Its over...and I'm surprisingly upset

I thoroughly enjoyed EDUC 4P19 with Susan Drake. Mainly because she was the only professor that directly cared about her students, that she designed the course around our needs, desires and interests. I can’t say this for any other courses, EDUC 4P19 was definitely unique. Everything about the course was useful and applicable to us as future teachers. Ex. Designing curriculums, Genius Hour presentations, blog group discussions, integrated curriculums are all very useful to name a few. Susan Drake tried new things with us even though she was not comfortable with it (google documents) and sometimes we were not comfortable with it (popsicle sticks). The exit cards were awesome because they allow for feedback from students or questions from students who didn’t have time to ask. I really want to incorporate exit cards because it gives shy students the opportunity to ask questions and state their mind. I will definitely incorporate exit cards in my class someday.

Susan Drakes course was my favourite course in university thus far. Thank you Professor for making a course in university useful to my life. Sounds harsh towards other courses but it is very true.

I really enjoyed blogs because it gave students the opportunity to collaborate on a topic and express their individual outlook. There were agreements, disagreements and great discussions. I think the blogs were effective because it allowed students to become comfortable with their colleagues and ultimately comfortable to express their own opinions.

I also really enjoyed Genius Hour because over the course of my school life, I was never given time to research a topic that interested me. It was awesome to present my interests with the class. Presenting, even the smallest things, is a useful tool as a teacher. I am getting more comfortable over time presenting in all my education courses. Which is another reason why I appreciate this course. I mean…I don’t get the opportunity to present in a Physics course…ever.

Another great portion of the course is the creation of our own science curriculum. It is another realistic aspect to the course because obviously, as teachers, we will need to collaborate and come up with ideas and design a curriculum that follows the grade expectations.

As I said in my first blog, communication is the best way to learn. And everything Susan Drake incorporated in the course involved communication. I would like to thank Susan Drake one last time for a memorable experience through my struggles as a student in university. 

Integrated Curriculum Limitations and stuff

In the sciences and mathematics, there are interesting things happening in project based learning that will definitely improve student attentiveness and learning. As a high school teacher, it is difficult to appropriately implement project based learning in an integrated curriculum. An integrated curriculum may be difficult to implement in a high school class, specifically, because it focuses on one subject as opposed to involving knowledge from other courses and interweaving them in one lesson. However, if I was an Elementary school teacher, I would have an integrated curriculum because it is so profitable to students in many ways. Maybe I am just biased because I am looking to become a Physics and Mathematics teacher in high school. I will not be able to appropriately use an integrated curriculum to its full benefits because I have limited time with my students, as opposed to an Elementary school teacher who has all day work with their students and get to know them. Also, in high school, every students schedule is different and students have different knowledge on different subjects. So, in high school how can we use a subject within a subject if students have separate knowledge and students may not understand a concept while others do. But, in an Elementary school, the students should be on the same page with their knowledge and the teacher can used this to their advantage when designing a project based activity.

Basically, I don’t like integrated curriculum even though I see the benefits in an Elementary school setting.

As a teacher you need to change your methods, but it is difficult to change when you are brought up in this traditional teaching method environment.

I really enjoy working together in a group environment when designing our curriculum. Finally some collaborative work periods where students can design a project based activity inside their designed curriculum. I am thankful that we get to apply our knowledge in group work. In the past 4 years, it seemed to be all about learning in a classroom and how to apply it. Now, we finally get to apply it in a teambuilding curriculum activity. I am thankful that we get time in our groups to discuss what we talked about in class and what we feel would be an effective method in designing a curriculum. By gaining this teambuilding and collaborative skill, we can use it as future teachers when we need advice from other teachers, in a school environment.

Thank you Susan for this opportunity to discuss and apply instead of being fed information. Thank you for the change of pace.

Student Centred Learning andddddd my thoughts

So put this into perspective, you’re a teacher and you have been taught in University that your students need to ignite their higher-order thinking skills. In order to do this, students must work with each other, collaborate with each other, communicate with each other, and present their findings to the class. All of these student centered learning techniques I mentioned, do not involve a teacher telling them how to collaborate, communicate and present. What do teachers even do? They are there to guide the students through their learning and act as a manager of the class, rather than the head honcho who holds all the knowledge and answers. Never forget that the students are the learners, the teachers, the investigators and essentially the center focus in every classroom. We are obviously shifting away from a traditional classroom because student centered learning, through discovery and experience, is being more heavily focused on than ever before. So, if students do all the work, why do teachers get paid so much for working 4 hours a day for 5 days a week and holidays/summers off? It’s just funny to look at because we are told, as future teachers, to let students discover knowledge by themselves. Teachers are having a smaller and smaller role in the classroom and getting paid more and more. Maybe it comes to a question. Do you think, eventually, that teachers would become almost unnecessary in a classroom environment? If they are necessary, would they still be called teachers or maybe just managers? Hopefully my perspective makes sense to someone else besides myself.

I really liked Susan’s excerpt in the book, interweaving curriculum and classroom assessment, where she explained how to infuse Assessment for learning into teaching. To summarize, Susan used different assessing techniques in her classroom, ranging from raising hands to traffic cards to exit cards. I like how she came to the conclusion of feedback and no grades given. Growing up, I would never think of being a teacher and not giving out grades. Maybe because I have been conditioned by the typical curriculum that we have implemented today. Fortunately, success came from not giving out grades and just giving feedback. I’ll be looking forward to trying this technique in my classroom someday. Thank you Susan!

Know your Students and Know your curriculum

Knowing your students is a top the charts for designing a curriculum. Let us break this down for just a second or maybe two. Let’s say you are an Elementary teacher teaching your twenty students that you see every day for the whole day. Designing a curriculum for them should not be difficult because you are understanding how your students learn on a frequent basis. Now let’s say you are a high school teacher that teaches science at a grade 9 level, math at a grade 9 level, biology at a grade 11 level and 12 level. You are working with 4 different groups of students throughout the day working with them for just over an hour. By limited time with these groups, it will be very difficult to get to know your students well enough to ultimately design 4 different curriculums around them. So, if you don’t know your students understandings, then how will I be able to grasp the big picture here and design an updated curriculum that benefits my students entirely.

Alright alright, no more critical rants. I typed the previous paragraph before I continued on past the first page of Chapter 2. I just wanted to get my thoughts out of the way so I can focus on the importance of a healthy balance between knowing your curriculum and knowing your students.

I’m sure you have heard the saying knowledge is power. Well…power is power. Hate to break it to ya. Anyways, there are lots of ways to look at knowledge. Factual knowledge is essential facts that are trivial in everyday life. Conceptual knowledge goes beyond facts and involves Big Ideas and understanding the meaning behind such ideas. Procedural knowledge is how to do a task using a skill or techniques. I feel the most important knowledge to have is Meta-cognitive knowledge. The knowledge of one’s own thinking process. Why do we think the way we think? Meta-cognitive knowledge is a knowledge to reflect on the previous knowledge’s listed. These four categories of knowledge are defined by Lorin Anderson.

Now to connect these knowledge’s to students and curriculum. First off, your students must have a certain amount of surface knowledge before they can move on to Big Ideas and challenging tasks of deeper learning. Students, on their own account, can activate meta-cognition to monitor their own cognitive process. I think a big upcoming challenge now is shifting from teaching procedure to teaching concepts. Teachers will have to develop conceptual understanding first before they can apply this teaching shift into their classrooms.

I am going to conclude this blog (or rant…I don’t know what this is) with a question. What types of activities could students do to build a deeper understanding on a given topic? I know this question sounds broad. But, what comes to your mind when you think of deeper understanding. Leave a comment.

Breaking away from tradition

Hi friends, I am Daniel V and I am currently playing the game of school. I like to think that I figured most of it out by now because I am in 4th year university and continuing my education. When I say most, I mean that I am a successful product of the curriculum for a reason. So, I must be doing something right, right?

Let's just dive right into things. Let's evaluate this traditional teaching model and see why straying away may be a good idea.

Basically, the models of education need to change right now. The traditional approach to education limits creativity, knowledge and intuition. In a classroom today, you would most likely see a teacher feeding students with information as if they were storage devices. Students sit patiently in rows and listen to what the teacher feeds them with limited questioning. Also, students learn alone and much of the work by the students is by memorization.

I view a traditional classroom as limiting for the student and the teacher as well. Last year in my education class, I had a reading for the first week. The entire reading I forget, for the most part, but I will never forget this one sentence. “Learning is best achieved through conversation.” Obviously, learning can be achieved by other ways, but best by conversation? I initially debated this quote because by having a science/math background I kept to myself. I hardly asked questions because the answer was the answer and you couldn’t really expand on it. So, in this education course there was a lot of group work and conversation on a specific situation each week. I wanted to see if this quote was legitimate or not. Basically, I tested it out with the idea in mind each week. To cut it short, conversation is a strong way to obtain knowledge with very many advantages. You get to dispute claims made by your peers, you get to elaborate when you agree and most importantly you get to hear your group member’s perspectives. It was interesting to listen to everybody’s ideas, and not just mine, on the same question.

At the end of the semester, I became more comfortable with learning through conversation and I understand how effective it can be in a classroom. When I become a teacher I will stay on track with the mandatory curriculum, but I will highly stress questioning and conversation. My goal as a teacher will be to limit direct instruction and incorporate conversation between students and teachers because I viewed, first hand, how effective this strategy is.

Basically, I believe student centered discovery is the way the curriculum should shift. It should shift towards a constructivist design focused on student thinking skills and group conversation focus.

After reading chapter 1 of interweaving curriculum and classroom assessment: engaging the 21^st-century learner by Susan Drake, the thing I found most interesting was students with fixed mind sets. Mainly, because I am guilty of falling into this category. Students with a fixed mindset believe their success is the result of innate intelligence and talent, qualities that are genetic. When these such students encounter a difficult problem, they are discouraged. Thinking like this discounts the value of practice and effort. In contrast, students with a different mindset view failure as temporary because they believe their ability can improve with effort. In conclusion, assessment feedback that focuses on student’s visible actions rather than on assumed actions and personal attributes will ultimately create a healthier mindset.

Final ramble on,by me, not Led Zeppelin.

I want to help students find and then build on their unique abilities, by providing supportive feedback and essentially get them motivated to work on their difficulties.

I can say all I want about teaching and what I should do as a teacher. But, nobody will know what exactly to do until they are fed to the sharks. Basically, placed into a classroom for the first time. We need experience and lots of it. Nobody is going to be the best they can be right out of the gate. If you think this, then you are setting yourself up for failure. We will grow on experience.