strategies, and should be a long-term daily process of  becoming informed about students' learning.

     According to Simpson "Effective assessment requires planning, interpreting, and managing a variety of data" (89). This means that a teacher can collect as much data as they want but the data becomes useless if interpreted incorrectly or not at all.

     One consistent concept throughout the readings has been embedding certain strategies into the lesson itself. This is one concept that I find most appealing. One's ability to accumulate and interpret assessment data at the same time as instruction appears to have the most direct and immediate strategies for proper assessment while also facilitating deeper literacy practices within the students.

     One activity I found most interesting in this aspect was the word fluency activity.  At the same time that the students are formulating scaffolding of the content, the teacher is also receiving very powerful and detailed data on the students prior understanding of the topic. This strategy then allows the teacher to determine which concepts need to be reinforced and can thus adapt the lesson accordingly.

Can you remember any strategies/activities from your past that ultimately facilitated content scaffolding while also revealed your prior knowledge of a concept?

     Assessment of students academic and literacy capabilities needs to be formative, and comprehensive in order to successfully adapt a lesson to the needs of the students.  By incorporating multiple strategies, the teacher can formulate a more accurate understanding of the students academic standing and learning progression. Standardized Testing can be one of these strategies, although the value of the data from that test should be taken with a large grain of salt considering it's flaws.

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.