Introduction
Introduction blog due by Sunday night January 28th at midnight
In today’s post, you’ll simply introduce yourself by giving your first name and last initial and telling us what your current or anticipated role is in education. For instance, “My name is Estella D. and I want to be a high school math teacher” or “My name is Erwin D. and I hope to become a middle school science teacher.”
This is a simple introduction blog and doesn’t count toward your 8 required blogs for this course, so PLEASE don’t forget to do the second blog due this week also on brain-based-learning!
Brain-Based Learning Blog
Brain-Based Learning Blog #1 due by Sunday night January 28th at midnight
This week many of you will be introduced to brain-based learning (or brain-compatible learning). This is a perfect compliment to the development of cognition. I mentioned that I’ve studied this field for many years and am certified as a brain-compatible expert. I’m even a member of a Brain Club (total nerd, right?!). I think this is an interesting theory in education to be aware of primarily, as some of the week’s readings explain, because it is the first-ever biological model for learning theory.
I often begin the methods courses I teach here at CSUDH (Go Toros!) by having students share about their most memorable positive experiences. After a class of around 35 share these marvelous experiences, we draw some generalizations about what makes learning memorable. For instance, many of the stories are about a learning experience that was rigorous! I love that! Many of the stories are about hands-on learning and learning that takes place outside of the classroom and/or school setting, i.e. in the community itself. I love this activity because it sets the stage for a methods course by helping us all ask the question: “How can I make rigorous learning memorable?”
But, you know what? I never asked students to speak about brain-antagonistic learning. Obviously, the opposite of brain-compatible learning would be brain-antagonistic learning and, although we’ve not read about the latter, I think we all know it and many of us have experienced it. So let’s focus on that just to read some scandalous stories (makes for more interesting reading, right?). Here is the question: What was your WORST learning experience and why?” No names, please! Ha! Just the story, let’s not smear anyone! Here, I’ll share mine first.
Circa 1964 I was in first-grade and I had my first spanking (my first!). The reason I got spanked was because we were coloring a Halloween ditto of a hissing cat and I colored my cat brown vertically and yellow horizontally. That’s it. I got beaten for that alone. My teacher (She Who Must Not Be Named) spanked me because she said, “You either color up-and-down or across, but you don’t do both on the same picture.” And I got spanked. She thought she was introducing me to reading that year and I guess in a way she did...but what she was spelling out to me is that teachers have all the power and can, if they want, be cruel. Here - I once wrote a little story about it.
Let’s be aware of what we DON’T want to do in a classroom as a result of these stories.
Okay. Brain-antagonistic stories! Let it rip!
Bronfenbrenner
Bronfenbrenner Blog #2 due by Sunday night February 4th at midnight
I really loved readings this week as they are just chalked full of amazing and interesting information! Certainly after our horror stories from last week’s Blog, we can easily see the power and impact of educators being reflective about their temperaments and how who they are impacts the learning and lives of their students.
I am also a parent of a 12-year-old…wait…OMG she just turned 13 (WTH…I’m the parent of a teenager!)... and so I was very interested in the parenting styles. Let’s hope I do a great job of raising Helena!
Bronfenbrenner’s Biological Theory of Development is the focus of our Blog post this week. There are so many influences on the students we teach and counsel and the bioecological model of human development encompasses them all. Here are two that I want us to blog about this week.
How do you incorporate controversial topics into your classroom to engage students? Since so many people had negative math experiences, let me give an example of what I mean in the content area of mathematics. One of my favorite math websites is www.radicalmath.org because it uses topics that are a part of students’ everyday lives to engage them. Check it out, okay? You can teach math through issues like race, gender, gentrification, homeownership, the lottery (yes, I play), racial profiling, predatory lending, living wage, juvenile justice and sweatshops, just to name a few. I think if we’d all had math class as a way to look at many of these issues that impact us in our daily lives, we’d have loved math more!
I just can’t help but brag on my fabulous kid, so here is a peer-reivewed journal article hot-off-the-press where Helena shows you how she confronts her own colonized elementary curriculum. This girl rocks! It’s pages 6-90 and you will love her homework examples! Brave and Didn’t Know It: A 12-Year-Old Decolonizes Her Elementary Education - by Helena Donato-Sapp.
Our texts references the increasing influence of television, the Internet, and other forms of media and I agree that pop culture is not only a major influence on students, but also a great engagement tool to get their attention as well. So I am curious how you will use pop culture to reach students in an academic content area. How you would use pop culture if you could? What part of pop culture would you use because you think it’s central in students lives right now? Surely The Hellfire Club and Eddie Munson can fit into a class somewhere and somehow, right? How would you use pop culture in a counseling situation? For example, I know I’ve used rap as a vehicle to engage students in comprehending literature.
Again, two questions to focus on and they refer to Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model of human development:
How will you incorporate controversial topics into your teaching or counseling?
What pop cultural reference would you use and how would you use it to engage students?
Learner Diversity
Learner Diversity Blog #3 due by Sunday night February 11th at midnight
Learner Diversity, Identity, and Self-Reflection.
Having an accurate sense of self has a lot to do with being an inspiring professional. This week’s chapter has us reading about learner diversity. This is such an important topic anywhere, but here in the greater South Bay area we have so much diversity that this topic is an imperative!
I believe that good teaching/counseling begins in the transformed heart of the teacher/counselor.
One of my favorite authors, Parker J. Palmer, in his inspiring book “The Courage To Teach,” writes the following:
“The question we most commonly ask is the ‘what’ question - ‘What subjects shall we teach?’ When the conversation goes a bit deeper, we ask the ‘how’ question - ‘What methods and techniques are required to teach well?’ Occasionally, when it goes deeper still, we ask the ‘why’ question - ‘For what purpose and to what ends do we teach?’ But seldom, if ever, do we ask the ‘who’ question - ‘Who is the self that teaches? How does the quality of my selfhood form - or deform - the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, my world? How can educational institutions sustain and deepen the selfhood from which good teaching comes?’”
Blog - Read my article “How School Taught Me I Was Poor” and write a response.
Differentiation
Differentiation Blog #4 due by Sunday night February 18th at midnight
The research is clear.
For the most part, teachers tend to teach the way THEY learn, not focusing on the many different ways that their students might learn.
I do a pretty comprehensive 9-hour session in some of my courses on cooperative learning. I go through a model of cooperative learning step-by-step and we experience it in a rich, authentic way. Still, there are quite a few people who would rather swim through a pool of their own vomit than ever have to do any cooperative learning! They hate it! Despise it! Loathe it! They hate the social interaction. The hate those lazy folks who are “hitch-hikers” and don’t do their part, placing more responsibility on others. They hate the “ball hog” who, like bullies we remember as elementary children who would always hog the ball and never share, take over a group and run their ideas through without ever considering others’ ideas. And here is what I say to people who hate cooperative learning:
“It’s not about you anymore.”
Brash, ain’t I?
Honestly, I don’t care whether you like cooperative learning - a strategy I chose randomly, by the way, because you could add any strategy here that you loathe - because the research is clear that many of your students process information best when they get to do it socially.
“It’s not about you anymore.”
We must be able to operate from ALL kinds of different strategies if we’re going to be able to lead students to success. We must be nuanced about differentiation in our classrooms.
“It’s not about you anymore.”
How will you differentiate your curriculum and teaching so as to reach ALL learners? This week you can respond to Helena’s video after watching it. By the way, she recently received a global award for her work in the field of Disability Justice. She remains concerned that all children get the teaching they need.
Week Six
Constructivism posits that learning is an active, constructive process. The learner is an information constructor. People actively construct or create their own subjective representations of objective reality. New information is linked to prior knowledge.
The CSUDH College of Education says that we are, first and foremost, constructivist educators and that this philosophy of education is our cornerstone. All of our courses are to be led by this shared philosophy.
How are we doing with that?
If you were to give the College of Education a grade, where would we fall? An “A” would mean that your experience has been consistent and that each of your courses have operated from this constructivist philosophy. An “F” would mean that you think we’re all talk and no walk!
Now come one. Be honest. Your grade isn’t going to be affected by this; it’s just to get us all thinking about whether we’re congruent with what we say and how we act. (In other words, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas!”)
And if you’re still uncomfortable grading a program that you are currently in, then tell me what your personal philosophy of education is instead. You have to NAME a philosophy, too, not just describe it. So that may take a bit of researching the different philosophies if you don’t know them already.
You choose this week. Grade? Or Philosophy?
Memory and Recall
Memory and Recall Blog #5 due by Sunday night February 25th at midnight
After you go through the materials for this week, I’m curious which of the new strategies for memorizing things and storing them into long term memory intrigues you most. Is it chunking, pegging, mnemonics, narrative changing, acrostics, or what? Tell me which one you think you’d like to explore a bit more and why?
Some people think that another definition of intelligence is being able to store information in more memory pathways. That makes sense to me. But which memory device intrigues you the most?
Art
Art Blog #6 due by Sunday night March 3rd at midnight
Art.
If we had met as a class and I’d asked you to draw three symbols that represent you and then introduce yourself to the class by telling us about those symbols, many of you would have begun, “Well I’m a terrible artist, but here is what I’ve drawn...”
Why is it that we have such wounded artists? Why is it that we have to bash our art before we show it to others?
This week’s chapter is about complex cognitive processes and that means, for one, art. I believe the arts to be a rigorous academic discipline and that they can tremendously benefit students in the comprehension of other academic content.
I also believe that arts play a major role in what makes us most human, most complete as people.
I can’t wait to see what you think of the PowerPoint handout for this week! That sucker took me years to make! It shows the power and the need of art in our classrooms. This is a topic of great interest to me, just so you know. I teach methods courses here and they are very arts-based. Some like ‘em, some don’t. But I know that students really respond to the arts, especially in this standards-based, throw-the-arts-out-with-the-bathwater times we live and work in today.
So take a gander at this week’s readings and let me know what you think about art.
How do you use art with students to engage and deepen their understandings of the content you teach?
Or...
How do you think our own inner-artists get so wounded? Where does our self-abuse about our artistic ability originate?
Or...
How does the expression and power of art to communicate what our words cannot communicate help students be more resilient?
And maybe...just maybe...someone will even use art to answer one of these questions!
Stress & PBIS
Stress/PBIS Blog # 7due by Sunday night March 10th at midnight
I always know when I’m under stress. I come from a family of runners. My Mom, who is 89 and still runs races in my home town, has the biggest trophy case in our family! We joke that when we’re under stress that we all do “marathon sleeping.” Marathon sleeping, in our definition, is when we find ourselves sleeping longer hours, but waking up less and less rested. Has that ever happened to you? Stress definitely affects how we learn as well as how we operate as professionals in the field.
When I teach TED 505 on campus I do the flashcard activity alluded to in the PowerPoint handout for this week. I give a set of flashcards to everyone that have 5 concepts and definitions on them from the chapter we’re reading that week. Students are to memorize the definitions verbatim (the verbatim part is what freaks them out) and are randomly paired with a classmate to do a timed drill on them two weeks later. Oh my! I am actually frightened to go into class that evening because people are so tense! We actually do the drill and the winners get a “free pass” on any assignment for class. Wow! Does stress ever affect how we learn, huh? Unfortunately, we do assignments like the flashcard activity all the time on students we teach. We often give students quizzes, tests and timed drills to see if they comprehend content.
There are two things you can respond to this week. Choose ONE.
Your first choice is to write a response to this great quote by Thomas Merton. It’s a favorite quote of mine and it always makes me pause and reflect on how I am managing my stress and/or how I am saying “no” to people and not taking on too much work. I replace “idealist” with “educator” as I think they’re synonymous <grin> and I replace “activist” with “advocate” as I know that educators advocate for all children.
“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist....most easily succumbs: activism and over-work....To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
What does this quote make you think of in regards to your work in the field of education?
Your second choice is to respond to the video by CSUDH graduate Melodi Patterson as she speaks about how she implements Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS). How do you (or would you) implement PBIS in your professional setting?
Learned Helplessness
Learned Helplessness Blog #8 due by Sunday night March 17th at midnight
This week’s chapter has us delving deeper into motivation. I find myself concerned about a difficult concept titled Learned Helplessness (LH). You can read all about it in the handout. My family is concerned about LH in our own children. It’s odd, really. My brothers and I grew up without anything and my Mom taught us to “go for it” and man! Do we ever! We are one motivated bunch of Sapp boys! Now, my nephews had it a bit easier than we did (okay, a LOT easier than we did!). And sometimes they appear to be having a more difficult time jump-starting their motivation. So that’s often what we all talk about when we get together as a family, comparing and contrasting this generation of boys with that generation of boys. What motivates one more than the other and why?
I am fascinated by LH. But it does beg the question: What in the world do you do when you have a student who (a) has LH because they’ve been told their entire lives they are, say, “stupid”? or (b) they have LH because they hate your subject and have had no to little success in it and so they take the attitude, “Why should I give a shit?” or (c) they’ve been handed life on a silver platter and don’t expect to lift a finger? Yikes! How do YOU motivate the hardcore unmotivated cases? Inquiring minds want to know!
How do you motivate the hardcore cases?
(OMG I can’t believe I just cussed in a blog!)