Classroom Atmosphere

I enjoyed that the articles this week since they focused on more than just the “average” or typical “struggling” student. I also like they somewhat focused on the atmosphere of the classroom rather than solely instruction.

The Winebrenner article was nice to read because it brought many options to the table. It was also nice to see an article broken down into steps and sections instead of long laborious chunks of reading. When it comes to gifted learners, people seem to automatically assume that the person must be gifted in many areas. While for some this is true, for most, I don’t believe it is. I’ve seen this throughout my own life and continue to see it in children I work with. While I was placed in gifted writing/reading or English and History courses throughout my K-12 education, I have struggled with math throughout that same education.

This was the first time I have seen or heard of Brain Gym, other than during my student teaching. My master teacher liked Brain Gym and used different exercises with the class. We often did them with students as a way to refocus them or before an activity to focus their attention in the first place. There was an alphabet of movements on flashcards which I tried to find online but was unable to. I liked the discussion of physical movement over all, including using squeezable objects such as Kush balls. I saw Kush balls used in fourth grade classrooms I subbed in at one elementary school. They called the game Sparkle and it was to practice spelling. Students would sit on their desks and pass the Kush ball from neighbor to neighbor as they each spelled out the next letter in their spelling word. If it got to the next student and there were no letters, they had to say “Sparkle” and sit down. Ultimately there was one winner.

I liked that this article addressed having a respectful and supportive learning environment. It is not too often that a published journal article about DI addresses bullying and teasing. “Teachers and schools must enforce polices that simply do not allow teasing, name calling or other harassment practices that demonstrate rejection of kids for any reason.”(Winebrenner, p. 134). On a lighter note this reminded me of a bit from the new Aziz Ansari special on Netflix which discusses bullying. He talks about bullying and does the majority of the bit in this clip:

The Tobin article described DI pretty simply: “A key emphasis in differentiated instruction is placed on respectful tasks, flexible grouping and on-going assessment and adjustments for all students.” I appreciated that this article recognized that some struggling learners would need direct or explicit instruction. To me it seems like this is almost completely glossed over in DI discussion and the majority of people dismiss it because they think it is boring and doesn’t encourage students to love reading. While I agree with both of those statements, it’s also hard for students to love to read when they completely lack the ability to do it. This article also discussed the importance of relationship building in the classroom and how the teacher’s language can impact students. “Empowering and considerate teacher talk shows a commitment to student’s academic growth. The teacher serves as interactional gatekeeper facilitating the student’s acceptance as a valuable member of the learning community.”(Tobin, 2007).

The subject of Tobin’s study does talk about how she used literacy centers but realized as she worked to bring DI into her classroom, centers were not differentiating because all students were required to do the same thing at all the centers. Questions I had from this article regard her flexible grouping strategy. It mentions exploration or enactment groups. I’m guessing enactment group means students act out a text, but what does an exploration group look like? I’m sure it depends on the student’s age, but how much help do you provide for research?

I think she brought up some good points about encouraging students to explain their own learning. I felt like, "Why didn't I think of that?!"

- Writing key phrases on the board

- Repeating back part of the student's questions to them

- Asking students to create yes/no questions

- Establish discussion routines

The Tobin case study was very long and I felt like it took a long time to explain something that could have been explained pretty succinctly. The different types of teaching also could have been described in simpler ways. “Three themes emerged: learning support within the co-teaching structures, explicit teacher-instigated literacy support and interactional inclusion,”(Tobin, 2007). This also addressed co-teaching. I don’t have any experience co-teaching beyond student teaching. I’m currently working with a para-educator and we work on tag-teaming students who have questions. Later on in the year we will both be working with student small groups. Does anyone have experience co-teaching?

Tobin, R. (2005). Co-teaching in language arts: Supporting students with learning disabilities. Canadian Journal of Education, 28(4), 784-801.

Tobin, R. (2007). Differentiating in the language arts: Flexible options to support all students. Canadian Children, 32(2), 11-18.

Winebrenner, S. (2003). Teaching strategies for twice-exceptional students. Intervention in School and Clinic, 38(3), 131-137. 

Individualized Tasks and Gifted Education

Hello All! It has been a crazy last couple weeks with my after school program starting this past Monday. This first week we are focusing on relationship building activities and drawing them in, hopefully they’re not in for a rude awakening when the really academic stuff starts. Probably should use the word “stuff” as a teacher of literacy but that is where my head is at tonight.

First off I really enjoyed the Donna Wederich article on individualized responses. This was a very practical way to get students involved in reading and also includes a small way to assess their comprehension or interest. It repeated throughout the article that the entries included were from very high-level students and that was part of the reason the teacher was able to open such a strong dialogue. Do you think this method would be as effective with “average” or “low” students?

I think the assignment could be tailored (there it is again) down or up depending on the student. An average-level student should be able to complete this assignment. I would perhaps give more prompting questions to students on the lower half of the spectrum, rather than letting them have free reign over the letters and journal entries. I also wondered about doing an assignment like this with younger students since the students in this study were in middle school. I think it could easily be done with upper elementary or even 2^nd/3^rd with a lot of prompting.

What struck me from the Herzog article was how different differentiation form looks like for gifted students. I think it is especially hard for teachers who are so used to teaching to the middle, or even the bottom half of the middle, to include those higher order thinking activities. Activities that would be completely out of reach for over half of the class. I think this is why gifted education has taken on criticism or hostility for being “elitist” as the article mentions. I wonder if I as a teacher or if the whole new workforce of teachers is as prepared to teach a gifted student as we are to teach one who is below benchmark? Obviously this is just a part of the big spinning wheel of the push for standardized tests and raising test scores.

Examining gifted education makes me think back to my own. I went to enrichment classes in elementary school which was a pull-out program. Also my 4^th/5^th grade class was relatively small (our teacher looped with us) and the majority of us were very high achievers. Most of the people in my class ended up being the same people I was in honors courses with all through high school. I wonder looking back how much of this was based on intrinsic vs. extrinsic factors. Most of these students were from middle to upper middle class families, most had parents who had college degrees themselves and stay at home moms. Our teacher was also very involved and really nurtured our want to explore higher level thinking. I know for myself that even as a child I was perfectionist, who strived to do my absolute best anyway, even without my parents or teacher pushing me. This is a totally different ball game but how much of a child’s performance at school or even ability level do you think is just luck of the draw based on factors completely outside of their control?

Micro v. Macro (I guess)

The readings this week vacillated between being very interesting and just appearing to be a jumble of strung together words, with key quotes I liked.  The Parson’s article discussed macro vs. micro differentiation in a somewhat veiled way. A question I came away from this article with is what is the difference between micro differentiation and “reactive teaching”? Isn’t micro differentiation small changes you make while teaching? Not necessarily planned as your macro differentiated lesson is. I thought this quote really summed up differentiated instruction, but also makes you realize how massive of a task it is:

“Therefore, teachers who effectively differentiate their instruction not only carefully plan instruction to differentiate for the variety of learners in their classrooms but also provide moment- by-moment adaptations to meet specific needs that become clear during instruction — needs that were not or could not be anticipated”(Parsons, 2013).

I find it interesting that the Duffy & Hoffman article is from 14 years ago but we are still having the same whole language vs. phonics debate even if it is just on a minor level. I found this quote to be interesting:

“Most U.S. elementary students are learning to read better than they ever have in the past (Berliner & Biddle, 1996), are competitive with students in other developed nations of the world (Bracey, 1997)”(Duffy & Hoffman, 1999).

Is that still true? We did an exercise in one of my undergraduate classes ranking different countries in different subject areas. The U.S. normally faired in the mid-to lower half of the bunch when the statistics came out. Though when I discussed this assignment with my brother, who has a master’s degree in Political Science and is just a fountain of random knowledge otherwise, he questioned the validity of the information since often the countries that came out on top were much smaller than the U.S, (Finland, Norway, etc.), so of course it would be easier to have a higher literacy rate in a country with a population one-fifth the size of Texas.

Another quote I took away from this article was one of my favorite from the readings this week:

“Such excellent teachers do not rely on a single program or method because they know that good teaching requires "doing the right thing in the right way and at the right time in response to problems posed by particular people in particular places on particular occasions”(Duffy & Hoffman, 1999).

I did not relate to the Tomlinson article very much. While it has good general ideas, middle school is just not my game.

Finally the big article. The Shulman. I immediately identified with a point he made, “Teachers themselves have difficulty in articulating what they know and how they know it.” This reminded me of my student teaching observations and the conversations I had with my supervisor afterwards. He would ask me how it went and they ask me how I knew. This was extremely hard for me to answer at first. The first observations always warranted answers like the students were engaged, they asked questions etc. Which his response to was always “and what else?” I think it would still be hard for me to articulate an answer to that question now, but the practice of it made me better.

Shulman (1987) articulated all of the plates teachers have in the air at any given time, “the subject matter being taught, the classroom context, the physical and psychological characteristics of the students, or the accomplishment of purposes not readily assessed on standardized tests, are typically ignored in the quest for general principles of effective teaching.”

Another point he made that stood out to me is that teaching is a learned profession. A teacher should never stop learning or believe they have all the answers. I think that is often a sign of a teacher who has given up or is bored with teaching or the school system. There are too many teachers who get far into their career and then never change their methods or point of view and it’s their students that suffer. I can only hope when I am at that point in my career I will still be open to new ideas. That’s part of the reason I think having student teachers is so important because it often shakes up what tenured teachers have concretely set up in their classroom.

On a final note I would like to discuss tailoring in class. I don’t think there was enough in the articles about it besides:

“Adaptation and Tailoring to Student Characteristics: consideration of conceptions, preconceptions, misconceptions, and difficulties, language, culture, and motivations, social class, gender, age, ability, aptitude, interests, self-concepts, and attention”(Shulman, 1987).

The term tailoring reminds me of this video from one of my favorite Disney movies.

English Language Learners

The video was hard to get through. Is it being read by a computer? The narrator’s voice has a very choppy, Siri-like quality at times but seemed totally normal at other points. 

While fractions is a little high for my target age group, I think this idea in general is great. I know in my student teaching class my master teacher had students work on the ipad with our 8^th grade “helpers” to play math games. I know they really enjoyed it. (On a side note if anyone knows of math apps, sites or games that target 1^st or 2^nd graders let me know! I’m looking for games for my new job!)

Finally an article that feels more in my wheelhouse! This is probably because it has a bilingual/ELL focus, but it was so much easier for me to read than a lot of our past articles. An issue this article brought up right away is the viewpoints of native language as a deficit vs. native language as a resource. “Viewing heritage language as a resource encouraged us to design an instructional approach that valued and leveraged cultural practices and linguistic knowledge”(Puzio, Keyes, Cole & Jiménez,, 2013).Depending on your viewpoint on ELL education and your own level of education about ELL education and second language acquisition, there is a large divide. On a side note, when public education began in this country some of it was what we now consider to be dual language in English and German.

I think the idea of collaborative translation is a great way to involve a student’s native language in the classroom, particularly if you have a large about of students with the same native language. I like that this also gives students a level of independence they may not have doing work only in English, if they are at a proficiency level where they must depend somewhat on the teacher. As a substitute in bilingual classrooms I didn’t see a whole lot of translation work but I did see students who would complete assignments in a mix of Spanish and English. Often times if they were prompted to complete an assignment solely in English, if they weren’t sure of a word they would write that particular word in Spanish. The difference there being that all of their teachers were bilingual.

There are a lot of misconceptions about English Language Learners and how they learn. Many of the “facts” that are out there are really chalked up to be folk linguistics perpetuated for certain peoples political gain. I included a little snippet of an assignment from my T&L 510 class that just ended that was about disputing folk linguistics:

I disagree that the more time students spend in a second language context the quicker they learn the language. A child being put in a poor quality immersion or submersion program is not going to help them learn L2 as quickly as a high quality transitional or development bilingual program. As Crawford (2004) states, “What counts most is the quality of second-language exposure, not the quantity,”(Crawford, p. 189). I also disagree that children acquire an L2 once they can speak it. According to linguistics expert Stephen Krashen, “We acquire language when we understand it,”(Crawford, p. 189). We acquire a language through comprehensible input, or being able to understand what others are saying in L2. “Speaking per se does not cause language acquisition,’ Krashen argues, but follows from it as a ‘result of obtaining comprehensible input,’”(Crawford, p. 189). Students also often experience a silent period where they choose not to speak English, no matter the amount they are able to speak or understand.

The most preposterous of all the statements from the focus reflection is that all children learn L2 in the same way. Many factors affect how a student learns L2. Including negative influences that may change their affective filter such as “anxiety, lack of self-confidence and inadequate motivation to speak the second language,”(Crawford, p. 191). All of these factors can make acquiring L2 more difficult for students. There are also positive influences they can affect how students feel while at school and may affect their attitude towards L2 such as a bilingual-bicultural curriculum and a classroom that recognizes the value of their L1 and native culture. Implying that all students acquire L2 the same is the same as implying that all students learn to read or learn early math skills in the exact same way.

Many of the proponents of English-Only education are politicians or public figures with absolutely no background in education or any kind of scientific research. In fact the man behind getting ELL programs taken out of California schools (where there are more students who speak a native language other than English, than those whose native language IS English) is Ron Unz, a “businessman” with a Harvard physics degree. While he may be highly educated about physics, that doesn’t give any background in SLA or teaching 6 year olds who speak zero English. His movement was/is called English-Only. An interesting fact is that his supporters included Arnold Schwarznegger, which I find ironic. Not because of the picture seen below but because part of his original fame coming from his imperfect ability to speak English.

I included another section of a past assignment about the English Only movement and Proposition 227 in California:

Bilingual education is dismissed by this movement as failing students with ineffective instruction to help them learn English. However this movement is built by politicians looking to capitalize on semantics through deceivingly worded catchphrases such as English Language Empowerment Act, English for the Children and Yes on English (Crawford, 2004). This movement and Proposition 227 is built mainly on public misconceptions such as language is easier to learn the younger you are, immersion is the easiest method for children to learn English and bilingual support from classroom teachers acts as a crutch. Unz was not quick to point out that “because of teacher shortages, fully 70 percent of California’s LEP students were not enrolled in bilingual classrooms,”(Crawford, p. 324). Bilingual education with a gradual transition to a traditional English classroom is a strong and effective option that school districts should be able to consider and/or implement based on their own needs. I believe that bilingual education should be an equal effort on the part of the school, school board, teachers and school support staff as well as parents of students.

Crawford, James. Educating English Learners. 5^th ed. 2004. Los Angeles, CA: Bilingual Education Services.

Puzio, K., Keyes, C., Cole , M., & Jiménez,, R. (2013). Language differentiation: Collaborative translation to support bilingual reading. Bilingual Research Journal.

D'Oh! Thoughts on the videos from Walden Pond

Apparently I had a blonde moment last class. I thought we weren't doing blogs for multiple weeks, not just last week. 

To be fair, this is what I looked like the day I graduated from college:

Here are my notes from the videos. I wrote down information I found important from the video or that I really related to.

Video 1: Supporting all learners

- Essence of differentiation: Where are we trying to go? Who’s with us? When you find out who is ahead or behind, what will do about that?

- Is it just me or does Jay seem a little bitter to be playing second fiddle in the video?

- I like that Carol Tomlinson makes the point of studying students to understand how their lives are affecting their learning.

Common misconceptions of differentiation

-          Not differentiation: Giving struggling students less work and high achieving students more work.

-          Not helpful for struggling student to do less and not useful for advanced learner to do twice as much of the same thing

Make understanding for advanced learners

-          More complex

-          More abstract

-          More multi-faceted

-          More connective

Make understanding for struggling learners

-          More scaffolded

-          More concrete

-          More guided

Video 2: Authentic Learning and Assessment

- First thought, why are these videos filmed in stone cottage in the middle of no where? What is this Walden Pond?

- Carol looks equally bored while Jay is talking.

- Examining what a discipline is. Science is a discipline because it evokes an entirely different way of thinking.

- Coaching analogy – I never thought of coaches as differentiating. Playing team sports as a child, I don’t really see the connection but I can compare this to swimming in high school. We were divided in lanes by our ability/times or by what stroke we were practicing and often we all had different individual goals.

- Conceptual Velcro – Big ideas help the little ideas adhere

- Carol referring to someones work as “interesting plowing”, what a great way to say long and hard to read. Who knew we could have something so simple in common with Carol Tomlinson?

Carol’s point that some teachers believe only a few students can use knowledge. Differentiation is broken up between smart and not smart students. This is terribly sad, but I think it is all too common in classrooms.

Video 3: A Change of Mindset

To me this was by far the most boring of the videos. It had almost a Charlie Brown teacher way of coming through to me. Wahhh Wahhh Wahhh standardized tests Wahhh Wahhh Wahh.

- Jay often hears the phrase: I’d like to teach to understanding,I’d like to but… - misconception

- Most missed items on state tests are not skill based questions but understanding based questions. This seems particularly interesting to me since as they say in the video, we often assume standardized tests are all fact based. 

- “I don’t think too many of us signed on for test prep as a career” Amen sister!

Carol's tips for high test scores

1.  understanding, 
2. confidence 
3. competence

- Assessment as a photo album, not a snap shot. Standardized testing gives us just one look into learning. - - - Standardized testing is like taking a picture with a wide angle lens, it only shows the students understanding from a far away view.

- The teacher from a small school in Idaho: 8 ways to teach reading? That is impressive!

Video 4: Teaching, the Ever-Evolving Profession

- AMT – Acquisiton Meaning Transfer

Can often tell which classes are advanced vs. remedial by looking at students.

Advanced – higher income, more opportunity, often cacasioon

Remedial – low income, students of color

Pedagogy of Poverty

Do you start with the curriculum then differentiate or do you start with differentiation and then tie it to the curriculum? Where does assessment come in? Start with it? Or include it later on?

- Parts of a classroom are inter-related, hard to pick which to start with?

Steps of Backward Design

1.       Identifying desired result – standards, essential knowledge, skills

2.       Think about assessment evidence, particularly summative assessment, connect goals to the evidence of learning

3.       Plan instruction, develop lessons

- You can kind of hear the camera man or someone coughing in the background!

- 21^st century skills or learning – aligns with UBD, need to be able to apply what you learn, not static but adapting.

My most burning questions from the videos are:

1. What would you consider 21st century skills?

2. What is UBD? I don't remember them ever saying the whole acronym. I'm guessing it has something to do with backward design.

3. Do you start with the curriculum then differentiate or do you start with differentiation and then tie it to the curriculum? Where does assessment come in? Start with it? Or include it later on?

I find the third question to be the most pressing on my mind. 

DI for the (Mostly) Younger Set

The readings this week offered more direct examples of DI in literacy situations, as well as common literacy problems students have. I thought it was interesting in the Brown and Morris article how some low spellers were able to regurgitate spelling words for the test but “were unable to spell these same patterns even a week later,”(p. 168). That sounds like the classic cramming study behavior of a college student.

I was not surprised to see the classic rule of 3 under Brown and Morris’ organization of spelling instruction. I was also not surprised to read that their reading groups and spelling groups were relatively similar. I liked that this article offered different tangible activities to do in the classroom. I particularly liked the partner game day activities: memory, racetrack, bingo and speed sort. I think this article made a good point about quality intervention, the longer it takes for a teacher to intervene the farther the student will fall behind and “the spelling achievement ‘gap’ will be easiest to close before it starts to widen,”(p. 181).

My favorite article from this week was But They All Read at Different Levels by Laura Robb. I liked that it directly answered real questions about differentiated instruction. I liked the examples of tiered activities. This made the whole idea of tiered activities much simpler. With this as a reminder I can now think back to literacy projects I did in elementary school and how the choices we were given was a method of differentiated instruction. I often chose to make posters for book reports rather than dioramas or do a dramatic monologue about the book. I can see how technology in the classroom now opens even more doors for options for tiered activities such as moviemaking (as Robb mentions), PowerPoint, Prezi, online book talks, book trailers etc. I remember making a terrible video for a book report in the eighth grade in which my group and I acted out a scenario we wrote as the characters of a certain book. But it was made with a VHS camcorder and may as well be considered Stone Age technology now. It will be interesting to see how technology continues to impact literacy instruction. Regarding book trailers I found this great site that is all book trailers for books for third grade and up: http://www.slimekids.com/book-trailers/. This is a great link that spans more grades and gives more insight behind the stories: http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/65-book-videos-build-excitement-summer-reading. An example is a trailer for Lily Brown's Paintings by Angela Johnson which I posted just before this post because it was having trouble uploading to this post.

Another thing I appreciated about the articles this week was that they were more focused on younger elementary grades (since that is my focus) rather than upper elementary or middle school. The Tobin and McInnes (2008) article provided great insight into real life differentiation in a primary classroom. Since we spend so much time discussing small group instruction I found this quote important:

“Researchers found small-group instruction (three students) to be just as effective as one-to-one instruction in developing reading skills such as phoneme segmentation, fluency and comprehension, while the former study documents the success of mixed-ability groupings (four to five students) to achieve fluency and comprehension in reading at the primary level,”(p. 4).

I already believed that small group instruction was more effective than whole group, but it is good to know that it is believed to be as effective as one-on-one interaction with the teacher. 

Lily Brown's Paintings - Book Trailer