Standardized Tests

When it comes to standardized tests, I am a little torn. For starters, I do not like them. This is partly because I have grown up with a parent who is a teacher, and she dislikes them. In the past, whenever it was time for ITBS to roll around my mother would always grumble about how she hated giving the standardized Iowa test to her students. However, the school that she teaches at is also considered a School in need of Assistance, so this strongly influences how she feels about ITBS and standardized test in general. I also do not like these tests for the same reasons. Not only did I hate taking them from fourth grade to mid high school, but the older I get the more I learn how awful they are. I have read in more than one place that standardized tests are biased. I guess this is bound to happen when you have the creators of the test all well educated and around the same ethnicity. Those people wouldn't think to include questions that might relate better to other races, or heck back in the day they probably didn't want to in order to keep certain races from passing. This is a sad thought, but quite possibly very true.

When it comes to the classroom I'm not sure whether I want them included or not. I can see how they might be a positive thing, but of course with positives there are always negatives. So this is how I look at it:

Pros of standardized tests:

• all students receive the same test
• easy to "grade" or compare students when they are all assessed on the same material
• certain ones might prepare you for harder standardized tests in the future, for example if you are going to Medical School you will take a lot of huge exams in your future and will need to know how to "attack" them.
• easy to administer and track results by computer
• instigator of change (but can also be a bad thing) in school systems
• shows growth or opposite from year to year
• accountability (high expectations) of students

Cons of standardized tests:

• biased towards certain classes and races
• test anxiety for some students
• questions are wordy and long
• science often doesn't really test science, but the students reading ability and problem solving instead
• time consuming for person giving/monitoring the test and student taking the test
• names or words students might not know in the questions
• can affect how the teacher teaches
• teacher may teach students in a way that they do better on the test, instead of a way that helps them learn better
• Language barriers

Of course I'm sure there are many more pros and cons, but those are good enough for now. I think standardized tests should be used in the classroom when APPROPRIATE. This could mean when a teacher or district needs to know how ALL of their students are doing in a certain subject area. Using them over and over again does not make sense to me, and I think over testing students is possible. I also think that they should NOT be used to gage how the teacher is doing. I do not think it is fair to assess a teacher's skills by using standardized test scores. Some students are just not good at taking tests, or possibly have test anxiety. Things like this would not be the teacher's fault, and therefore it should not affect his or her status as an educator. I also do not think the test scores should be taken so seriously when studying how different races did compared to each other. Or heck maybe even if people do look at scores that way and see that a certain race scores significantly lower than the other ones they should change the questions, or format the test differently in some way. But I'm assuming that would be too much to ask of the great creators who designed the test. So overall, I think these tests should be used when they are being used for the right purposes, but not overly in order to protect our society from becoming too dependent on the scores they produce. 

PS. In my personal opinion I HATE standardized tests, mostly because I suck at taking them, but I think they are awful and I am so glad I do not have to take them anymore. Even though they do have some positive value in the classroom, I will still continue to hate them until something is done differently with them. And if I have to administer an ITBS like test in the future I might die. Kidding, but really...they are not fun, nor are we friends.  :)

Classroom Management Part 2

I want my classroom to be a great environment, and ideally there wouldn't be any students in my class that misbehave. However, we all know that that is not the case in today's world. Way back in the old days teachers had the right to discipline their students however they please. Unfortunately now teachers get in trouble for almost anything, so I will need to have ways to deal with a student who misbehaves in my class.

If a student in my class misbehaves I will need to do a few things. First I do not want to embarrass that student in front of the whole class, so I figure I can either slip him a note asking him to stay after class, or talk to him about staying after class during a period of down time.

I also want to get to know my students little better than the average teacher does. So if I do have a student who is in my classroom after school I want to figure out what is going on in their personal life that might be causing them to goof off in class.

I should probably also have some sort of verbal warning for my students just in case they goof off in class, and continue to do so even after a warning. I know at my high school you could just call the office and send problem students to their dean, but I do not always want to resort to that policy if I have a misbehaving student in my class. Maybe I could have a certain word that my students would know mean business right away if I said it to them.

I'm sure there are more ways that I can deal with a student who might misbehave in my classroom, but for now I want to focus on only a few until I get the swing of having my own class down. I don't want to embarrass my students in front of their peers, but I do want to get to know them more. By doing so I will be more aware if there is something causing that specific student to act up in my class. I want to be able to reach out to my students and hopefully create an environment that doesn't give them a reason to goof off in class. If I am able to do so, then hopefully I won't have too many problems in my classroom.

Motivation

We all know that kids need to be motivated to want to go to school, and to want to learn. without motivation they will probably not care about their learning or put much effort into the process. Therefore, I will need to do quite a few things in order to motivate my students. First of all I want my classroom to be welcoming and professional. In order to accomplish those things though, I feel like I need to treat my students like adults as much as possible. I understand that not all situations will allow for that, but when possible I would really like to give them some responsibility in order to motivate them in my classroom. I also want to motivate my students by making sure the content I teach to them is relevant to their future. No one likes feeling like they are learning things they will never use again in their future, so I do not want my students to feel like that either. This also goes along with not wasting my students time in the classroom. If my kids feel like their time is being wasted, they probably will not want to learn what I am trying to teach. I will also have high expectations for my students since I plan on teaching Psychology, and it is not an easy subject to grasp and understand. Hopefully by not wasting my students time and having high expectations for them they will be motivated to come to class and learn something new every day. Another example of motivating my students would be by not shooting down their ideas. I want my students to feel like they can share all of their ideas that come to mind. I will try to find ways to direct their wrong answers to correct ones, in hopes that my students will not become discouraged from sharing their ideas with the class. A final way I will motivate my students in my classroom is by motivating myself. If I am not motivated everyday to teach my class and further my students learning, then why would my students be motivated to learn anything from me? Hopefully if I am successful at my job I will be able to motivate my students in multiple ways each day. I can motivate them by either using one of the examples I have already talked about, or by using a number of other motivational factors I have learned about.

Classroom Management Revised

There are so many things you need to think about when trying to manage your classroom. As I talked about in my last post, I really want my classroom to be a warm, welcoming environment for my students. I want them to know and feel like they can talk to me about anything and come to me when they are having troubles in my class or others. In order to accomplish that goal, I think I need to use SLT a few ways. First I need to make sure that I teach to my students in their "language" so that way we are always on the same page. Misunderstanding between the student and teacher can lead to misbehaving, and that is what I don't want.

When teaching my lessons, I would of course need to use DLT and start teaching at the most concrete and basic level possible. Then once my students developed higher level thinking skills I could teach in more abstract terms as well as concrete terms.

I also need to make sure there is a good amount of student and teacher interaction since I will be the more knowledgeable peer in the classroom for the first part of school. If I am able to form a relationship with my students my ideal classroom environment will hopefully be accomplished, and my students will feel comfortable around me.

I also plan on walking around the room constantly when possible to make sure that my students are paying attention. By walking around and having my students pay attention, I am using CLT through keeping my students actively mentally engaged. If I can successfully keep my students mentally engaged, then I will be able to affect their schemes in some way. Ideally affecting their schemes would be in the form of a positive learning experience.

I also need to use CLT to manage my classroom by teaching in my student's Zone of Proximal Development. This way my students should not become bored or discouraged with the information that I am teaching to them.

I also want to motivate my students to want to be in class everyday. I could do this by not wasting their time with silly assignments and "time fillers." Doing so would be using BLT in my classroom. Of course I could use the system of rewards and punishments in order to manage my classroom, but I want to only use that system when completely needed. I really don't want to develop the relationship with my students where they depend on constant praise for good work.

Another thing that I think is really important to classroom management is allowing students to talk in small groups about their ideas. That way students can share their ideas, compare them with other ideas, and come up with new ideas as a group as well. This would again be using SLT in my classroom.

Overall, I am sure there are so many more things that I can do to manage my classroom. However, since i am barley a future teacher I think I will focus on a small group of management options before trying to control everything. Which is also exactly what I don't want to happen in my classroom. My class will be inviting, fun, and flexible, or at least I hope I can make it that way in the future.

Classroom management

This weeks blog is about classroom management. This is a weird topic for me because of the examples of classroom management that I have had in the past. In high school I had super strict teachers who liked to run their classroom on a schedule, but I also had teachers who were so relaxed and just went with the flow of how the day was going. On certain days I liked one over the other, or a mixture of both. Of course on the days I didn't feel like doing crap or accomplishing anything I liked the lazy classroom structure, but on other days that I really wanted to get work done I liked my teachers with schedules.

For my classroom in the future there are few things regarding classroom management that I really want to do. First, I really want to have structure, but I want that structure to be flexible. I do not want to have to plan out every little thing of the day, I want to be able to go with the flow if something comes up that needs to be addressed. I also want the environment of my classroom to be fun and inviting. I want to teach Psychology or Sociology, which are both fun topics, so that is exactly how my classroom should be. Now I know that leaves room for students to not take me or the class seriously, and I do not want that to happen. To manage my classroom I want to do a few things like my Practicum teacher as well. He almost always does in class assignments and doesn't assign much homework. I like that, because when I watch the students almost all of them seem like they are paying attention and actively mentally engaged which is great. He also calls on the students a lot and encourages classroom discussion which I also really like. I want to walk around my classroom and form appropriate relationships with my students as well. I had great professional relationships with some of my high school teachers, and those are the ones that have influenced me the most in deciding to become a teacher. So I really want to do the same for my students in the future.

Another thing that I will really need to watch in my classroom is nonverbals. I know that I am not always aware of what my facial expressions or body language say to other people, and my friends point it out all the time. I don't know if it's just that I am somewhat of an awkward person at times, or if I am truly not aware of what I'm doing at times. Regardless, I will need to learn to play close attention to that.

I know there are a couple more things that I could do to improve classroom management in my classroom in the future, but hopefully that is good enough for now.

Group Evals

So I typed out a paragraph for each group, and then somehow hit the wrong button and everything disappeared, so unfortunately retyping means they won't be as long.

The first group: I liked their use of DLT and concrete examples. They even had a PowerPoint and pictures to show us more examples and details. They allowed us to eat some of the food on our tables which was nice, and I liked their presentation. I don't have written down in my notes what the purpose of it was really, could have just missed it, or it could have been to teach us about the food groups. Anyway, overall I think they did a good job!

The second group: Everyone got riddles and were told to think of words that sounded the same but were spelled differently. It was cool to see how many words we would come up with like that, and some of the riddles were silly so that was nice to not have such a structured environment. I think they did a good job at keeping everyone entertained and involved.

The third group: This group read us a story and I really liked it. It was a story about a princess, prince, and a dragon. I had never read it before, and like that it wasn't the typical happy ending Disney book. They also talked about respect with us, and examples of disrespect in the story. I thought that if they were really doing the lesson with 3rd graders like we were pretending to be then they would have hopefully gotten their lesson of respect across. Great job!

The fourth group: This group had us sing the alphabet and play a game. The game had us up and moving which was nice and we got to work together in teams, so that was fun. On of the girls said that she had used this game with young kids, and I thought that was a great idea. If the game could keep college students involved, then I'm sure it would work with young kids who were learning their letters. This was my favorite group, because I thought that all of us could apply that same game to our classrooms either in that format or another that fit our subject area.

Overall, it was nice to have a more relaxed day in class, and I think everyone did a great job!

Presentation

Last class my group talked to the class about social norms. We picked this subject, because we thought it was a relatively easy concept that most of our classmates should already understand and be able to connect with. We chose to make videos and allow for some classroom discussion, both of which I thought went fairly well. The class seemed to enjoy our somewhat funny videos, and the overall participation was great. The thing that I didn't like was the time limit. We wanted to more into why social norms are so important in our society and other societies around the world. Overall, for throwing a quick presentation together and making awkward videos in the process, I think my group did a pretty good job. The other groups also did well, and I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the presentations tomorrow.

Motivational Factors

Motivational factors are all around in the classroom. Throughout my internships and practicum so far I have seen quite a few examples. The first one that really sticks out to me is goals. I was in a 1^st and 3^rd grade classroom. At the beginning of the year, both teachers talked with their classes about what the classroom goals were. They talked through each one and modeled what each one would look like throughout the year. At first the teachers were a little easy on the rules, but as the year went on they got more and more strict. On the list of goals was another motivational factor, respect for the teacher. Respect for the teacher seems to be a big one in classrooms. I have also seen cases where home environment plays a role in how students behave during the school day. This is where teacher as student relationships come into play. One of my teachers that I was working with noticed that things were not great at home for one of her students so she formed a great relationship with that student. I know there are many more factors that play into the everyday classroom, but those were a quick few that I had time for  J

Something I do, but don't know why...

Something I do ALL the time and don’t know why would have to be when I  see a car that looks like someone else’s I know I check to see if they are the person driving it. I clearly know that my friends are not in town right now because they are all at different colleges, but for some reason I look anyway. It also never fails that when I notice it is not them I am somewhat disappointed, as if I expect them to come surprise me or something.  I love my friends, so it makes sense that I look for them, but really aren’t I smarter than that? I guess I could connect this by CLT maybe, but that could be a little shaky. My schema tends to tell me that my friends are still here, just like they were this summer. It also helps me recognize the same color and make of cars that they drive when I see them around, hence why I look for my friends when I see those specific cars. My schema hasn’t caught up to the fact that they are no longer here and won’t be back unless they visit until Christmas break.  Until it decides to catch up, I will probably still continue to look for them in those cars. Other than possibly connecting that to CLT, I guess I don’t really know how else to connect it to any of the other learning theories.

Thinking Out Loud

When Professor Kruse asked us to blog this week about how a friend would explain a topic we would someday like to teach I thought the assignment was easy. I decided to pick a broad subject hoping to get lots of information from my roommate. However, as I later found out picking my roommate who is working on a biology major might not have been such a great idea.

                I asked my roommate for 5 minutes of her time, and she willingly agreed thinking it was to talk about our normal subjects we tend to bitch about. However when I explained to her that I needed her to tell me everything she knew about sociology she seemed a little less interested. She explained to me that the only background knowledge she could go off of was what she learned back in high school. These were the things she recalled and could tell me about:

·         Studying serial killers and they way other people think their brains work

·         Studying different cultures

·         Sociology is related to psychology

·         Studying human behavior within a society

·         What people see as “norms” and how they make their lifestyles fit into those norms.

We could hold a pretty good conversation about those topics, and I think she used some of the learning theories we have talked about a little bit, obviously without knowing she was using them. The theory that jumps right out at me is CLT, because my friend used her schema and background knowledge to tell me about what she remembered learning in high school. She was able to connect the information she already knew with information that I supplied her with during our conversation. I think she also used SLT, but I could be stretching that a little bit. She really emphasized that sociology is studying how people interact with other people and everything else around them. She even knew some facts that I hadn’t learned in my sociology class, so she became the “more knowledgeable peer” at one point. Overall, she gave me some good information and key points that she remembered, but next time I think I will test these theories on someone else. Sorry roomie.

Any Topic

Given the choice to pick any topic for this week’s blog post I decided that I would pick psychology and the men who came up with all of the theories we are now taught today in intro to psychology classes. The four men that we learn the most about are Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotski. These men all have different theories that students need to memorize if they plan on being a psychology or education major. So using DLT and SLT to teach the theories to them could be very helpful when trying to get the information across.


When using DLT to teach them about these men I obviously could not give them a complete concrete representation, because the concrete representation would be to actually have the men in my classroom. However, we all know that they are all dead, and therefore could not be present during the lesson. Professor Kruse said that next to the real thing would be a video and picture. So I think I would split my students into groups and supply them with four pictures, one of each theorist, and their four names. Then I would give them a few minutes to try to match the picture and name correctly without giving them any background information on any of them. Then I would pick one theorist after the other to teach and go down the DLT spectrum. After getting through all four theorists and their theories I would then try to review in the most concrete terms possible, in order to try to get the information I just taught to stick in my students heads. Of course I’m sure just doing so wouldn’t be enough for my students to remember everything after one time of talking about it, so multiple lessons of reviewing the information would be necessary.

When using SLT to teach my students about the Theorists and their views, I would be considered the “more knowledgeable peer.” This means that I have / know all of the information I want my students to learn and retain. Therefore, when teaching I would need to put emphasis on the language I use and how I use it to construct my lesson. I would also need to interact with my students by walking around the room, answering any questions they have, and finding ways to help them understand my information in terms that they can relate to and already understand. Hopefully by doing so, some of my students will retain the information I teach them, and also become more knowledgeable peers to their classmates. If so, then the students who understand can help the students who don’t better than I can.

In a perfect world using DLT and SLT to teach this lesson would go smoothly, but we all know that doesn’t always happen. I really hope that when I have to teach those four theorists someday my students catch on quickly, or at least some of them do so that way they can help me teach.

DLT informs all aspects of teaching

The last few class periods have been mostly about Developmental Learning Theory, which to me is sometimes a hard concept to grasp. There doesn’t seem to be an exact definition for DLT on the internet, and when we try to come up with a definition in class Professor Kruse often directs our attention to something else which makes defining DLT unclear. At one point during our last class period I found myself being confused after we had been given multiple questions to talk about with our table groups. Maybe it takes me longer to process all of this DLT information, but slowly I’m sure I will get the hang out it.


Our question for this week was: how does DLT inform all aspects of teaching? When I first thought about this question right after class I couldn’t quite get what Professor Kruse was getting at. For example, what exactly does the word “inform” mean in this case? I came up with inform meaning to supply knowledge, but how do I know that is right? Of course there are many meanings for the word inform, just like there seems to be with DLT. We were told that DLT is a representation, meaning it represents how the topic being taught is explained. So I am guessing that the question is asking how Developmental Learning Theory represents and supplies knowledge about aspects of teaching. However, teaching can be anything and everything, so there could be many answers to this question.

Supplying knowledge to students across all aspects of teaching seems like it would possibly take more time to explain than the teacher might have time for. The teacher would have to find a way to represent the information in a concrete way so their students could grasp the idea at first. Then he or she could slowly move across the spectrum using more abstract ideas. The instructor could do so by introducing videos, pictures, and more text into their lesson plan. However, if these abstract ideas are introduced to the students too soon, then they might not be able to fully grasp all parts of the given information like the teacher would like. Using DLT can not only help the teacher find ways to give new information to their students, but it can also help allow students to learn information in multiple ways.