Course Reflection

Whew! This has been the toughest of the classes so far. Apparently my life has a very delicate balance and I can function when all of the pieces fit where they are supposed to. But when one of those pieces slips out of place....watch out.

Actually, I can keep everything together when I stay on top of them, but I managed to get behind in this class and it made it very hard to keep going. That being said, I really enjoyed the class. These are important concepts to effective teaching that sometimes get forgotten in the push for "content". It is necessary to reflect on the different ways that we can impact our students, and to develop an arsenal of strategies to have at our disposal. Isn't it funny how sometimes the simplest concepts (such as feedback) are the ones that we tend to forget, yet they are also the ones that can provide the biggest "aha" moments?!

Week 5 Homework and Practice/Similarities and Differences/Hypotheses

Homework and Practice

Practice is extremely important in order for a skill to become second nature. However, there needs to be a point to the assignments. Constant drills lose their effectiveness after a while. If homework is to be successful, it needs to build on the learning and expand on the lesson. If students are engaged in the learning they will be more apt to complete the assignments and they will certainly get more out of them.

Similarities and Differences

This is an important skill for students to learn. It is often one of the easiest ways to begin analyzing information. I have used wordle.net as a way to visualize the similarities and differences. Students have put the attributes of one character in a wordle and the attributes of another in a separate wordle. Then we start to reduce the number of words in each. It soon becomes apparent what the similar attributes are, as well as which ones are different.

Generating and Testing Hypotheses

I have generally only thought of hypotheses in regards to science classes, but I suppose that it is a skill that you could easily apply to all aspects of learning. Aren't the reading predictions that we ask students to make really just hypotheses by another name? Don't we want students to form questions in order to guide their learning? I know that I will be more careful about getting hung up on terminology in the future.

Comparison of On-line Mapping Tools

I have used a number of these on-line mapping tools before. I love Webspiration, it is easy to use and they have great graphics. However, it is too expensive for large-scale use. Bubbl.us is a good simple tool that is really easy to use, and free! If you have younger children, or are just looking for a very basic mind-map, this is a great site to use. I am afraid that our older students are often looking for things with more bells and whistles. Some of the other sites could be used as presentation tools as well (once you add pictures and other content), but this one is too basic for that use. I have used Mind Meister myself for other classes and found it to be easy to use, however students need to have an e-mail address in order to sign-up. This is a big issue for our district. We have talked about setting up Gaggle accounts for our students in the future, but as of yet that is not the case.

Collaboration vs. Institution

I loved this view of collaboration, let the people who are using the information take responsibility for creating, posting, storing, labeling, etc. The comment about the programmer who came up with only one idea really hit home. It is a little of a quality vs. quantity argument. However, as a classroom teacher, this definition of collaboration would frustrate me. When we design collaborative lessons, the purpose is for each member to have a job that needs to be done. It is definitely more of the institutional definition of collaboration, and group members get very upset if they are the ones doing the 80% of the work while another member only does 20%. So...how do we reconcile the two?

Feedback That Fits

I am aware that this blog post is a week late - I'm trying to catch up from having a very sick little boy.

I really connected with this article. I have a daughter who was on the receiving end of ineffectual feedback last year. She kept getting a B on her writing assignments, with no indication of what she had done well or what she needed to improve on. When she would ask the teacher, she was told "just keep turning in quality work". When I went to the teacher and asked her to define "quality work", she could/would not. My daughter is a very hard worker and takes her grades very seriously. If she isn't getting an A, she assumes it is because she has missed something, or done something wrong. Therefore, she wanted to know what she needed to work on in order to improve and was given no constructive feedback at all. I was concerned for the other students who really needed a lot of help, how would they improve at all?

The quality of your feedback is incredibly important to the success of the child in the future. You need to make sure that feedback is focused and specific to the learning targets (especially for those students who are even farther behind) in order to focus the efforts on specific areas of improvement. Fortunately for my daughter, most of her teachers have been significantly better at providing this type of feedback.

A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of teaching and learning

Overall I found this article very hard to follow. All of the numbers started to run together as I read. What I was able to gather was that the research seems to support my viewpoint that technology for technologies sake is not an effective way to teach. When technology is used to support or enhance an already good lesson, students learn more.

Principles of Teaching/Learning

Section #5 of Teaching Principles, "Effective teaching involves recognizing and overcoming our expert blind spots", was the part that I related to the most. I often find that I cover material too quickly. I tend to assume that my students have more background knowledge and abilities than they do. This was one reason why I chose to teach high school instead of lower grades - I felt that I wouldn't need to do as much step-by-step instruction and hand holding. This is something that I continue to struggle with today. I am always worried that step-by-step instruction will bore the students and I will lose the ability to capture their interest. It is often hard to find that middle ground that provides ample direction without being too elementary; how do you adequately explain without boring them to death. What do you do with the students who grasp the concepts more quickly and want to move on?