Summative Reflection

A Bittersweet Finale

            With SED 407 coming to a close I have to say that I feel like a teacher. Actually, I do not simply feel like a teacher, I am a teacher. This class was unlike anything I had ever experienced before, and I am very grateful to have gotten the chance to experience being in and out of classrooms once a week and working closely with real life teachers and administrators. Before I had started this semester I was extremely nervous about inserting myself into a classroom full of living and breathing students and getting them to listen to me as I explained concepts, vocabulary, analysis techniques, and organizational techniques in regards to English Literature. And now that it is all done, I am ready to do it again and again.

            Throughout this course I had learned many different and new ideas that I plan on keeping in mind whenever planning a lesson or assigning any type of task. The first is that confidence is one of the most important things for teachers to both have and develop in their students. When I stand in front of a class I need to show students that I know what I am doing and why I am doing it, while showing them that I am not afraid to admit that I may need to draw charts and outline ideas in order to fully understand them, and that it is okay to use a dictionary to look up words that I don’t know. If I am willing to take risks with trying to figure out new ideas and develop them, then students will feel it is okay to take risks too. I need to show them that not understanding something or knowing something is not a failure, but rather a learning experience.

A second learning I experienced was that learning inside the school needs to connect with student experience outside of school. School is only six hours a day. That means that there are 18 hours a day that students are not inside the building. If lessons are only taught to apply to schoolwork, then what is the point of learning them, especially when students will graduate from school, and not all students plan to go to college. Themes in literature and the emotions of characters need to be connected to students’ experiences outside of the box that is the school building.

This whole idea of connecting learning in school to experience outside of school relates directly to another thing that I learned, and that is the power of why. I have grown to believe that students should be told why a certain lesson is important, and that answer is never just that it is part of the curriculum. Students should know why things are important, it isn’t being taught to them because of the curriculum, it is being taught so they can apply the learning to their everyday life, whether it is to navigate through a new situation where critical thinking is required, or to express themselves better to employers and colleagues.

Now that I have outlined my most important learnings for the course, I want to discuss my most valuable learning experiences. My first has to deal with planning lessons. While it was hard to jump into the middle of a unit and teach two lessons, I managed to pull it off and create two lessons that fit perfectly into the unit that the teacher created. But the realization I came to while I was trying to figure out how I wanted to present the new information to students was that not every lesson needs a big elaborate exercise where students work collaboratively. While planning my lessons I kept coming up with activities that seemed fun but did not necessarily fit the concepts and themes I was trying to get students to uncover by analyzing the text. So I used backwards design to examine my objectives, and I found some not so elaborate whole class activities that would drive home the points I was trying to make while connecting it to the students own experiences and not abandoning the teachings of the teacher’s unit.

The second learning experience was the conversation we had with one of the staff at the school who told us that as teachers we need to constantly be studying students, keeping data, and peeling back the layers of onion that are the students. While knowing that keeping track of students was a valuable tool, I had never looked at it like an onion and that there are often many layers that need to be seen through in order to get the student to really open up to us, and there is no way a student will learn from someone that they do not trust.

The third learning experience that impacted me came from the vice principal who told us to remember that every day is a new day. This is something that I have practiced for many years working with after school programs but I was never able to put into words. Sometimes children do not know how to properly express how they feel and lash out instead. We as teachers need to look past the surface of the misbehavior to figure out why students are behaving this way, and never hold it against them. Every day is a new day has become something I tell myself every night and every morning.

This semester has been full of so many rich experiences that these are only a few of them. Every day seemed to present a highlight that I have told all of my friends and family about. If I were to list any disappointments, I would say that I would have wanted to spend even more time in the high school, and more time directly with the students, asking them about their thought processes when learning new things. I feel like I have taken a giant step forward in creating my teacher identity, and I often catch myself looking at everything from a perspective of curiosity of how I could use it in my classroom. I am looking forward to practicum next semester and developing my teacher identity further.

EMBRACE DISCOMFORT

In life we are constantly being shoved into uncomfortable situations and we immediately run for the nearest shade of comfort that we can find, and we bask in the warmth of its womb-like familiarity. What if I told you that you were doing it wrong. For many of us, this will be our first time standing in front of a class full of teenaged students, teaching our lessons that we so elegantly scribbled with our own blood. Uncomfortable? You bet. But I have recently come upon a new saying that I have been constantly reminding myself of, “Embrace discomfort if you want to get better”. Yes, I’m saying that we need to accept our nervousness and give it a great big hug.

The quote comes from this article, written by Henriette Lazaridis Power, which has become something I have read 4 times in the past week. To sum it up, Power says that we need to stop making excuses as to why we don’t put all our effort into one thing, because when it boils down, we are too scared to fail. To connect it to our own learning, don’t we constantly say that learning takes place when students take risks. Well how are we going to get any better at teaching or lesson planning if we don’t just jump in with guns blazing. I know personally when I think back to this saying of embrace discomfort, I feel inspired to put everything I have into whatever I’m working on, because how can I expect my students to take risks if I’m unwilling to.

EFFORT AND GRADE

Something that I am constantly thinking about is what motivates students to succeed and what has motivated me to succeed and the single word that everything goes back to is grades. Do I want my students to be motivated by grades, or by learning? I say learning. And while no student may be motivated to do something if you tell them they will learn, you can motivate them by praising their effort instead of their grades, because the only way to learn anything is to work at it, which involves effort.

To relate this to myself, when I was in the 7^th grade I realized that I was putting twice as much effort into assignments than my peers did, yet I was getting the same grades of A. No one ever said great effort, it was always great grade. So naturally I started to slack off, and I graduated high school 12^th in my class of over 200 and even had some college credits. I was motivated in school to get good grades, not learn, and I couldn’t tell you much about anything I did to get those grades.

As teachers, we will get to know our students and what they are capable of. I don’t want students like me that have no motivation to try because what they do is good enough for a great grade, I want students to try because they want to prove they are the best and can do incredible things. I think instead of saying good grade and bad grade, we should say good work, but I know you can do better, I want you to give your best effort. If I had a teacher that told me my grade was the highest in the class, but they were disappointed because they knew I could have done more and tried harder, I would have. I assume recognizing effort and the amount put into assignments would also inspire students who may try their hardest and fall short. Praising their effort will inspire them to continue to try and succeed. Focusing on their C after they tried so hard may simply make them feel like they can’t do better, and this is something no one wants. We need to make sure we praise best effort, not good grades.

Motivate

Yesterday we got the chance to discuss teachers and education with four of the students from district C, and something that I couldn’t help but notice was that all four of these students we student leader and extremely self-motivated. I was a self-motivated person and was in all A.P. classes, so these are students that I can relate to very well. And while hearing these students discuss what they like and what motivates them I felt like I was hearing myself. This is a little scary because that is just one type of student.

I spent most of the panel time thinking of how a non-self-motivated student would answer these questions. I hate admitting this, but the more than a hundred children I work with everyday consist of only a handful of self-motivated students. The rest do their school work because they want go to the next grade and don’t want detention. One of the students discussed feeling that students wanted them to fail first so they can build on top of failures, and they felt like risks were okay. I don’t see that in many of the students I help with homework, but I try to develop that.

So often I see children not wanting to attempt things because they feel they will do it wrong, and what is the purpose of putting in effort if you will get it wrong. I am starting to think that one of the most important things in a classroom is trying, and learning from failure, something that seems to be missing from a lot of classrooms. This could include multiple drafts to be examined by the teacher or maybe a practice test where the teacher can go over every problem to make sure students can pin point the areas where they need help and then the teacher can help them before the final exam. I personally cannot remember multiple drafts in high school, and this definitely puts a stress on students which can sometimes cause students to completely shut down.

Motivation seems to be absent in many students, so how will you help motivate your students to put in the work needed to succeed.

On Modelling

When speaking on teaching strategies, the word modelling gets tossed around a lot. The type of modelling that is often spoken on though is probably not the most correct way of modelling. Chapter 8 of William Strong’s Coaching Writing in Content Areas discusses modelling writing as showing students a few examples of work, looking at the errors and showing students what type of work would get which type of grade. This is not necessarily the only way to model writing because it still keeps writing a little mystified.

Truth is, good writing doesn’t just happen. It is something that needs to be developed and edited. Students will see finished work and think “I can never write that good, why should I even try”. I think the real way modelling should be used is to demystify good writing. In order to do this, a teacher should write with students, and in front of students, illustrating the thought process and how to work through errors. If a teacher’s first draft is sloppy, students will know that they can have sloppy drafts too, allowing them to take risks, and we all know learning happens when risks are taken.

Now modelling like this, or rather modelling “thought” isn’t just a technique that could be useful for writing. In one of my classes last week we did an exercise where we wrote about our thought process while reading through a poem as a class 3 times. The change of focus from one reading to another showed our techniques of decoding poems to ourselves. Showing this side to students is definitely a way of modelling. Most students don’t “get” poetry, but they probably only will read the poem once, I don’t get poems after the first read, so why would they, and why should I act like I can? Modelling thought process could also be used for math problems, or maybe working your way through a primary document. Modelling should be used as a technique to show that no one is perfect, and everything takes work.

Here’s some types of modelling: http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/4697

Fighting a Hidden Curriculum

Chapter 2 in our book written by Daniel Strong touches upon the “hidden curriculum”, something that I myself am a victim of. I use the word victim because it has caused me to often times believe that learning is about a grade and not being about learning. Learning is about practice, experience, and risk. The risk part of learning is where I feel learning is wounded in our educational practices. The risk isn’t trying something new or expanding on ideas, the risk is passing the class.

With the risk of school work being on making the grade, how can we really make students explore their learning and make it their own? In high school, I could be handed an assignment sheet on comparing a common motif between two novels in four pages, with a clear rubric, and I could do it in a matter of 3 hours and hit all the main points. At the least, I would say that paper would get a B+/ A-, but I couldn’t really tell you about what I wrote about, or what I learned 3 months later.

I don’t think this grade is proof of learning. And I think that it may be because this assignment is fake. I say it is fake because there is no connection to the student. Assignments like this have students regurgitating the ideas that are being passed around in class. There is no real room for personal opinion, or real world connections.

So now I am curious as to how we can eliminate this hidden curriculum of school being about grades, and make it about learning. Some ideas that I have already began playing with are giving real world assignments. Instead of just assigning something where you say pretend we are writing this to the local paper, actually write it to the paper. Connecting lessons to current events, make school about the outside world we are preparing them for. And of course the 5 minute break down at the end of class, where what was learned that day is addressed and the importance of it is uncovered. What are some ideas that you may have to make school about learning and not about grades?

On a side note, I type into google, why do we study literature, and I got this dry, boring reply: http://www.ask.com/question/why-do-we-study-literature. As a high school student asking this question, I would have replied, “why does any of that matter in life?” I’m beginning to think that school and “real life” are two different things and that there needs to be a bridge over that gap connecting the two.

Managing Behavior

Controlling all the children in your class is not something that one teacher can do easily, instead a teacher needs to coach the students to control their own behavior inside of the classroom. This is something that I feel Metzger stresses in her letter. In my own experiences I have learned that solid rules and clear consequences for not following rules are the best combatant for undesirable behavior. And of course the consequences need to be followed through upon. If anyone working with children gives clear rules and regularly goes over the rules, the children will be able to recite them and will police themselves.

            With solid rules and consequences, I have noticed that it is a lot easier to deal with those that may not follow the rules and need be redirected. The vice principal at District C told us that he never says he is mad but rather that he is disappointed. The children I work with do not ever want to upset the staff members and often act on emotion without thinking through their actions. When this happens I find the best method is to isolate students and explain why their behavior is less than acceptable. The first question I start with is “why?”. Often this is met with an answer that they don’t know so I break down everything that happened and we figure out where bad decisions were made, why, and the correct approach. Then I normally express how their behavior makes me feel, and when they understand that the behavior effects everyone negatively, they think a little bit more before acting.

 

            The most important thing I feel is that you should not get into a power struggle with a student. The most important thing to remember is that you are the teacher and have the ultimate power. Children will try to drag you down to their level. A teacher needs to diffuse situations instead of heightening them, and that is something that Metzger mentions in her letter. But the most important thing to control classrooms, or any groups of children, is to have a plan and solid rules and consequences. A cool site for classroom management ideas is this one: https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos?landing_page=Classroom+Culture+Behavior+Landing+Page&gclid=COy0qaDotboCFU9o7AodI0cAfg

Dread Central (Essential) Question

            Starting from day one of my process of applying to Rhode Island College, I was stuck on the idea of how I can evenly mix the role of mentor/tutor, that I have become very comfortable with in my work with after school programs, and the role of instructor. I know many things about myself, I can create a safe environment for children, can become a person they run to if they have pressing issues,  and I can coach them through even the toughest problems that their teachers give them. But what I don’t know is how to be the instructor/teacher. I don’t know how to give out the homework, present material, or how to effectively grade student work. Now like everything else, I didn’t become a valued mentor and tutor overnight, it took experience and practice, but I am a little terrified to enter my first class and fail at being an instructor. I know over time, I will come to find the appropriate balance through trial and error, but before I start I’d like to come up with a map, a starting place, I can deviate from if necessary.

            When it boils down to one single question, my essential question is: How can I balance my identity as a mentor/tutor with my future identity of instructor/teacher?

Community

While studying education, something that is always mentioned is the positive classroom community. We’ve all realized that learning cannot take place in an uncomfortable or unfriendly environment, so we need to have a positive classroom community. But what exactly does the word community mean? To paraphrase a large amount of different definitions, a community is a a “group of people sharing common goals and attitudes”. So to think about what I would like my classroom to look like, I would want my students to have an attitude that they can accomplish anything I give them, and a goal to do their best and learn as much as they can.

These are things that go into my personal identity as a teacher. But now the nerve racking question of how can I create this positive classroom community where my students are inspired and motivated to do their best? Luckily, the internet is vast and offers many ideas that I can mull over and decide what I may want to try and what I don’t want to try, here is an example, http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept08/vol66/num01/Seven-Strategies-for-Building-Positive-Classrooms.aspx. Chapter 7 in Subjects Matter also explicitly lists some strategies to build a classroom community.

To connect to the article on mindfulness, while the idea of The Still Quiet Place may seem a little goofy, I think it would really work in a high school classroom. School is stressful enough and sometimes even I find myself needing to take a step back and look at things in smaller pieces instead of just the large final product. A friend of mine that teaches social work classes at RIC was recently telling me about how it’s that time of year when his inbox is swamped with student emails and that he ends all of his e-mails with “remember to take deep breaths”, something I feel everyone forgets. But to get back on The Still Quiet Place, after I read the article on mindfulness on Thursday, I was immediately determined to use this practice at work the next day, and I knew exactly who I was going to use it on.

There is this one 8 year old boy that I often refer to in my head as “the end of the world kid”, because if the littlest thing goes wrong or someone looks at him the wrong way, he seems to act like the world is coming to an end, having a full on tantrum. Well, Friday morning at 7:00 A.M. when his brother told him he didn’t want him on his foosball team, he began crying and screaming at his brother calling him a “stupid jerkface”. Even though I was half asleep still, The Still Quiet Place popped into my head and I quickly called this child over and told him I wanted to try something out. He started to cry more because he thought he was in trouble, saying he didn’t really mean what he said. I reassured him he wasn’t in trouble and when his sobs turned to whimpers I had him close his eyes and find his quiet place. He relaxed very quickly and when he was finally relaxed enough, he gave me a hug and went back to playing. I was impressed at how well it seemed to work and I am definitely planning on using it on a larger group. Unfortunately it was about 20 minutes until it seemed like the world was ending again. I now know I have another tool in my back pocket to use when things seem to get a little out of hand. I’m actually curious about other techniques like this that could be used to relax students.

Cooperative Learning Connected to ELL

After class last week I decided to look more into cooperative learning and Spencer Kagan who had been mentioned. I came upon this awesome page on using Kagan structures for ELLs. This page seen here, http://www.kaganonline.com/free_articles/dr_spencer_kagan/279/Kagan-Structures-for-English-Language-Learners talks about how certain techniques and approaches to cooperative learning could be used for all students, not just those that are extremely proficient in the language, allowing everyone to learn and participate.

On this page, the idea of PIES is mentioned which are all parts of cooperative learning, and it breaks down to Positive Interdependence, Individual Accountability, Equal Participation, and Simultaneuos Interaction. These are all things that need to be considered when creating a cooperative learning assignment. They are also some of the things that we had experienced during the activity in our last class. Looking at this and reflecting on my experiences in school, I can see when some things were done right and when some were not. I like looking back and seeing the ways that had worked best to facilitate my own learning.

Also on this page are descriptions of the levels of language acquisition, something that I often see touched on but never explored as much as I’d like. This is definitely a website I am going to bookmark and look back at when planning lessons for ELLs. The page lists different techniques that could be used for the different levels that are listed. I’m excited to explore cooperative learning in my own classroom, and to use it the actually effective way, unlike the way many of my own teachers have used it.

Interesting Video

I came across this video today on how some teachers in the Bronx are trying to make science interesting and fun. A very hip way to get students interested in subject content and connecting it to things students are interested in.

http://www.upworthy.com/an-incredible-teacher-made-up-a-curriculum-to-get-this-kid-to-laugh-at-a-photosynthesis-joke

The Big Bad Textbook

While reading chapters 3 and 6 of Subjects Matter I was constantly reflecting on my own experiences in school with textbooks in high school, and even sometimes in college. The fact of it is that textbooks are synonymous with the word boring. Often when a teacher told me to read a  textbook, I skimmed it to get the main idea about what was being conveyed, otherwise after the first page of the assigned reading I would have drifted off to thinking what I was going to eat for dinner. I agree completely with this book that textbooks should be used as a reference with its vast information, while articles about real world incidences should be used as the course reading. This way students can look up concepts and see how they are applied in the real world.

I actually have a friend that works at the Pearson office in Boston, editing math textbooks who says that the amount of knowledge in a textbook is completely overwhelming and could never be covered in a school year. This is a friend who actually got his math secondary education degree. I decided to look at Pearson’s website www.Pearson.com and instantly was reminded that this is a corporation with one thing truly in mind and that is money. At the top of the page, they display the share value proudly. This makes me wonder if we should really trust corporations when it comes to deciding what should be taught or tested, *cough* ETS *cough*. Even upon closer examination of their website, I got to a page on education, and there is no mission statement, just information on their success and control of the textbook world. Are textbooks really engineered to educate, or make money for the manufacturers?

 

Crisis Prevention

I have been working with children for close to a decade now and have been to many different workshops, trainings, and conferences on the elements of child care, but one of the most important and useful I have experienced is the crisis prevention training from the Crisis Prevention Institute. http://www.crisisprevention.com/Home

Hearing Principal L talk about some of the recent issues at District C, I was reminded of my CPI training and how various elements may go into a student’s “bad day” causing them to lash out, and the many strategies for de-escalation. This is definitely worth checking out and there are a lot of helpful tips and strategies. Here is a page with a little information on de-escalation. http://www.crisisprevention.com/Resources/Knowledge-Base/General/De-escalation-Tips/De-escalation-Techniques

To give you more of a taste of the different things to check out involving crisis prevention is the verbal escalation continuum, which is shown below, this is a design of the stages of a verbal crisis. This has some intervention strategies at each stage.

This website is full of many things that I feel everyone working with children should be exposed to in order to be able to create the safest environment possible for everyone.

Speaking on ELL

When discussing ELLs, one major element is the culture of power. And the question that goes along with ELL instruction is how do we assimilate ELLs appropriately into the culture of power, when they start further behind other students. It seems that District C may be developing a great way to do this by creating a community around it. With such a large ELL population, it is no doubt necessary for District C to create a strong learning environment for ELL to be able to go on and function in the world after school.

           

In the document from George Washington University, there are many approaches, techniques and elements of teaching ELLs and I find them to be very simple, yet I am able to see just how well they might be able to work inside of a classroom. This also immediately brought me back to some of the differentiation practices that I have already seen while observing classrooms at District C. These being the two different articles in the art room, one with simpler language, and the different approaches for the movie in the science room where the teacher handed out a few notes that could help students articulate what they are seeing on the screen.

           

But one thing that I have come across that was not mentioned in the document is approaches to directly inspire ELLs to work hard. On the New York City school department’s website I found a page for ELL instruction that mentions inspiring ELLs with model ELL students that have succeeded against the odds and went on the big things. The page can be seen here, http://schools.nyc.gov/Academics/ELL/default.htm . By showing students what could happen if they work hard, I believe that current ELL students will believe that they too can succeed, making them want to put in the time and effort that is necessary.

Also I stumbled around this cool picture which I think would look nice hanging up in a classroom.

The Power of WHY

I got into some pretty deep thinking around the word why today:

While volunteering at a youth event in my city today, I was asked a million questions beginning with why. This got me thinking about how when we are little we are so curious about everything but as we get older, the question waterfall comes to a slow trickle. This can't be good. I know no one has infinite knowledge, so do we simply stop looking for answers. In class we have spoken about teachers needing to ask themselves why they are doing certain lessons or activities, and I have noticed that when I know why I'm learning something or doing something, it is a lot clearer. 

Now in a high school classroom, if you asked a student why they are doing something involving their learning, they would say they are doing it because they have to. I know that's the response I would have given. Now I'm thinking of different ways to incorporate the why into learning. Maybe if students see the use of what they are learning they could actually own their learning, not just have it be something the teacher is having them do. Perhaps a way to approach this is to have a 5 minute recap at the end of class complete with ties to the why, and ultimately to the objectives and essential questions of the course.

Thinking of Backward Design

While reading the pieces for this week I had really been sucked into the one I read first which was the one dealing with backward design. While the text mentions that this is a  concept that has existed for a while now, I am completely dumbfounded as to why I feel like I have barely ever had it practiced on me. The idea of truly establishing a goal and assessment before planning how to get there in education seems so simply logical. Looking back on my own lesson planning I have seen myself start out with an idea of what I would like the purpose of my lesson to be, but start thinking of how I would like to introduce the topic and teach it, before clearing up my exact purpose. I would also leave the assessment as the last thing I'd work on which after reading this article and the comparison of teaching something to having driving directions, seems moronic.

This text is filled with a wealth of knowledge on a pattern of thinking I have never thought of. I personally find this piece to be so valuable. The way it is organized is also extremely useful, the two visuals especially. With the map of stages of backward design and then the circles for establishing priorities, I am excited to use these when planning my next lesson. These two figures give specific instructions for the process of establishing the base of a lesson plan, something that I have seemed to fumble and really struggle with.

Along with the chapter in our text book and the module for UbD, I see a common theme about focusing on small parts that need to be learned in order to understand the lessons. Working toward students' learning the smaller main elements in order to understand the whole ideas. This ties to the idea that there is so much content to cover and that not all of it needs to be as intensely covered as certain other things. The priority organizer is definitely a great tool for this and the list of interesting books that are given in the textbook will definitely help me develop great lessons and units in the future.

This website has a nice outline of backward design. http://www.arps.org/users/ms/coaches/backward%20design%20101.htm

Literacy Profile

One of my non-school social world literacies is fitness. Having always been involved in sports such as soccer, track, tennis, basketball, cross country, baseball, and many more, I learned that there are appropriate ways to practice fitness and exercise and these are things that I am constantly thinking about and practicing during the day. There are many elements that go into the concept of fitness, some of them are nutrition/diet, cardiovascular exercise, and weight lifting.

I had become interested in the whole entire concept of fitness from an early age when I realized that the things I put into myself or did to myself could affect my performance in the future, but I didn’t really practice a fitness focused lifestyle. I mainly just started studying the different things that athletes would say they did for themselves to be able to achieve some of the things I witnessed. But one major thing that I did discover was how important diet and nutrition was as a building block to everything else in fitness.

While I understood all of the elements that went into a good diet and nutrition, I can’t say I had really practiced a healthy diet until 2010 when I took a nutrition class at URI which really opened my eyes to the practice of a healthy diet. This class made me examine my own diet over a month and a half and analyze the elements associated with a nutritional diet. This activity made me see where my diet was lacking and where it was overloaded, and I started to change my eating habits. Not only did I start eating better to get all the vitamins I needed, but to also boost mental and physical capacities.

On top of diet are many other elements, some have already been listed previously. One of them is cardiovascular exercise. Cardiovascular exercise is exercise to strengthen the heart. This type of activity will allow the heart to keep a slower and more regulated pace when not participating in physical activity. An example of cardio vascular exercise, and my favorite is running. My track coach in high school who is also one of my neighbors taught me a lot about running and the conditioning of the body in order to be able to run long distances. Through practice and reading articles about running I had learned about pacing yourself during a long race so you do not tire your body out and can get all the functions of your bodies regulated to work together, including your heart, keeping a constant pace. One person who stood out in making me want to learn a lot about running was the late, great runner Steve Prefontaine.

A third element of fitness and the last one that I have become involved in is weight lifting. My brother has always been into building muscle and becoming very fit. About a year ago, I decided that I wanted to start building muscle and I began doing a lot of research on certain supplements to build muscle. My friend is a personal trainer and began giving me some tips and even showed me some things in his gym at no charge. In the past year, I have contributed to many weight lifting blogs and have even taught some lifting techniques to my other friends.

Combining these different elements of fitness I have grown to see that my thinking is often a lot clearer and I am able to do a lot of different things that I wasn’t able to do before. Doing this type of stuff, I have also learned the values of persistence and focus. Something I can take both into work and into my education. I see that what you put into something will yield desirable results.

These ideals are something that I can bring to my classes and show my students that hard work pays off and that everything is connected and scaffolding is necessary to develop different knowledge development. I can also bring up professional athletes and speak about the different routines they have in order to better themselves and compare it to the students’ own learning.

Reading Strategies

Chapter 2 of Subjects Matter really started me thinking of techniques of effective reading and how I could get my students ignited in the practice of effective reading. What stands out the most to me is the idea of activating prior knowledge. This is something I have always known should be applied before starting any new type of lesson. Connecting the base of something new to something already understood, a very Vygotsky idea of scaffolding. This led me to start thinking about different lessons that are started inside of an English classroom, and maybe the students would have to be working on something that they have never been introduced to yet.

With this wonder in mind, I began thinking about different ways to introduce topics. Possibly a game with some highlights about a specific subject before students started a book. This way when the reading is done for homework, the students will be able to make a little connection. For example, when reading "The Crucible", the day before it is assigned for homework, create and execute an activity/ lesson on puritans and the witch trials. At the end out the unit, this would be something excellent to reflect to also. I used "The Crucible", because I remember many students in my 10th grade English class having no real idea what was going on in the play, because they were given no context for it, and of course did not read the textbook's introduction.



Here is some more information on activating prior knowledge. http://www.thinkport.org/career/strategies/reading/activate.tp

Scaffolding, is this the best approach?

One thing that seems to be constantly brought up throughout these past two chapters is the concept of scaffolding. These chapters are constantly looking at how interaction between that teacher and student is what is needed for learning to occur. One thing that is heavily emphasized however is that this just doesn't occur with instruction, but rather students need to look and discover elements of process on their own. The students do not only need to know how to do certain things, but need to also know why they are doing it.

This whole concept relates heavily with Vygotsky's ideas on social learning. Students need guidance to their answers, instead of simply teaching themselves, or being told how to do it. Eventually using this model, they will be able to not only do what is required of them, but also be able to explain why. And hopefully they will enjoy doing it. This is real learning, not just being able to create a product.

Introduction to Me

I'm Nathan, a 24 year old student of Secondary Education at RIC. In Spring 2011 I graduated from URI with a B.A. in English. While I was an English Major, I had a double minor of Business and History because I did not quite know what I wanted to do with my life. Having always worked at summer camps, after graduation I began working at one of my favorite organizations, the Boys and Girls Club of Pawtucket. There I was mentoring and supervising children in my home city of Pawtucket. Working with both pre-teens and teens, I realized that I wanted to be a teacher and applied to RIC. Last school year I was promoted to the position of 5-8 year old supervisor which was quite enjoyable, and this school year, I have the position title of pre-teen education coordinator. I also help out with the teens and drive one of the Boys and Girls Clubs school buses every morning. This is my third semester at RIC and I am excited for all of the experiences to come. The reason that I want to become a teacher is so I can spread knowledge, promote higher thinking, empower younger generations, and show students that learning is not a boring monotonous thing.