3D Printing. Virtual Reality. Wireless Charging. Electric Vehicles. These are all examples of technology innovations that are currently impacting our world. A few weeks ago, I was asked to pick an innovative technology and design a lesson plan that incorporates it. I picked Circuit Stickers, a technology kit that uses a conductive copper tape, LED light stickers, and a battery to allow users to make illuminating circuits. After going through all the tutorials, I was quite stumped on how to use this in a lesson, particularly one that could be implemented in my Language Arts classroom. I ended up choosing to have students make a map to follow Emma Edmonds, a Civil War spy, along her journey since we read the novel already in my class.
See my lesson plan here. After designing plans, I was asked to examine my peers’ lesson plans based on two different lenses. The first would be Universal Design for Learning (UDL), where teachers examine how the information is presented, how knowledge is showcased, and how students are engaged, to make learning and understanding available to all students. Intersectionality is the other lens, where teachers examine their lessons in terms of accessibility for students of all races, genders, religions, ideologies, and backgrounds. In my current reality, I focus a lot more on UDL than I do on intersectionality, which made evaluating lessons challenging. I also received feedback on my lesson plan. In general, I love receiving ideas from others as it feeds the intrigue I feel toward collaboration. Two peers critiqued my lesson and a lot of their comments were concerns of clarification, which made me realize how much detail I had left out. I added notes on the 21st-century skills that were involved, what kind of background knowledge the students would need, and materials that were required for the lesson - all based on their suggestions. My professor and my peers all commented on a similar idea: Peer #1:Peer #2:
My lesson needed a rubric. Once again, an extremely important list of details that I had left out. So, I created one. I was happy with the lesson but wanted to see if my peers could help me take it to the next level, and they did. Originally, my lesson was designed using groups of four with each person having an individual role in the collaborative effort. However, one of my peers commented this:
It didn’t take long for me to revise my lesson so that each member of the group is inherently responsible for meeting the standard/learning target of the day before even collaborating, which was one of my concerns. I also noted that my peers and my professor both agreed that some type of final presentation of knowledge besides the map would be ideal to conclude the collaborative effort. I ended up running with my professor’s idea of having the students make a short video (for example, a Flipgrid) where they explain their map in story format, sort of like a weather person would do on the news. I think it is a great final capstone for the group work experience.
There were some suggestions that I did not accept as well. For example, in my original plan, my plans for assessment included summative assessment, formative assessment, and self-assessment (since self-assessment is one of the goals for my teaching growth plan this year). One of my peers commented:
It is a quality idea; however, I have tried this in middle school and often times it turns into issues of popularity, cliques, and personal interest. I probably will allow students to give me feedback on how their group is functioning (maybe through a Google Form), but I don’t think counting that assessment as part of their final grade would be appropriate. A peer also suggested I give students the option of showing their list of locations in a variety of ways (orally versus handwritten, etc.). I decided to stick with handwritten, as I do think developing those expressive writing skills is important.
Overall, it really was a collaborative effort in all capacities, from getting my lesson critiqued, to researching effective collaboration, and lastly creating a successful collaborative lesson plan. References
All screenshots were taken by the author of this blog post. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vA6E2hiBl1a9yc3jEon_wxL6-p9ZI_VkzZ-Xt9PHnFs/edit.
High school musical gif (2013). Retrieved from https://gph.is/XHIW2N
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My group and I walk down the street towards a man. It’s February 2014 and we have a meeting with him in downtown Selma, Alabama. I shake hands with the man, wearing an all-black, military-like outfit. He greets me like any other person who planned to meet with him that day, but my sense of uneasiness is growing. I know this will be a conversation I will never forget. My eyes skim the patches on his shirt, and I prepare myself for the first (of many) encounter with an active member of the modern-day Ku Klux Klan. I went to Selma, Alabama twice in college via our “Alternative Breaks” program, where we volunteered our semester break for a chance to learn from others and help them along their journey. In Selma, we volunteered with an after-school program that celebrated diversity and inclusion. Selma, as an entire city, is still widely segregated. Even though segregation is not legal, due to socioeconomic issues and political beliefs, the town is still nearly split by race. One side of the railroad tracks versus the other. Driving through downtown, a visitor can see abandoned buildings and yet, at the same time, a whole bunch of Civil Rights history. The after-school program we volunteered at caused a lot of controversy in the community. Volunteers would get threatened and the kids at times would have to physically fight to get to the church where the program was held. The program focused on self-expression through dance, song, theater, and writing. It served as an outlet for the youth to occupy themselves with something other than gang violence, drug activity, and theft, which a lot of their peers were becoming involved with. The volunteers there do everything in their power to give the kids a safe place to be vulnerable and supported. Check out some of these fantastic kids here: This after-school program changed how I saw kids, how I saw their experiences, and how I saw teaching. This past week, I’ve learned a lot about intersectionality and representation in the classroom. All students regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc., should be able to learn in the classroom. As I reflected, I realized that after my trips to Selma, I had been trying to show examples of races, ethnicities, religions, and cultures to students who were not part of any of those minorities. This week, when asked to analyze lesson plans from different minority perspectives, especially when considering race, I found it not only uncomfortable but also challenging since, due to my students’ demographic, it is not the center of my focus when it comes to lesson planning. I also reflected on universal design for learning, where teachers focus on how information is presented, how knowledge is showcased, and how students are engaged, to make learning and understanding available to all students. I do really focus on the design of my classroom and how it functions. I love creating or finding content that displays information to students in a variety of ways. I always try to give students a choice in their display of their knowledge, because it keeps them engaged. I feel that universal design for learning can constantly be improved and modified to meet a variety of students, so it is always a work in progress. I would love to invest time in communicating with my fellow teachers about some of the issues we have representing a variety of students in the classroom. Accommodating each individual student can be a real challenge. At the school I work at, a lot of the students come from the same types of families and share similar beliefs. A lot of the teacher lunchtime is spent talking about politics and how our opinions may differ from our students and their families. I think it could be a great starting point for some discussion not only amongst teachers but with the community as well as to how to educate the students for the future. References[Joseph East]. (2013, August 7). I WILL DANCE Official Trailer [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg1WmwEnIbE
I spend way too much time on social media and it needs to change. I was in seventh grade when Facebook made its way to my fingertips. In the time since I’ve created and removed plenty of content from my page. Now, it’s mostly independent-clothing sellers and my high school peers ranting about our political world. It was time for a purge. I removed myself from many of the groups I was in and my feed slowly started to recalibrate. Suddenly, posts from people I hadn’t heard from in a while were appearing. It felt relieving to get back to cleaner slate. I decided since Twitter was the newest to me, I would try to find people to follow who had opinions about education-based topics. As a person, I am not opinionated, and I found that on all of my social media accounts - especially Instagram - I followed people who were like me: female, predominantly white, Literature teachers whose boldest opinions were their latest book recommendation. In fact, I oftentimes find myself skipping over or removing people who would make assertive statements about the newest education trend. So, on Twitter, I followed a bunch of people, especially people who weren’t afraid to use social media to express themselves. People who were making what I would consider bold statements. People who I didn’t necessarily agree with. People who run their classrooms completely opposite of what I do. People who are different than me: I think all too often, people get caught up in their bubble. They ignore, block, or remove every person who doesn’t agree with them. While reviewing my social media, I kept thinking of this video from Ellen DeGeneres. I think she makes some valid points about communicating with people outside our bubble. ReferencesScreenshots from author's personal Twitter page.
[TheEllenShow]. (2019, October 7). This Photo of Ellen and George W. Bush Will Give You Faith in America Again. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSZtjol7mJA
Figure 1: A representation of how information, especially due to the Internet, feels today. Retrieved from http://gph.is/XMXIFp.
This week, my eighth graders are beginning the biggest task of the semester - the research paper. Of course, with that, comes conversations and lessons surrounding the internet and giving credit where it is due. I often hear: “Ms. Stirling! I’ll just take some words from a random website, change a few, and then it’s not plagiarism anymore.” Up until this week, I never really had a good response to that. I decided to look a little deeper into copyright laws and the opportunities of fair use. I learned that copyright law is not just about the words itself, but the ideas and content from the original work as well. My middle schoolers call changing a few words “paraphrasing.” However, that’s not the true definition. Even if it is paraphrased, students should still be giving credit to the original work, or they are still in danger of violating copyright laws. By understanding this information, I am able to better challenge my students to cite sources correctly in their papers. At the end of my journey, I ended up creating a Public Service Announcement style video for my students, using videos from under the public domain license:
This video can be utilized by many teachers to start a class discussion about issues of copy/pasting from the internet. It shows students what they should be doing and teachers can utilize it to teach lessons on proper citation and licensing of different works.
ReferencesMy first class of undergrad was on the foundations of education, where theorists like Jean Piaget, John Dewey, and Lev Vygotsky, were daily topics of conversation. One that I always connected with was Piaget and his idea of constructivism. In 2017, Michael Resnick stated, “According to Piaget's constructivist theory of learning, children are active builders of knowledge, not passive recipients. Children don't get ideas, they make ideas” (2017). This concept of building knowledge is apparent in my classroom today, as I challenge my students to try no matter how hard the material or task is. We fail to answer a review question correctly? We tried and can try again. We didn’t follow the proper essay structure? We can revise. If they don’t try or aren’t engaged in the material, they are not ever going to gain knowledge and I can’t help them succeed. This idea of trying drives my teaching, as I am constantly looking for more ways to make lessons engaging and accessible to students at all levels. I created this infographic to show my journey so far: Teaching middle school is an interesting endeavor. When I first arrived at my teaching job, I learned my school values academic rigor and student productivity. However, I had students vocalizing that they were sick of individual, “busy work” and wanted to be more engaged. They wanted to be creative and collaborate. They didn’t, as Piaget would say, want to be recipients of knowledge. They wanted to be more actively involved and wanted to connect a lot of their literature work to real-life issues. They wanted a classroom environment that took Piaget’s theory to the next level. Constructionism, a theory by Seymour Papert, which builds on Piaget’s theory, states that “As children construct things in the world, they construct new ideas in their heads, which motivates them to construct new things in the world, and on and on, in a never-ending spiral of learning” (Resnick 2017). I attempted to find ways in which students could use their work in class to help them in the community, to make them more successful in high school, and to also make sure they were prepared as 21st-century learners. Combining student achievement with collaboration didn’t seem like that big of a feat. So, I sat down and planned new lessons - ones that were full of collaborative work and found engaging real-world connections we could make in our classroom. Some of these lessons worked, and others failed miserably. However, that was all part of the learning curve for me as an educator. I also learned quickly that teaching bell-to-bell was expected, with no time for anything less than educational. Students were expected to gain knowledge all hour, which took preparation on my part. Overall, it has been very successful, and I continue to add new projects every year. There was one piece still missing though and that was classroom management. I failed hard. Building this new, engaging classroom - especially with middle schoolers - came with some serious behavior issues. Students weren’t used to getting out of their seats, communicating with one another, or working together to complete a task. My school operates using the Responsible Thinking Center (RTC): Figure 1: An image from a slideshow presentation created by Kerry James about the Responsible Thinking process. I felt bad for sending them there and having them miss out on their academic work, but at the same time, they had to evaluate how to behave in a better manner. I learned quickly that students would have to be taught how to communicate with one another because otherwise many students were visiting the RTC room. For a while, most of my lessons were failures, but I’ve learned how to teach these collaborative expectations. There is one portion of these theories that I am still unsure about. While revisiting Papert’s theory this week, I kept getting stuck on this whole concept of “maker education” which is hard for me to picture in a classroom that doesn’t have science involved. I tried googling ideas and the few that did come up seemed more applicable to students in younger years. I will continue to strive for these types of activities to be incorporated in my classroom. ReferencesJames, K. (n.d.). The Responsible Thinking Process (RTP) based on the perceptual control theory. Retrieved from https://slideplayer.com/slide/11768925/.
Resnick, M., & Robinson, K. (2017). Lifelong kindergarten: cultivating creativity through projects, passion, peers, and play. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. |
Jennifer StirlingThis is my #MAET journey! Thanks for reading! Archives
August 2020
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