One new way that I have begun to incorporate teaching of complex cognitive skills into my classroom is to use technology and problem-based learning to help engage my students into wanting to learn more math. This new way of teaching will allow me to develop lessons that will help improve in the areas of concept learning, problem solving and strategic learning.
When I start to review for a test or a quiz with students I have noticed they will sometimes lose interest in what they are reviewing. I have started to use technology to help engage students in their review. I felt that if I could show students the review content through technology instead of the traditional review format, it would spark their interest. A good number of the students I work with are already involved with technology so this seemed like a natural choice to make. Technology can be counterproductive if there is no link to the learning objectives (Eggen & Kauchak, 2010). Since I am relating technology to the material students are trying to learn, it has become a way to reinforce and introduce content to my students. Since I have had success in using technology to help review with students, I am also looking forward to using technology to help introduce new content as well. I want to use technology along with problem-based learning as well. Problem-based learning is a strategy that takes problems and makes them the focus for developing skill and content and learning activities (Eggen & Kauchak, 2010). After reading through this strategy I thought I could use it with technology to create new activities that would be helpful to my students. Problem-based learning is setup for students to be accountable for finding solutions to problems with some guidance from the teacher. Since I like to have students explore and discover things on their own through the use of manipulatives, problem-based learning seems to be the next step to help increase student learning. My plan is to use technology to help guide students through problems that they will solve on their own and in small groups as well. I am going to work on designing lessons where students will have to use technology to present their learning and their discoveries to the class as a whole. These types of activities will help me improve on strategic learning which is a bit of a weakness for me.
Through the use of technology and the implementation of problem-based learning will help me become a better teacher because I am using something that is student orientated and student driven. I know that if I develop more student orientated lessons, students will respond better to what I want them to learn. Problem-based will help me with strategic learning because it will allow me to guide students along and have them learn what I want them to learn and it has the possibility of students learning more than what I expect. I am also going to use more technology to help engage my students more which should create more interest and more excitement about learning math. I feel that if I stick with these ideas and evaluate them as they are implemented, I can analyze what is beneficial and what is not and then I can work on making these ideas better and more effective.
In the space below, write a brief summary/synopsis of the group's discussion this week. This can be an overview; it is not necessary to cite or attribute specific contributions.
For the discussion this week, we talked about new ideas we can use in our shared really great ideas that others seemed to want to use as well. The discussion seemed like a professional development day due to all the ideas that were talked about.
In the space below, demonstrate three ways in which you enhanced the group discussion. Explain how you probed or challenged a group member's comment, offered a new/unique idea, or shared a related classroom/school experience.
For the discussion this week we shared ideas about what new strategies we were going to use as teachers. A few people were eager to share some of the ideas they had gotten from the book and after hearing some of the ideas I shared my unique idea of wanting to use technology and problem-based learning in my classroom. I talked about how I am going to create lessons where I give a problem on the board to students and I am going to break them into small groups and have them use technology to help solve the problem. I elaborated on what the lesson will look like. I will present a problem to students and then they will get into groups of about three or four and they will have to create a presentation or a power point as a group to show the class how to work out the problems. Students will also be encouraged to share any new ideas or discoveries they made while solving the problem. For example, if the problem has the keywords "find the difference" in the problem in it, that will indicate that the problem should be solved, by subtraction so the students can list the key words and describe what they meant. My idea was met with positive feedback because it seemed to tie into other content areas. I felt that my idea was relevant to the discussion because we were talking about new ideas that we were going to use in school and I wanted to share mine with others.
After other people shared some more ideas I asked the probing question to the group, "How much time should be given to implement and try out these new ideas?" This was a difficult question to answer because no one was really sure how much time something should be given to see if it is successful or a failure. One person mentioned that we should give ideas a few tries and always try to make improvements if needed. Another person mentioned that it could take the whole school year to work out all of the parts of the ideas to be successful. No one seemed to have a definite time table but we all seemed to agree that new ideas should be given multiple tries before abandoning them. I thought this question was relevant to the discussion because I had been thinking about it since I read about problem-based learning and I was not sure how long I should try it out for. I also think my question made the group think about how much time they should give their own new ideas as well.
The last enhancement I made for the discussion this week was I shared a classroom experience that was related to divergent thinking from the reading. I explained that divergent thinking is a way to make a variety of different methods to find the solutions to questions. I shared how in math, we were recently showing seventh grade how to solve proportions. I told my group how there are multiple ways to setup and solve equations and still come up with the correct answers. I shared some examples of how students had solved proportions with my group and they thought this was really interesting. I talked about how when I create a problem, I try to make ones that have different ways to be solved so that my different types of learners can have opportunities to be successful instead of just showing problems that have one way of being solved. I felt that my experience was helpful to the conversation because it showed the other members that when we create work for our students, we need to create it where it can be completed in different ways. The more ways we offer students to solve something, the more likely they will find a way that works best for them.
Session 7: Complex Cognition
Final Project
Summative Paper
Part 1: See "Final Project" link on Teachscape site
Part 2: Response
In 3-5 pages, write a final summative paper that reflects thinking across all the course content, your own teaching, and how you will use the research and reflections to change your teaching practice. Use specific examples from course readings, video classroom examples, expert commentary, and the Collaborative Discussion and Application assignments.
Your response should include three components:
A reflection upon your course experience and the ideas, activities, and concepts you learned. Think in terms of the development of your knowledge of teaching and learning strategies; how your new knowledge will benefit your students; and how this knowledge will change, or has already changed, your work in the classroom.
A synthesis of the ideas and/or concepts you learned from this course that will help you in your teaching situation. Support these ideas with specific examples from course activities, such as the Required Reading, the video examples, the Collaboration activities, and the Application assignments.
An action plan that describes specific actions you will take to continue to improve your use of these strategies in the classroom, and also how you might encourage your colleagues to adopt the use of these strategies more broadly in a coherent, school-wide approach to teaching and learning.
Please follow this organizational format:
I. Introduction: Tell us a little bit about who you are as a teacher:
Your teaching experience
Your teaching assignment
The demographics of your school/community that impact your teaching
"This is where I am as a teacher, and this is where I want to be." Look at this as being a "thesis statement"; it is an organizational foundation for what you are going to tell us. It helps to develop a "point" to what you have to say.
III. Review the seven topic areas covered in this course; they include, in the order presented:
Development and Learning
Behavioral Theories and Social Cognitive Theory
Cognition
Constructivism
Diversity
Motivation
Complex Cognition
Your paper should be a reflective summation that indicates your thinking and practices on each of these seven topics. Reflect and synthesize: Discuss how they impact your teaching, how you apply them, how you modify them to fit your circumstances, etc.
Action plan: Integrate into your paper specific actions you will take to continue to improve in the use of the strategies presented in the course. Consider how you might encourage your colleagues to adopt the use of these strategies in a coherent, school-wide approach to teaching and learning.
Supportive references: For each topic area you cover, you should be able to make/use at least one in-text (parenthetical) reference to the respective course materials to support your ideas.
Reference page: This paper also requires a reference page, conforming to
APA guidelines.
Please be aware of the weight of this assignment (70 points).
Grading considerations:
10 points Organized, logical, and structured presentation
10 points Includes all required components
15 points Writer defines, explains, or summarizes concepts in depth
15 points Evidence of critical thinking:
Paper demonstrates application, synthesis, or reflection of
concepts
15 points Research base:
Paper includes multiple supportive references that add credibility
5 points Conforms to writing standards:
Appropriate language, format, and mechanics of writing;
Includes a reference page (APA format)
My teaching experience has been from one extreme to another. I started my career working for a private school before I went to work in the inner city of Flint. I worked in one of the lowest income areas of the entire city of Flint. After a couple of years I then got hired into Grand Blanc as a Title 1 Math teacher. My current job requires me to work with students that are struggling in math and with general education students as well. The demographics of my school are pretty diverse. Our whole school is one of two middle schools and each has nearly 1,100 students each. With these large numbers of students, it is needless to say that our student population is very diverse. We have students from a variety of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds as well as students from a wide span of economic backgrounds as well. The west side of the district where I teach at has a greater population of students that are on free and reduced lunch than the other schools in our district. The wide variety of students that I see at school and in my classroom has pushed me to create different ways to teach students so that they can become successful. My students may not have all the materials and support that students from other parts of the district have, but they do have the capacity and ability to learn and that pushes me to become more creative and more thoughtful with my teaching.
Right now in my career I am still learning new things and I am trying to refine my teaching methods. I am trying to learn new things that will help me become a better and more effective teacher. As a teacher I want to be at where I am comfortable with what I know and where I do not need to always ask for help. I want to be in a place where people come to me to ask for information and for strategies. I want to be that veteran teacher that people look to for guidance. I know that I will always need to learn as a teacher and I am trying to reach the place where I know what strategies work and what methods are more successful than others based on the seven different topics that I have learned about from this course. I know that the topics of development and learning, behavioral and social cognitive theories, cognition, constructivism, diversity, motivation and complex cognition are all areas of content that I have reviewed during this course and through that review I have developed some ideas of how to incorporate each idea into different areas of my teaching to make me more effective.
The first topic that I learned about came in two parts and they were the development and learning stages of students and the views of Piaget and Vygotsky. As I read over these topics I found that I agreed with Piaget on his views about how children develop through multiple stages beginning with the Sensorimotor stage all the way up to the Formal Operational stage which is where students think analytically and logically. Since my students are generally lower level students I focused more on the earlier stages of Piaget that deal with concrete learners. Much of my school's curriculum is geared toward formal operational thinking which is difficult for my concrete learners however, research shows that they are still concrete operational learners (Eggen & Kauchak, 2010). Vygotsky's theory is the one that I generally us in my classroom where students learn from each other in a more social environment. Working in a group is crucial to student learning because they can sometime learn more from each other than they can from me, (Aguilar, 2010a). I use this idea of scaffolding when I create lessons and to help my students learn from their peers and myself. This idea is one that I share my other my colleagues during collaborative planning time because we all teach the same material so we should be teaching in similar ways.
The second topic that I learned about in this course was one of my favorites, behavioral and social cognitive theories. I did not know at the time of the reading be I have been using the Premack principle in my classroom since I started teaching. The principle talks about how a desired activity serves as a positive reinforcement. I use the Premack principle and negative reinforcement to help me shape and mold my own methods of dealing with behavior and I use both ideas to help shape student behavior the way I feel it should be. The second theory of this session was social cognitive theory. The most important new idea I took away from this session was that I should try and teach to levels that are just above students that I can drag them up to their next level instead of teaching below them (Yonemura, 2010a). This idea is one that I want to do a better job at and I will work on this idea by designing lessons that push students to their next level instead of keeping them complacent.
The next two topics that were covered in this course were cognition and constructivism which were two topics I was not familiar with and I did not feel I was effective in terms of my teaching especially when I was planning on how to grab the attention of my students. I learned that student discovery is more helpful. From the reading for cognition I came away with the idea that as I continue to teach, I need to make sure that I am teaching in such a way that my students are learning best and not the way I learned best. I know early on in my career and even today I tend to teach in a way where I learn best and I need to be more aware of this (Yonemura, 2010b). I have taken the approach of creating lessons that play to the strengths of my students and not my own teaching style. I share this with my math PLC (professional learning community) group because we need to be unified in the ways we teach math so that students are exposed to the same material in the similar ways. One thing that I still struggle with is that I forget that my students do not always learn something the first time. After viewing the videos for cognition and then for constructivism I learned that even though students do not always learn things the first time they see something, if I provide them with multiple opportunities to learn they will be successful. Another major idea that I took away from the course material was that it is more beneficial in the long run for students to discover things on their own and struggle instead of me just teaching them. I now feel that if something takes a little extra time for students to learn on their own, it is more helpful to them in the long even though it is difficult for me to stand back and not just jump in and help students the moment they struggle. The most difficult part of using a constructive approach to my teaching is to provide students with an experience where I can grab their attention right away and build on that experience and knowledge (Kauchak, 2010a). I have learned ways to teach students through the use of hands-on activities to make my teaching more impactful to my students. At my school we use a program called Hands-on Equations that is growing school to district wide in middle school mathematics. I feel that my biggest growth came in the areas of cognition and constructivism.
The next area of content that was covered in this course was diversity. Diversity is something that every teacher will experience in some form or fashion during their career. Diversity is not just different races, it is also different cultures, different backgrounds, different economic and social statuses of students as well. As a teacher I need to make my students feel welcome and comfortable which can be difficult to do right away. When children feel that they are secure, wanted and part of a group, they seem to grow (Kauchak, 2010b). The biggest area of diversity that I focus on the most is the diversity of culture that my students bring to my classroom. When I am dealing with the diverse cultures in my classroom I need to try different strategies to relate content to the students' everyday lives to help raise their level of intelligence (Aguilar, 2010). I need to be conscience of what information students know and what kind of things they are interested in so I can try and relate math to those interests. Since students grow up in different areas, one student might be able to relate to an example where another does not. This is an on-going challenge that I face at my school. One action plan that I have taken at my school is that some teachers write down names of students that they have concerns about and as a team we will invite these students and their families to meet with us and give us a better understanding about their culture. This is something that I have started doing this year and it is a tremendous help to me because I get to hear from the families and students themselves about their culture and it makes it easier for me to create lessons and examples that will fit the needs of those students.
The area of content that I worked on during this course was motivation. This was probably the most enjoyable discussion we had as a group. When I think about motivation, I think about setting goals and what I can do to accomplish my goals. In my classroom we write two kinds of goals. The first is an individual goal that students write for themselves and the second goal is one that the whole class writes together. Students know that I take an interest in their goals and that in turn motivates them to accomplish their goals. When I can help a student write a goal and get them to feel personally involved in the goal, they feel more interested and they are more willing to put forth the effort to accomplish that goals (Lawson, 2010). In my classroom, a goal for the whole group maybe to have a classroom average of 75% and higher or another goal would be to have everyone pass math. I use these goals and some kind of reward to help motivate my students. If students know that they will earn something for their hard work, they are more likely to accomplish something than if there was no incentive. For this current marking I have told all the sixth grade students that if there are no failing students on my academic team, I will shave my beard. When I told my students this they were ecstatic. I told my students that since this was the goal we made together, I am in it with them meaning that if they fail, I failed as well. I want my students to know that I take as much pride in their goals as I do my own. I have shared this goal and incentive with my other academic team teachers and we have decided to work together as a team and come up with some incentives and goals that span across the areas of content such as science, social studies and language arts. I feel that this idea will bring us and our students together and make us more successful because we are acting together on common goals.
The final area of content for this course was complex cognition.
Complex Cognition
Sources:
Aguilar, E. (2010). Cooperative Learning [Video]. San Francisco, CA: Teachscape. Retrieved from http://www.teachscape.com
Aguilar, E. (2010). Teaching Diverse Students [Video]. San Francisco, CA: Teachscape. Retrieved from http://www.teachscape.com
Eggen, P. & Kauchak, D. (2010). Educational psychology: Windows on classrooms Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill/Prentice Hall.
Kauchak, D. (2010). Constructivism [Video]. San Francisco, CA: Teachscape. Retrieved from http://www.teachscape.com
Kauchak, D. (2010). Teaching Diverse Students [Video]. San Francisco, CA: Teachscape. Retrieved from http://www.teachscape.com
Lawson, R. (2010). Building a Teacher-Student Relationship [Video]. San Francisco, CA: Teachscape. Retrieved from http://www.teachscape.com
Yonemura, K. (2010). Cooperative Learning [Video]. San Francisco, CA: Teachscape. Retrieved from http://www.teachscape.com
Yonemura, K. (2010) Constructing Conceptual Understanding [Video]. San Francisco, CA: Teachscape. Retrieved from http://www.teachscape.com
Session 7: Assignment Evaluation
Collaborative Discussion: Response
Criteria
Possible Points
Points Earned
Content of Response
Includes three of the following:
Description of how the topic area impacts your classroom experience or may impact it in the future
A probing question that extends the topic area and original thinking about the topic
A new and/or unique idea that extends the topic area and original thinking about the topic
A challenging view that might not conform to the majority opinion, with an explanation of ideas that support this view
10
Integration of Course Content
Includes connections between the Collaborative Discussion assignment and two of the following:
Required Readings
Strategies in Action videos
Expert Commentary videos
Content covered in previous sessions
10
Standard Writing Conventions
Appropriate academic language, complete and correct sentences, and less than three mechanical errors
4
Timeliness
Assignment submitted on time
(If not, MAT late penalty becomes 10% per day)
1
TOTAL
25
CDR Comments:
Final Project
Criteria
Possible Points
Points Earned
Organization is logical and is structured for ease of reading
Assignment is very organized.
10
Contains required components
Includes all required components.
10
Demonstrates understanding of course concepts, ideas, skills, and/or theoretical foundations
Assignment demonstrates in-depth understanding of the content and research base.
15
Application and integration of research base into main ideas of the assignment
Assignment clearly makes connections between the research base and participant's own practice. Shows in-depth knowledge of and reflection about the relationship between the two.
15
Evidence of critical thinking about teaching practices and/or assignment topic
Assignment shows in-depth analysis of course materials. Participant always makes explicit connections to own practice and the ways in which new knowledge from this course is impacting own practice.
15
Adheres to standard writing conventions
Appropriate academic language, complete and correct sentences, and less than three mechanical errors.
5
TOTAL
70
Final Project Comments:
