Building Communication Skills and Safe Spaces

One thing that is really standing out for me is the fact that every student is involved in Cooperative Learning. The fact that everyone has a role, an important one that is necessary for the team to thrive is incredibly beneficial on so many different levels. The biggest element being that students are learning fundamental skills of how to work in a group or team, and on a bigger picture, how to be a productive member of society.  I think about Congress, or other groups of government and most of the time I am disgusted with how these seasoned adults don’t even understand the basic principles of discussing important topics and ideas with other people who don’t share their same views. Meetings on topics like abortion, gay marriage, and healthcare become heated arguments that score closely with ignorant temper tantrums. CL is a way to teach students content as well as basic ways of communication, teamwork, and how to work together. Looking at our “Let’s Make Squares” activity last week, there were a lot of ideas going on at my table, and we all had to voice them clearly and precisely in order to have each member move their pieces how we thought would be best. We had to be courtesy of each other, patient, and cooperative (lol).

 

Another element of CL that I think is wonderful is the praiser. I’ll be completely honest, it did feel weird to have someone cheerleading the group and it was very sarcastic. But after we actually overcame making four squares, we all became praisers. It really is so unlike us to say “Good Job” sincerely to someone else. Eventually, if we were to do CL regularly it would most likely become a basic part of our nature.

 

I feel like CL is something that is more likely to happen in elementary schools rather than secondary schools, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t. There just needs to be more building up and working towards getting high school students ready for CL. Little kids enjoy playing pretend, and are at an age where it just comes second nature to them to want to assume a role and run with it. But that magic gets beaten out of students with age. CL is something I’d want to wait to do with students after they’ve had some time in class. But its something I believe can help harbor a healthy classroom space and community. If I’m told I need to know my students, and I believe I want a safe space, then using CL to build up student’s self-esteem and making everyone feel a part of a group is how I can do it.

A Menu of Options/ Do Your Own Assignments

One piece that is really sticking out to me this week is the idea of a menu of choices for students when it comes to projects and papers used for assessment. The cookie example displays perfectly why it’s important to give students equally weighted options when having large assignments. Not everyone thinks a like and approaches tasks the same. Thinking back to Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory, not all people learn the same. So giving choices that are weighed equally, or as equally as you can get them, allows students to have a choice in how they want to best demonstrate their knowledge. But as stated in class, it’s important that students know that they may have a choice, but they must choose all the options presented to them at least once. So for example, give students an option to write a paper about “Of Mice and Men,” film and write a script for a scene from the movie, or create an eight page, multi-panel comic of their perception of the book along with a one to two page analysis of why they chose which scenes and how they accented the themes and motifs of the book using visuals.

 

The idea of choice and creative freedom was one I didn’t get to experience until college in some of my writing ad English classes. In SED 445, How to Teach Writing in Secondary Schools, we were required to create an assignment for students based on a wordless graphic novel.  One thing that stood out to me about that assignment, that I am reminded of again this week is the idea of weighted options. That stands for an important question: How can you be sure that your choices are fairly heavy? Well in my past SED 445 class, we not only created an assignment and rubric, but we did our own assignment. And let me say, it was a powerful experience and one that I’d advocate that teachers do more often. Doing your own project helps you see into the eyes of a student more effectively. It was hard to pick myself apart from what I knew about the assignment and just go off of what I had created, but the attempt yielded results that showed me how much or little I was asking from students. It also shows you what’s important about your assignment and what isn’t. For one of my classmates in SED 445, he had created a film project with a packet to guide their process. Doing it himself, he realized that the packet was confusing and asked way too many insignificant details that detracted from the actual content.

 

Giving choices to students allows them entry into the assignment. Students feel more invested and excited when they get the chance to break out of the norm of paper writing and get creative. Its where thinking outside the box and hands on skills can thrive and where students can get a sense of what they can really do when guided effectively and given the chance.

On Asking Questions and Giving Lectures

 

 

I find myself thinking about the fundamentals of learning and asking questions. To me, questions are powerful. Questions lead to thinking, probing, and searching for some sort of answer. I feel like in many senses, we want our students to ask questions. But yet when I was observing classes last class, I noticed that not enough students were asking questions. Instead, the teachers were which makes sense of course. Questions are a form of assessment, that’s why it’s important to focus on how we word our questions. Playing with Bloom’s Taxonomy and switching of the order in which we ask low level to high level questions is a key.  I feel like it’s not just can our students answer the questions, but can they take that answer and shoot a deeper, related question back out? To me, that’s more of an assessment than just an answer.

 

Looking at the second part of the class, I found the lecture on how to lecture really eye opening. The part that stands out to me the most is telling stories in our lectures. It opens up many different doors for our students. Not only is it in human nature to be drawn to stories, but its also a way to help them remember the content of the lesson. But more importantly it’s a way to build a relationship with students. By telling them a story from your life (an appropriate one) it’s a way to show them a side of you. It adds depth to who you are as a person. I can remember some of my favorite teachers from high school and one of the reasons I can is because I know something quirky about them that they told me one class. I know that lecturing is inevitable, but as long as you can keep it fun, productive, and human I feel as though it is a productive way to get information out.