When it comes down to it, how to best teach our students is a simple yet extremely complex and difficult question to answer. It is difficult to suss out who and what to believe when it comes to best educational practices but it is vastly important to do so (Willingham, 2012). This is why I tend to model my teaching mainly around two learning theories - constructivism and sociocultural learning.
When I think about how I learn best I tend to fit into these two learning theory categories pretty well and I have modeled my teaching style around those. During my high school and undergraduate years I would always try to work in groups with classmates I felt that were more knowledgeable than me and learning from that more knowledgeable other was extremely helpful - not only content-wise but how they learned or studied or prepared themselves for classes. And then within those groups I could bring my ideas and work them out with my peers while they provided suggestions, improvements, or new perspectives I hadn’t considered. I found that I did this with sports as well - I always pushed myself to be surrounded by people more talented than me so that I could learn from them which I feel almost perfectly blends these two learning theories.
In my classroom I try to build a community of learners by prepping my students the first week of school on how to work collaboratively and effectively in a group. We watch videos and work through activities that I have picked from Jo Boaler’s website Youcubed.org and do the 100 numbers to get students talking activity to discuss what makes efficient and effective group members. Then whenever we start a new topic I have students randomly assigned to new groups and we always start with a discovery activity that has students push their Zone of Proximal development through collaboration with their new group members.
It is also important for me to keep in mind that just because I learn through collaboration and experiences really well my students may learn other ways better. Trying to work other types of learning styles into my everyday activities is important not only to reach all learners, but to keep each lesson interesting and fresh for me and my students.
Resources:
Misura, M. July 22, 2022. Learning Theory. [Image]. Willingham, D. T. (2012). When can you trust the experts?: How to tell good science from bad in education. John Wiley & Sons.
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Creativity comes in many forms as I learned through my CEP 833 class this past semester. We tend to think of creativity as Big-C creativity - big breakthroughs like the invention of sliced bread. But little c-creativity, small changes to simple objects, or noticing new or old things around you and how to appreciate them in different ways can be just as valuable and important. Students (and adults) struggle to accept little-c creativity as creativity. Or they often see creativity as an artistic endeavor rather than a scientific (or mathematical!) endeavor. I sometimes struggle with this as well and don’t often think I am very successful at being creative, but these past two weeks I pushed myself to be creative and I learned a few things about how I can improve my creative muscle. For me, taking a break from the creative task and doing something else that is completely unrelated - a chore, a walk, a shower - helps me to settle my mind and usually when I come back to the creative task I feel better about coming up with new ideas. Another thing that truly helps me to be more creative is to collaborate with others. Last week while trying to come up with an activity based on the “bodily sensations, reproducible patterns'' tool in Root-Bernstein & Root-Berstein (2001) “tools for thinking” I created the Magic card below that represented the overall topic of solving linear equations. This was fairly broad and couldn’t really be used in the sense that a Magic card is (I should mention, Magic the card game is a head to head card game where players attempt to defeat each other by playing cards that make you lose health points or run out of cards to draw). Luckily I was able to collaborate with my husband (and classmate) and my professor and came up with an even better idea for my classroom that would make the Magic card idea even more dynamic. What I would do with my students is give them an equation that they would need to defeat (or solve) and then they would need to create as many cards as needed to complete that task. Typically you would shuffle up, draw a card, and then play a card and this could potentially be problematic when solving linear equations as we want to solve in a specific order, but I also think this could open up really interesting conversations about if and when solving in a specific order does matter. Overall, I think it is important that I don't doubt my creativity. I want to empower and encourage my students' creativity and I think I need to do that for myself as well. Resources:
Misura, M. (July 15, 2022). Magic Card. [Image]. Root-Bernstein, R. S., & Root-Bernstein, M. (2001). Sparks of genius: The thirteen thinking tools of the world's most creative people. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
I feel that most educators go into teaching because they want to inspire and help students foster a love of learning. How we go about doing this, within the framework of the subject area that we teach, can be a true challenge when considering all the variables within a classroom setting. What subject matter are you teaching? How will you teach it? Can you achieve that within the means of your classroom? And when students enter the equation there is a completely new set of obstacles to consider. Will they care about your subject matter? How can you help them to care? How do you help them to work hard and self motivate? How do you build up the 21st century skills that are so important to our ever changing workforce? Amongst all these questions, and hundreds more, it would seem reasonable that we could try to use the scientific method to theorize, test, observe, and repeat what approach would work best for all students; however, what works best for all students is likely the issue as students are all so different.
As, Willingham (2012) stated, “There are other vital questions in education for which the scientific method is wholly inappropriate…Who is ultimately responsible for children’s education: parents, teachers, or children themselves, and does the answer to this question change as kids get older? Educating children raises dozens of questions, and, powerful as the method may be, science is applicable to just a fraction of them.” (p89) Educating children is so much more than just how to add, compose an essay, or learn about the civil war. And because teachers, students, administrators, community members all have a voice in the education system there are many differing opinions about how to best teach our children. When talking with my mentor teachers, they mention that how to best educate children has gone in cycles with one style of teaching being best when they first started, to something different, and then back to that original method now. And thinking about teaching now with all the divisive opinions that are only reaffirmed through everyone’s own confirmation bias bubble it is even harder to ensure that students are getting the best, well-rounded education.
I am only through half of Willingham’s book and there are so many ideas that resonate with me, some of which I mentioned above, but even more questions that I have - for example, how can I know what is best for my students? When can I trust the facts presented to me? I am hoping the second half of the book begins to answer some of these really difficult questions.
Resources:
Willingham, D. T. (2012). When can you trust the experts?: How to tell good science from bad in education. John Wiley & Sons. |
AuthorMarissa McGregor, high school math teacher extraordinaire. I love my husband, daughter, and family dearly. Archives
August 2022
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