I must admit that I love the voices from the classroom section of you book! I like that it create a scenario and prepares us to be reflective.
As educators and potential educators we all enter the classroom with the hope that our students will be autonomous learners. We want them to be as invested as we are in seeking our initial degree/certification or additional endorsements. However, we do not leave students any time to reflect on what they are learning. On page 109 the text discusses the connection of the preparation phase and the reflection phase. It is no secret that at the beginning of the week we are amp'd up. Alright here's the vocabulary, let's do a one pager, okay read the story, take the test...SEE YA MONDAY! As the end of the week nears we forget to look back on what we learned. Did the story teach us a lesson? What do you think about the character(s)? What do you still wonder about? Are all important questions that students NEVER get to answer. From a behavior management stand-point you hear teachers constantly complaining that their students talk too much. I'm certain that they don't, they actually don't get to talk enough? On Monday look around our own class, Dr. Johnson will say something that will spark a question, we turn to our partner, log onto the internet (yes we already know that you googled taxonomy last week) or mumble a comment under our breath. We are no different than the students that we interact we are comprehension monitoring. During times of the day in my classroom, when I catch a student talking and I think they should be paying attention, I say Danyla (who is my think out loud and most talkative student), are you talking about learning? I love it when she actually is talking about something she doesn't understand. She's trying to monitor her comprehension but seeks help from others most of the time to do it. This is where I adore partnering Kagan Collaborative strategies with reflection within my classroom. The simple act of allowing students 5 minutes to just reflect on what they know, what they want to know, what they learned, and what they think is valuable. There are times that a student can find so much understanding from a partner. Kid to kid language is an awesome example of speaking to learn. We have concrete facts that this strategy is imperative to reading, why isn’t it practiced?
While reading page 110, it talked about the Oppenheimer study, where American teachers traveled to Japan in the late 1990’s. When they observed the students in Japan, they didn’t see recall and memorization but they saw analysis, and reflection. The student confirms that reflection is an important piece of the learning process. Did you find this cliché in a sense that the researchers brought the information back and no reflected on the study? Are we so confident in what we do that we didn’t learn anything from our information research? Isn’t this a contradiction of what the study concluded?
As I read on I began to look at what elementary teachers typically do. Shy away from reflection, use time as an excuse, and the recognition that critical thinking can’t really be assessed on a standardized test. Have we become a factory of test takers? Is critical thinking so unmeasurable that we discount it in an effort to teach test taking skills?
One of the techniques that I hope to add to my classroom is juxtapositioning, where learners are able to compare and contrast texts having opposing perspectives. I would love to do this in social studies using government for Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. The ideal of a direct democracy and representative democracy on an issue may help better connect my students to the concepts. At this time, it seems to be their most difficult concept to understand. My grade level struggles with ideals and concepts that would help students understand how both forms of government operate.
PAR and Cooperative Learning (or Collaborative learning) seems to offer three options to achieving the desired reflective learning results. It allows a choice of three phases and if I tie it to the social studies lesson students may actually understand the two forms of government. The challenge will ultimately be time. With SOL’s right around the corner the pressure to follow the pacing guide, district benchmark testing, and monthly monitoring test are put in place to make certain that I have taught what the district says teach within the allotted time frame.
While it’s true that time is the issue, I wonder how many people believe we can as a nation do better if we go to year round schools with more breaks?
In closing, as it pertains to our classroom and this course. I was very suprised to learn last week on the test that we were not able to use a strategy repeated readings and text lookbacks. Many of us are taking many courses, maintaing full time jobs and reading throughout the week. If your like me you may have memory difficulties.
If research indicate this as an important practice for not just children but adults why aren't we using it in this class?
1 comment:
This was my favorite part of your blog:
"As I read on I began to look at what elementary teachers typically do. Shy away from reflection, use time as an excuse, and the recognition that critical thinking can’t really be assessed on a standardized test. Have we become a factory of test takers? Is critical thinking so unmeasurable that we discount it in an effort to teach test taking skills?"
I, like you, often woder these questions as well. So often you hear how time constraints get in the way of more critical thinking type testing, and its such a shame. Students are trained to memorize exactly what's needed to pass a test, that they aren't even stopping to thinking outside of the material, or even reflect on what is being learned.
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