Reading Reflection5- I'mthinking...

Incredible sadness. Thursday night a 17 year old girl vanished from a park less than two miles from my home. The same community park where I ran a rec basketball league for years and managed hundreds of baseball games. The same park where I spent countless hours with my own children watching them grow up. I've been on the trails she was running hundreds of times. She was a friend to many of the players on my basketball team from last year. I happened on to one of those players last night and she was a wreck. The pain and anguish of the parents must be unbearable. Her bio reads like that of half of the 17 year old kids in the neighborhood, athlete, scholar, ASB, peer counseling, brilliant future to look forward to.........I am not trying to be fatalistic and am praying for a positive outcome here, but I am sad and really angry. I wonder why I have become so anaesthetized to all the travesties and atrocities that surround the world yet beome so moved when it happens in my backyard. Earth can be a pretty screwed up place to be sometimes. Sorry to be such a buzzkill if you read this, but this is what I am thinking..............

CP2 Website

http://sites.google.com/site/mrmacsciencelcc/

my chemistry ct has blackboard site set-up and will use that, but looking at other ways to present stuff...................

Reading Reflection 4- Groupwork Ch. 4-5

Creating the Task

Cohen describes multiple ability tasks which are designed to allow students to solve problems that may have multiple answers. The task "requires a variety of skills and behaviors" and "also requires reading and writing" (p.68). The multiple ability task must be designed to be challenging and interesting. This type of task works best using the equal exchange model "where no one person could do the task alone" (p.64). Participants charged with this type of task will hopefully be able to demonstrate their mastery of the concept by synthesizing what they have learned and creatively applying it in their final product.

The notion of allowing students the freedom to demonstrate ideas that don't necessarily have a finite solution lends itself quite well to the discipline of science. The prompt from me could be as simple as, "In your group demonstrate your mastery of the gas laws." The biggest obstacle for me as the teacher is to convince the groups that the task requires different kinds of intellectual ability. The obvious notion of the group would be to turn to the individual with the greatest academic status and let him/her lead the way. It is imperative that I ensure low academic status students participate and are recognized for their contributions. I think this would be an awesome tool to affirm diverse intellectual contributions from a heterogeneous classroom and create a sense of classroom democracy. However, I am still struggling a bit as to how this type of group work could best be implemented.

Lastly, one thought that was intriguing to me was Cohen pointing out that research shows that "the success of the group depends on the amount of talking and working together" (p. 65). Within minutes of entering a classroom, it is evident who the most talkative students are. In assembling groups it appears that distributing the high "expressive" status students will be important.

Reading Reflection 3 - Groupwork Ch. 1-3

Chapter 1
Groupwork is a tool that should be designed to allow students to be actively engaged in participation on a task without direct supervision. The author plans on drawing from years of experience and research to describe the tenets of highly effective groupwork.

Chapter 2.
The author declares groupwork to be a "superior technique for conceptual learning." Aside from the learning task requiring conceptual thinking the group must have the resources to complete the task. Cooperative learning has been shown to help students retain information. Cooperative learning also provides the chance for students to form friendly bonds with each other.

Chapter 3
The author describes the attributes and attendant power given to students in groups based on their academic, societal and peer status. The disruption of power and subsequent outcomes of the group are often unduly influenced by those with perceived greater status.

Note: During my CP1 I had some students in my chemistry class who enjoyed high academic status which was merited. They enjoyed working together. Every time I separated them to mix the groups up, they always complained how teachers always make them go work with the "dumb kids" and they end up having to do everything.

I would like to know how you keep groupwork from being less than 50% social time. Even in this rather eclectic group known as Day Cohort, we are placed in groups, spend a few minutes on task and then complain for several minutes on the Chargers playoff ineptness or the topic du jour...................

School Reform at Lunch

The following website describes the Breaking Ranks Model of High School Reform.

http://www.alliance.brown.edu/pubs/hischlrfm/datdrv_hsrfm.pdf
Key points include:
1) Ensure students have access to rigorous, real-world instruction.
2) School is restructured into small learning communities.
3) Develop staff capacity to systematically use data for equity, accountability and instructional improvement.
4) Implement collaborative leadership strategies that engage staff, students, parents and community to support the school and student success.

Reading Reflection 2- BPHS

First and possibly of foremost importance, the Best Practices High School (BPHS) was started by a group of individuals with great energy and a similar vision of secondary education. Their ability to create and actually implement the classroom dynamics they wanted had the greatest impact on the school. The schools expectation that the teacher be a coach and model and not just a babble fountain of facts was tantamount to their success. Likewise, the emphasis on cooperative and collaborative learning helped foster the sense of community that the school sought. The individual attention afforded to the students with accommodation for the varying cognitive styles of students had a strong impact on the school. This troika of pedagogy created dynamic, engaging and community based classrooms that many of the tenants of the Second to None initiative suggested.
During my first clinical practice (CP1), I noticed that the school was making attempts to create a supportive environment. Many of the instructors on campus were involved in developing or implementing new programs such as the International Baccalaureate Program, a forensic science club and a Filipino dance club. They were trying to build the "climate" that BPHS recognized as important. Likewise, bulletin boards and all school announcements regarding upcoming college fairs and on campus visits by local colleges were abundant. Representatives from local community colleges were placed in classrooms as tutors and mentors discussing post secondary school opportunities.
The concept of getting teachers to coordinate interdisciplinary thematic units will not be feasible. The logistics are just too cumbersome in high schools that are so large and class sizes that are so huge. Moreover, many of the classes are represented by several different grades and the range of their aptitudes across content areas will not likely allow for this pedagogy to be plausible.

Reading Reflection 1- Rethinking High School

In my first clinical practice (CP1) I must have answered thousands of questions. More times than not, I would reply first with, "What do you think?" or "Where would you start?" The students would typically respond with those three melodic words, "I don't know." The prompt from me was not for information, but rather to promote student thought. The Best Practices High School (BPHS) notion of students being able to create meaning for themselves rather than being a short-term warehouse for information, is at the the core of how I feel students should be gauged. In chemistry and across the sciences, if you actually understand the concepts, you really don't need to be so consumed with absorbing factual information. I discussed this with some of my better performing students in CP1 and they admitted that it is usually easier just to memorize the facts. In the context of how they were going to be assessed, they certainly had chosen the path of least resistance.

The BPHS suggested that only a few subjects be investigated, but to a much deeper level. I did not see this as a great measure of reform. Perhaps, during the course of the school year, students should be allowed to explore a few topics in much greater detail. The chemistry course that I taught in CP1 was labeled as a college preparatory class. The aim is to present the students with a fairly large scope of chemistry concepts. If they choose to pursue chemistry in college they will have plenty of time to explore the discipline in greater detail.

The BPHS incorporated many of the Second to None suggestions for reform such as; teachers acting more as coaches and mentors, students receiving more individualized attention and teachers seeing fewer students during the day. The question I have and would like to explore further is how do we make these 3500 student high schools with class sizes exceeding 40 students seem small.