While watching each of the speakers, I noticed that they all focused on creativity; learning outside regular school procedures. When working with kids, I've realized that a lot of students do lack the opportunity to use it but also do not know how to think creatively. At least with my current group of kids I feel that it is like pulling teeth whenever I try to do something creative with them. I feel that, just as the videos indicated, students need to have a creative outlet in order to grow. I only have a few students who are interested in doing anything creative while others would prefer something very straightforward. I've heard of doing "passion projects" before and I always thought that this would be a great idea for some of my more advanced students who tend to finish things well in advance. It just seems like they want to finish the work and be done with it so that they can go back to some mindless activity. My colleague, who has the Honors students, has a different experience where the students are a lot more interested in learning something new and thinking creatively. While I watch these videos, I can only agree with everything that they say but I personally have the hardest time with being able to implement creative projects. Can you teach creativity? I was pleasantly surprised to have an article to read surrounding the very issue once those videos left me with this question.
The 6 insights that they provided were helpful. The first one, which is essentially to teach outside the box and teach in a non-linear way. The second I think is very important, which is to get students to question what they already know. Especially with English, the learning process is never ending and you can always add to what you already know by questioning it. The third was an interesting one to consider where you just have to let students become creative people. They did so by having students go through riddles, simulations, and games. I really like this idea and can definitely see how starting or ending the class every day with something small like that can help boost their creativity. The fourth would be difficult to implement in the classroom until more students became creative but you are who you hang out with, so if you hung around creative people then their creativity would likely rub off. I don't know how I could make that happen in my own classroom. One idea I have is to have the students go through different portfolios of creative people and we could reenact that era and space. The sixth one, which they identified as the most important is also one I feel that is as important as the second which is to make sure students know that it is ok to be wrong. No idea is a bad one. I've always stressed that myself since with literature there are can be so many different interpretations of one piece of work. Knowing this, the road ahead to incorporate this into my lessons is a long one. I hope with time I can have a classroom full of creativity.
1 Comment
My driving questions are: What effect does modern technology such as Web 2.0 applications like Google Applications such as Sites, Classroom, Slides, Docs, etc.have on an interactive environment where students can participate in academic conversations in a 21st century setting? What is the relationship between technological resources and the improvement of English communication and collaboration skills?
Will you leverage any tech tools to implement your action research study? I will be using Google Chromebooks with both of my groups to give them both a survey. My treatment group will be using Google Chromebooks throughout the duration of the study and will complete both their pre/post test on the Chromebooks. Why will you choose these tools? I chose this tool because my driving question is focused on using technology in the classroom and this is the type that is available to me for a whole class set What kind of data can they provide? The data that I am interested in is related to to what effect does technology have on communication and collaboration skills. The Chromebooks are my only way to get that type of data. What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must we want for all children in the community. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy” - John Dewey I feel that this quote is a given but not an actual reality. As a society, we should want ALL of our students to succeed for the sake of our future. The point about democracy is true. Because we are not providing the same opportunity for success for all students, some students start out with a better advantage and this does not lead to an equal opportunity for everyone to pick themselves up by their boot straps.
When it comes to meaningful learning goals, I luckily feel that I came into teaching when this was a focus in my program and that I was never told to teach for the test. Especially when it comes to common core and the curriculum that my district adopted which is Spring Board. What I love about Spring Board is that it completely focuses on backward mapping which identifies the goals first, establishes what we are working toward, and keeps these in mind as we are working on different activities. Common core focusing on skills such as critical thinking and collaboration is a big step forward to creating an education system that compares to other nations. I still feel that sometimes there still is too much of a focus on testing. While I do think the students are taking less tests than I used to, I still feel that we are constantly stopping to get these district tests in. I also hear "data" about 50 times a month from administration so I still sometimes feel there is pressure to teach to a test but now I feel the assessments often do focus on skills. This quote, "when there are shortcomings in schools practices and outcomes, states should involve expert teams ine valuating the root causes of school failure" (305), has always been the way I have felt about the school system. It makes no sense that when something doesn't work that nothing is done to fix it. We really do need to be holding teachers accountable, especially in this day and age. I met a teacher who was 3 years away from retiring and when I came into sub for him for the day, he claimed that he did not know why he had to go to a professional development since he was not going to "change his ways." I was shocked to hear an educator saying they did not care to change even though they started teaching 30 years ago. That right there was what was wrong with their science department and why students were not doing well but nothing could be done to get rid of that teacher since he was tenured. In general, we should be trying to fix what is wrong and making sure we are holding the curriculum, state of the school, and teachers accountable. By keeping schools accountable that also ties into making sure that students have equitable and adequate resources. My school's science and history department are still using textbooks that I used while in middle school. The books were new to me back then and that was at least 10 years ago! When I found this out I could not believe that there was no new curriculum adopted. Now this I feel really is a disservice to our students. Especially when it comes to science since there are so many new advancements in science and the students are still stuck in the early 2000s. One of the biggest issues when it comes to education is the lack of funding. It makes no sense that we are putting so little money into education when this the foundation of our society. In other countries, they put top priority on education and the teachers are paid higher and are held at a higher standard. If our country paid teachers more then we would have more teachers willing to stay and we would have better credentialed teacher which in turn would lead to better teaching and better learning. I am not quite sure who are the seminal people researching in the area of my driving question which is: How can modern technology such as Web 2.0 applications like Google Sites provide an interactive environment where students can participate in academic conversations in a 21st century setting? What is the relationship between technological resources and the improvement of English communication and collaboration skills? Initially, it was actually rather difficult to find anything that was related to my research question as a lot of it seems outdated for being about technology which is always advancing. Most of the research I had originally found was about the different barriers that are associated with using technology like not having the network for it, not having enough to go around. But the other side of the research was about training for preservice teachers. I consider this all outdated now because I just graduated my credential program. The studies done were 5-8 years older so had been applied to my credential program. My school is going to be 1:1 by next year and I currently have a full set of Chromebooks with a network to support it. Those barriers don't exist for me anymore.
The research that pertained to my driving question is very limited as this is still a new concept. Any researchers that I have found are either just teachers like myself in a Master's program or students in college trying to get their dissertations finished. I did notice that a lot of this research was done in Europe or Asian countries which actually makes a lot of sense that they would be the ones to begin this type of research since they are a lot more advanced than American schools. Since I only finished my credential program within the last year, I feel that my journey toward a 21st century teaching approach is well on its way since it's the only way I've learned. My credential program stressed addressing the 4Cs and a lot of the lessons I created in the program related to them. What I have found in my own classroom is slightly different than I had imagined. I really wanted to implement technology right off the bat when I started teaching, but I had barely any access to it so everything I had envisoned had to change. Now, seven months later, I have access to a full class set of chromebooks, a projector that I have to set up every day (but ten times better than the broken project I used to have ~ Apple TV coming soon!) and now I am in a position where I can use technology the way I always imagined it. BUT, and it's a huge but, we went seven months without this access and now there are a lot of classroom management issues that are also presenting an issue in implementing all the technology I wanted to from the beginning.
I feel that in the coming school year, when my classes are completely 1-to-1, I will be able to fully use some of the new 21st century teaching styles I have learned through my program. I genuinely feel that what has kept me from implementing it now is my classroom management. Technology is only a minor aspect of 21st century learning. I feel that collaboration is a bigger part and technology is not necessarily needed for that. In my own classroom, I initially started with groups but found that I could not control my class's talking and groups only contributed to how much they were engaged in each other's conversations, but not in learning. After doing different professional developments and going to different conferences, I think I have found a strategy to implement the first few weeks of the year. I don't think it's possible for me to start over now so I still don't feel comfortable putting my students into groups now because they already talk so much as it is. With the classroom set of computers I can now implement an online discussion which will allow for collaboration online while still (hopefully) stopping talking from the students when it is not appropriate. I plan on trying some new different apps online that I feel can contribute to students collaborating with each other while also engaging in critical thinking skills. One of which is called flipgrid. What I like about flip grid is that students can respond to other students's videos and their initial videos can provide a whole conversation online. I feel like I have a lot of online sites that I can use that fully commits to being a 21st century classroom, it's just all about getting my classroom management together and, now that I have access, slowly getting my students from writing on paper to being fully engaged with the technology we now have. |