Inquiry Plan (3 of 3)

I have completed the implementation of my inquiry plan with my students and will be posting my video this evening. Due to some challenges at the school where I work, I was unable to video the lesson where I used the song about the average. Instead, I choose a YouTube video with song to present the meaning of percent. While the students where engaged, they were not quite as excited as they were with the "average" song.

After I had finished implementing my inquiry plan, I polled the students and asked them to write down which of the lessons included instruction that they felt helped them learn most effectively. The hands down favorite was either of the lessons that involved songs. Next was the pair grouping lesson. The least favorite lesson by a large margin was the lesson where they had to write how graphs can be lisleading. In response to my second blog, Professor Clarke suggested using different mediums on which the students can write their responses. I am going to try that suggestion and see if that makes any difference. I am willing to try anything to help my students not view writing as this huge, horrible thing.

Overall, I learned that anytime I can incorporate music and/or songs my students will benefit. I too will benefit because if the students are more engaged, there are fewer discipline problems. I took the insight that I learned from my inquiry plan and tried it with other classes. In one class, I offered extra credit points to any student who wrote a song about the topic we were discussing. These students asked if they coud "perform" their song for the class. Of course I allowed it and the students had a great time and this activity helped some of them learn the content.

Inquiry Plan (2 of 3)

I have continued implementing my plan in my classroom and some lessons have gone better than others. This comes as no surprise to me. For instance, the lesson where we talked about how and why graphs can be misleading, looked at a few examples and then the students were to write, in their own words, how graphs can be misleading did not go as well as I would have liked. For the most part, the students in my class hate to write and will try to get away with writing one sentence. Of course, I let them know that I expect much more than that from them and hand them their paper back.
The lesson where the students had to work in pairs to graph data in a bar graph went well. I picked the pair teams, using a mixed pair grouping. Overall, the students enjoyed working together and, judging by the resulsts, most of them understand how to graph data properly in a bar graph.

Inquiry Plan-implementation (1 of 3)

My inquiry plan is focused on student engagement. This, to me, is one of the most important aspects of teaching. A teacher can know the content, have perfectly prepared lesson plans and if the students are not engaged, all that content knowledge and preparation is useless. As a result, I decided to focus my inquiry plan on student engagement.

My plan utilizes Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences to help increase student engagement.
I took several lessons and focused on one or two of the intelligences identified by Gardner. i have started implementing this plan in my classroom.

The first two intelligences I addressed where the logical-mathematical and the musical intelligences. My students were studying how to find the mean of a set of data. I found a song called "Call Me Mean (I'm just Average)" by Harry Guffee. The students had a lot of fun with this song despite its country music type flair. I had copied the lyrics for the students to read as the song played. After the song played through the first time, the students begged me to play it again. Six of my students asked if they could go to the front of the class and sing along. Of course I said yes. I replayed the song, the students at the front of the class sang along and hammed it up. Overall, I think this lesson was very successful. I am positive that more than one student will not forget that the mean is the average!

The next intelligence I addressed was the bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. I wrote a series of test scores on the board with the directions to create a line plot of the data. I asked for two volunteers who then held up a large, laminated number line that had numbers 85 to 100 on it. I
randomly handed students half sheets of card stock with large "x's" printed on them. I would hand the student the "x" and tell him or her what score they represented. They would go and stand behind the number line at the appropriate place. Once all the scores were "recorded", I asked the students a series of questions about the graph where the answer would be a student's name. For example, I asked "Out of this set of data, who represents the median?". Judging by the students' reactions, the engagement level was very high. It was much higher than the times when I taught this lesson by having the students create their own line plot from the data on the board.

Next week, I plan on addressing several other of Gardner's intelligences. I will blog about those activities at that time.

Measuring what are students know and are able to do is a vital part of teaching. The question is exactly how we should accomplish this. I read the article "How Should We Measure Student Learning? The Many Forms of Assessment" by Edutopia Staff. and watched the video "Making a Case for Comprehensive Assessment." Both of these items bought up some great points. Not all learners are great test takers. Multiple choice and short answer assessments do not test for things our students are going to need in order to be successful. For instance, in today's world, there is an emphasis on teamwork and collaboration. Neither of these are tested in our current testing instruments. In the video I watched, A New York High School is using performance based assessments to gauge student learning rather than the state's high stakes testing instrument. I think this is an excellent approach to assessing what our students actually know and can be able to do. At this high school they use a system of assessments that include portfolios, presentations and standards bases projects rather than a single assessment item. Our current situation of assessing student knowledge at one time with one instrument just does not make sense to me. Can such an instrument really assess what that student has learned?

Unfortunately, that is the world we live in today. Our teaching is so geared to making sure our students can do well on the state test. I know in my classroom, I actively teach test taking skills. At times, I feel like I am teaching students to be great test takers rather than teaching them the content.

As to my inquiry plan, I would like to focus on student engagement. If students are engaged, they will learn. If they learn the content, they will do well on the assessments.

Domain 1

I picked domain one "Planning and Preparation" because i feel that understanding my content area is one of my strengths. In addition, I spend a lot of time and effort planning quality instructional activities to allow the diverse student body that I teach to be as successfula as possible. I am a huge fan of Howard gardner's multiple intelligences. I strive to address as many of those intelligences as often as I can. For instance, when I teach integers and absolute value, I have the students form a human number line. Other students are then given a number on a card and they have to find their place on the number line. In addition, I will say something like "Johnny is closer to Susie than Ricky is. Johnny's number has a greater value than Ricky's number." I will repeat the procedure on the positive side of zero, again using the student names. I lead the students to come up with the fact that if a number is to the right of another number, it is the larger number. Also, in this unit I use a song about integers. I have a cd of math songs that has a song called "The Integer Song". Months after the lesson, I can sometimes hear a student singing that song!
After what I have just written, it probably comes as no surprise that the component I am most comfortable with is component 1a "Demonstrating Knowledge of Content and Pedagogy". Content knowledge, as I stated previously, is one of my strengths. I love math. I love teaching math. I was very fortunate as an undergraduate to be a part of a program called the "Explorers Math Program." This program was desigened to allow an undergraduate to explore the field of math education before they had reached a point where it would be difficult to change their major. I was a part of this program for the last 3 years of my undergraduate work. There was a professor, who was in charge of this program, who taught me more about HOW to teach math than any of my coursework classes combined. She taught the developmental math classes at the college I attended and, under her direct supervision, she allowed me to plan lessons and to deliver the instruction. After I had taught a lesson, she would constructively point out ways that I could be more effective or ways that I could incorporate different learning styles. The knowledge I gained during that time with her was invaluable.
The component I would like to zero in on is component 3c "Engaging Students in Learning." as my previous posts might have suggested, engaging students is not an easy task. The students of today are so bombarded with information and they are so much a product of a society that wants the quick fix, that engaging them in the learning process can sometimes be very difficult. My questions to others include: "What specific things do you do to help engage your students?"; "How do you deal with student apathy?"; "How do you handle that student who does not want to do the work, does not want to learn the concept you are teaching and then turns around and becomes a discipline problem?" I look forward to hearing any feedback that anyone is willing to give.

Curriculum should be the framework from which we build our instruction on a day to day basis. It should be a guideline to tell us what to teach, and when, to allow our students to learn what we are teaching. The reality is that in this age of high stakes testing, the curriculum itself is being used as a measuring stick to determine how effective a teacher is in the classroom. Kentucky has developed curriculum documents that all teachers in the state are to use to plan their instruction. These documents are broken down into standards that all students are to have mastered at a certain grade level. The students are then tested to see if the standards had been met. The testing generates all kinds of reports showing how many students actually mastered the standard. In turn, the teacher is held accoountable for the results of that test. While I am all for holding teachers accountable, I think that there is not enough accountability for the students taking the tests. As educators, we are always being told to make our instruction relevant, to show the students how they can use the information in their own lives. Then in the Spring, we turn around and give them a test, that has huge implications and consequences, and they are not even held accoutnable for how well they do, much less shown the relevance to their own lives on performing well on the test.

As for having control over the curriculum, teachers have little input. I am of two minds on this. I feel it is vital that there is a standard curriculum that teachers across the state have to follow. The student in Eastern Kentucky, which is part of the Appalachian Mountains, should have the same education as a student in Frankfort. This was the issue that the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) was to address. What I would like to see is that the curriculum be developed ONLY be teachers who have actually taught in the classroom on a day to day basis. Teachers who understand how unrealistic it is to teach everything we are being asked to teach to every group of students. People with limited classroom experience have no business creating a curriculum for which teachers are going to be held accountable.

On a day to day basis, curriculum in my classroomis based around those standards listed in the Kentucky curriculum documents. I take each standard and create objectives from them. Some standards encompass so many concepts that one standard could have many objectives. I then post those objectives on the board for each of my classes. I tell the students before instruction the objective of the day. I will use different formative assessments to determine if the objective was met or not. I will use exit slips, bellwork the next day, questioning, and wipe-board-like activities, to name a few. The results of the formative assessment tell me if I can move to the next concpet or if I need to reteach.

I would like to blog about something that is a little off the subject. Teachers are constantly being told to make their instruction fun and interesting and engaging. While I agree that we need to do all we can to make learning fun, when did making the learning fun become the primary goal? We are teaching our students that if something is not "fun" it is not worth their attention. Life is not always fun. Sometimes in life you have to do something you don't want to do because it has to get done.

Traditionally, education has been viewed as a way to impart knowledge to new genereations. This way of thinking incorporates lists of skills, subskills, and facts that need to be passed down. This type of thinking is embraced by positivists. Behaviorists, still within this definition of education, rely on practice and reinforcement of new knowledge with a heavy emphasis on task analysis. However, education needs to be defined in a much broader sense. The students we teach today are much more a part of a global community than generations in the past. Education needs to be defined as a way to teach students to think for themselves. Education needs to be a vehicle where students learn how to integrate new knowledge and to apply that knowledge to confront new situations and problems.
The curriculum is the framework for the education process. It provides an outline of what needs to be learned and when. In Kentucky, there is a formal curriculum that all teachers within the state are expected to follow. The drawback to the formal curriculum documents is one of overload. There is so much to cover in any one grade level subject. I teach middle school math. The Core Content for Assessment and the Program of Studies for middle school math is extremely comprehensive. As much as we would like to think differently, the focus tends to stray to what is taught rather than what is learned. As teachers, we are expected to teach the set curriculum, to keep to a certain pace, regardless if the students have mastered the content or not.
This idea of maintaining a certain pace so that everything in the curriculum documents gets taught needs to change. The focus is so much on getting through everything so that our students do well on the high stakes tests. The consequence of this is that students are not learning the value of being a life long learner. They are not learning the value of learning something new simply for the sake of the learning itself. Instead, they are learning that they need to learn the new concept, whatever it may be, simply so that they will be able to answer the test questions correctly.
I admit that in my current teaching I use a curious blend of behaviroist and constructivist philosophies. My curriculum has a heavy emphasis on introducing new subskills in order to build toward more complex skills. There is a focus on formative and summative assessments to see if the students have learned the concepts. I am a constructivist though, at heart, and I try to get my students to talk about the math they are learning. I try to make them explain how to do something as much as possible. Most of my students simply raise their hand and want to give the answer. Instead, I tell them that I do not want to know the answer, I want to know how they got their answer. If there are a few minutes left in class, I will ask for a defintion. The students get frustrated when I won't let them recite the book definition. I try to get them to explain in their own words. By doing this, they have to synthesize the concept and construct a meaning for themselves in able to impart it to the other students in the class.
We do need a new approach. We need to develop and implement a new curriculum that allows more time to develop deeper understandings of the concepts being taught. We need a curriculum that allows a teacher to focus more on what has been learned than on what has been taught. As it stands, with pacing guides and highly structured curriculum guides, a teacher has so much time to get as many students as possible to learn as much as they can at whatever level they can. At some point, regardless of where the students are at, the teacher has to move on to the next concept.
The bottom line is that we need to teach our students how to think. We, as educators, need to teach this generation of students to be prepared for situations and problems that are not even in existence yet. That is how fast our world is changing at the moment. We need to ignite that spark that encourages a student to be a life long learner, not a great test taker.