Tell, Show, Try

Janet Zadina talks about the importance of episodic memory in order to make information stick. She encourages teachers to create positive emotions in their teaching in order for moments to be memorable. During my teaching, I use a strategy called tell, show, try. First, I tell the students what were are going to do. Next I show them how to do the task, and then I ask them to try it themselves. For example, if we are writing an essay I will first tell them how to write a three paragraph essay. I tell them things like what is needed to make a paragraph and what types of sentences make a good essay. Then I show them how to do this. This involves literally writing an essay in front of them and speaking my thoughts aloud. At first it seems silly to say your thoughts out loud, but young writers greatly benefit from this example. Finally, I tell the students to write a paragraph by themselves. It is important to understand that I wouldn't give them free reign to write the entire essay on the first try. I would probably give them to write a paragraph and then have them share that paragraph with a peer, and then have volunteers read their writing aloud to the class. By having the students share they are held accountable for their work and will try harder knowing that their peers will read their work. My method of tell, show, try is a form of Zadina's research of the episodic memory.

Can Students Be Too Eager?

This week Zull talked about two students. The student that I would like to focus on is Michelle, the girl that participated constantly, but her comments and questions had no content. When I read this I immediately thought of a student that I had during my student teaching experience. My student would raise her hand often to participate and ask questions, but often times her questions and comments warranted a puppy dog head turn response from me. I was constantly confused about where her questions were coming from. I tried and tried to make connections between what she was asking and what we were talking about in class, but I never could. My mentor teacher would say that she just likes to hear herself talk and would therefore ask anything in order to get a chance to speak during class. When reading this chapter I finally pinpointed my student's questioning, she was Michelle. She was the student with the empty questions. Like Michelle from the book, my student would write long responses on tests and would often explain her way out of the correct answer on test questions. This confused me. How could a student have a test answer correct and then explain in such a way that it was clear that she did not understand? I suspect that my student was struggling to use her reflective brain. She wanted so badly to participate in class discussion that she would not listen to herself or think about her comments before speaking. I may try to encourage her to write out what she is thinking before saying it out loud as a way to get her to reflect on what she says before she speaks.

The Big Picture

This week I want to talk about the big picture of learning. Learning, in my opinion, has changed over time due to the increase of standardized tests. Teachers have taken to teaching to the test or too specific. I find this disturbing. Students are learning to memorize a small set of information instead of learning skills that can be applied to many different types of problems. I fear that teachers are so fearful of their students not being prepared for the standardized tests that instead of taking a risk, and teaching at a deeper level, they simply teach chunks of information. When teacher teach this way the students memorize the information long enough to take the test and it does not create lasting learning. I hope that one day the tests become less important giving teachers the freedom to teach skills. When students learn skills their learning is lasting and can be applied to multiple subjects and situations. Therefore, skill learning is a huge part of education that is lacking.
This week at our school we are teaching Romeo and Juliet. One of the English teachers is only showing the movie version of the play, and this concerns me. The purpose of teaching Romeo and Juliet is not to teach the play. The purpose is to teach about Shakespearean language and literary devices. By having students just watch the movie the whole point of reason students even learn about Shakespeare is missed. I find that many teachers are taking the easy way out and missing the point to teaching to create lasting learning.

The Social Pathway

I found the reading for this week to be interesting. The social pathway plays a huge role in learning. Students that perceive themselves to be socially accepted are better at learning. I actually witnessed this in my classroom. I had a student that was homebound because she had extreme social anxiety. She did not feel accepted by her peers therefore she went homebound in order to better her ability to learn. This semester she decided to come back to the school. She seems to have adapted to the classroom environment now that she is back. At the beginning of the semester, her grades were poor and she talked to almost no one in class. Now that we are 4 months into the semester, she is social, her grades are improving, and her creativity surprises me sometimes. Through this student I see the importance of the social pathway to learning. Students need to feel accepted and it is important that they have friends in the classroom in order to help them learn at their fullest potential.

Accessibility

One thing that I would like to talk about this week is accessibility. We are covering Romeo and Juliet right now in my English class. When I learned that I had to teach the play I was a little worried because the language is somewhat difficult for most 9th grade students to understand, and I was worried that even I would not understand it. Before this unit I had not read Romeo and Juliet since I learned it in high school. I remember vaguely that it was difficult, but not a completely foreign language to me. After reading it now, as a graduate student, it was much easier. This may be due to the fact that I am more familiar with Shakespearean language now.
For the first week of teaching Romeo and Juliet I just watched my mentor teacher do it, and this is where I learned about accessibility. The students are reading and listening to the original text therefore it is very difficult for them to understand even the plot of the drama. My mentor teacher explains almost every line of the plot to help them to understand and follow the dialogue as it plays on the audio. She breaks the scenes up into even smaller sections to give brief and explicit explanations of what is going on in the scene. Usually after hearing her explain and then hearing the audio the students are able to understand what happened in the scene. Occasionally a student will ask for clarification. As we progress through Romeo and Juliet we will explain less and less before listening to the audio.  The students will become more accustomed to the language and it will therefore be much more accessible to them without so much explanation.
I think that this form of making text more accessible to students is much better than just giving a student an easier version of the play. Giving them an easier version is starving the students from the opportunity of even attempting to understand to true Shakespearean language. I think that scaffolding the students up to the higher level serves them better by allowing them to experience the real version but making it more accessible to them.

What does it mean to comprehend?

I am doing a project on reading comprehension. First thing I had to determine was what does it mean to comprehend? Comprehension involves all of the processes of the brain when reading. Comprehension means to construct meaning. A student may struggle with comprehension for many different reasons such as decoding, prior knowledge, vocabulary, working memory, lack of attention control, and drawing inferences. Last semester I had two students that struggled with reading comprehension. One of the students is dyslexic therefore, in order to help her comprehend we allowed her extra time on assignments and she frequently used colored paper (which helps dyslexic students). I was intrigued by another student. He was not dyslexic, but he really struggled with reading comprehension. Also when I asked other teachers about him I learned that he did well in math except when there was a word problem. This made me wonder where his struggle was. After reading some of his reflections after he read I found that he just was not understanding even the most basic comprehension in what he read. I honestly do not know where he was struggling to comprehend, but reading about memory made me think that maybe this is where the gap was. Unfortunately I no longer have this student so I can't see what type of intervention has helped him. In the future I will definitely be on the look out for comprehension struggles in my students and so my best to give them techniques to assist with their comprehension struggles.

Multitasking in the Classroom

As I read this week's chapter I thought about attention and multitasking. I thought about how difficult I find concentration if there is a lot going on around me. For example, I do not like to do any school work in a coffee shop because I get too distracted. Also, when reading, even for pleasure, I like silence. I find talking or music distracting and I feel that it takes away from what I am trying to do. Then I think about myself as both a student and a teacher. During my undergraduate years I found myself trying to figure out the best note taking strategy during lecture. In some classes this was easy because they teacher just said what was on the powerpoint plus possibly a little example, and I found this easy to write down and comprehend. In other classes, the teacher would use a PowerPoint but not say one word of what was on it, and I found that I struggled to figure out what to write down. I struggled firstly, because I did not know what was more important to remember for studying later, and secondly because I would forget what the teacher would say and when I looked back up at the PowerPoint there were no words to jog my memory of what was just said. Thinking about how difficult this was as a college student, who was in school because I wanted to learn, not because someone was making me go to school, I can now see why some students may be reluctant to take notes. They don't know what to write down. They don't know what is important. They don't know what to pay attention to, and their attention is usually divided between the teacher and other students in the classroom. I just wonder how we can fix this multitasking that goes on in the classroom? Some multitasking is inevitable, so what is the best way to deal with it?