I, like most of us educators, have learned a lot about the flipped classroom idea. I admit when I first studied this idea, I was marveled and excited!! Yes, Dan Pink - you are a genius! Instead of lecturing during class time and assigning a bunch of homework...then woops the bell rings, he says, "Let's turn this upside down." Sending home things in advance such as videos, tutorials, and lectures is a brilliant idea! Thank you Dan and many teachers thank you too. But, and here is the big but, it is my opinion that is not the best choice for the population that is special education. Students with IEP’s have IEP’s for a reason. They are by and large NOT independent learners and they DO need lots of one on one attention. Instruction in the moment and not at home, matters. I played around with some flipped classroom ideas, sent home a few things, and hoped for the best. It was a bust. Primarily, it just created more worry and angst with my students then they were already feeling. For students with special needs, and really for all little ones, flipped is a flop.
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Thank you Zaretta Hammond for the lessons I learned tonight. After a Biden win and then today a Raider’s win, I have been feeling super upbeat. I enjoyed this blog experience thanks to Zaretta and...other factors. Culturally responsive teaching is exactly what we ALL need to do. Memo to me - keep this phrase written down and kept nearby.
1. Build authentic relationships. They are the on-ramp to engagement and learning. There is a trust factor here. My students come to me with a brand new IEP (usually) and they are wondering why they have to see me and sometimes, when can they get back to class. I work hard from minute ONE to build a relationship. They need to trust me. Ours is a safe relationship. 2. Use the brain's memory systems for deeper learning. Connecting new content through music, movement, and visuals strengthens the neural pathways for comprehension. A waldorf school is a sometimes frustrating yet useful environment! Music, movement, and visuals are what we do. Heart, head, and hands. And when we teach, we let it sit - an important pathway to comprehension. 3. Acknowledge diverse students' stress response from everyday micro-aggressions and help calm the brain. OK, not my forte, but this is interesting. I am reading that stress responses can be complex and numerous. Culturally responsive teaching can incorporate something as simple as asking how things went at home. Another memo to me: bridge the GAP between the student and myself - look for, ask for, investigate, try harder! There is little trust if I do not begin to understand their own personal ties to culture. 4. Use ritual, recitation, repetition, and rhythm as content processing power tools. And an incredible way to teach rote memorization. Boring stuff like multiplication facts. Set to music or rhythm and you can set the tone for years of automatic understanding. 5. Create a community of learners by building on students’ values of collaboration and connection. It creates intellectual safety, reducing stereotype threat. Teachers inherently build on their connections with their students. I think of little ants who climb on each other to create a bridge. We are always the ants - masterfully stretching, connecting, and sharing our strengths with other educators, in hopes to reach our students. There is a lot of trust there. If I can go home that day knowing that there was a kiddo who trusted me or even another teacher in a significant way, then I feel a connection was made. Just a little strand maybe, but a connection. Our students deserve this. This Blog unfortunately is being rewritten on a Google Doc in hopes that I can copy and paste it into my weebly blog page. I will not be able to trust weebly again. I wrote my blog tonight and did a damn good job - outlining all the videos and how it tied into my teaching. It was only one and half hours of typing but still. When I went to click SAVE, it erased the whole paper. GONE.
So, I will try to remember what I wrote and it may not be half the work I had produced previously. Sour grapes, sorry. Seely Brown main idea: 21st century challenge is preparing our students for this world of constant change. We need to rethink HOW we learn, WHAT we need to learn, and how MEDIA has changed the game. My favorite part is when he said, “There is no better way to learn than having to explain it to someone.” Howard Gardner main idea: outlines specific cognitive abilities that will be sought by leaders. Disciplinary Mind, Synthesizing Mind, Creating Mind, Respectful Mind, and Ethical Mind. Dan Pink main idea: Motivating students is not a way of higher rewards or larger incentives, in fact that can lead to poorer performance. Motivating students is intrinsic and comes from within. Students must do what excites them and what makes them feel like they are making a difference. Sir Robinson was OFFLINE all Sunday evening so I could not watch him. I loved the man I consider a genius - Louis Mobley. He taught his employees to think creatively and not just “read financials”. His school was built on six insights: traditional teaching methods are useless, “unlearning”, we must become creative, you can’t learn it, hang out with creative people (my favorite), creativity is connected to self-knowledge, and he gave his students permission to be wrong! I have tied many of these men’s methodologies into my teaching - maybe just not near as well as they have done. As I try to incorporate the 4 C’s, just as all these men have, I am learning that there is so much more for me to grasp. I incorporate critical thinking in my lessons as much as I can but sometimes, I just have to get a kiddo to understand that when C and H are together they make only one sound. What I can honestly say I understand and have demonstrated to my students over the years is that it is OK to be wrong. I ENCOURAGE it. This is how we learn. Mistakes get a big WOOP from me! Arms waving and everything. Mistakes are actually opportunities. “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 Chapter 9 Linda Darling Hammond - so many thought provoking ideas and ones that make so much sense...but how does this even happen?
High and equitably achieving nations would benefit from and require the following elements: Meaningful learning goals Intelligent, reciprocal accountability systems equitable and adequate resources strong professional standards and supports schools organized for students and teacher learning First, I would like to address the quote (and my silly picture) from Dewey. It never ends - as a parent, I am usually on top of my kids' learning, their assignments, their grades, their feelings with regards to fairness and equity, and their difficulties (if any) with learning. I am the staunch and resolute educational advocate and it is sometimes a joy for my kids and OK - more often than not, it is a pain in the neck for them. It is not always the delight of the student to have their mom or dad, who happens to be an educator, watching their many moves. I am trying to tone it down a bit, thank you for reminding me. There is a rich contrast between Bush Senior's six national goals and what Darling-Hammond is arguing for. Bush' ideas look absolutely fantastic on paper! And he had a lot of people of board - with the exception of educators! Is it really the teacher's fault if test scores are consistently in the tank in certain geographical areas? Wouldn't one look at equity in all circumstances, which might lend light to this issue? To "equalize access to education al opportunity" would be an educators dream come true but maybe even more important to the parent, whose child is underserved. So, in my opinion, when studying these five principals, I feel #3, is far and away the most important and the ideal that has the most consequences. As a special educator, I am always trying to understand the best way to "level the playing field" for my students. They need adequate opportunities to learn what everyone else is learning. I don't intend to give them the advantage over others, just help them ingest academic material in a way that works for their learning style. In tandem with this equity is the need for rigorous and sensible preparedness for the educators. The training should never cease. Our students' futures are depending on this. Clearly, if one took the time to read through my blogs for the last many weeks including summer time, one would realize that I have changed my driving question a few times. Well, here I go again. I worry not, as I understand and take comfort in the fact that this cohort is keeping it real, and not judging me! I will be including more information and insight into the 4 C's and TPACK in the coming assignments. I am feeling...overwhelmed. I am feeling...exhilarated. I am feeling...tired of zooming. I am feeling...unfulfilled. Lastly, I am feeling...like I can't wait to start my journey with my new DQ - beginning with a survey of my students and families.
I can identify with the ACOT research project. I feel I am past Stage 1 - Entry. I am somewhere in Stage 2 - Adoption. This is very likely NOT where much of the cohort is but I have been behind the times working for 12 years at a non-digital school. I am struggling (not complaining mind you) to make up time. I DO feel that my school aligns with something I am re-reading from Linda Darling-Hammond (pg. 65): "Research suggests that successful new models of schooling require strong teacher faculties who work in organizational structures that create more coherence and a "communal" orientation, in which staff see themselves as part of a family and work together to create a caring environment." My school is not strong on tech tools but we are strong on family and creating a caring environment. My U-Turn will be encompassing the 4 C's in my action research, and moving into the ACOT Stage 5 - Innovation! I have a lot of work to do. Last semester, the 4C's were more of a cool graphic on our Touro website than an idea. Now, I have been referring to it, beginning to understand its relevance, and excited to see how this theory plays out in all the work I do from here forward. I watched MANY videos this week. Some were inspiring, such as the one on the Culture of Critique, on which I discussed in my very short video presentation. This video encompasses so much of what we teachers need to understand about our future 21st century kiddos: they are so smart, so savvy, and so ready to embrace the culture of the 4C's. If we can consistently, through out the grades and across curriculum's, establish a culture where we are creating together, critiquing each other in a kind and meaningful, collaborating on assignments, and using our critical thinking skills, we can then expect our students to become actively engaged, problem-solving young men and women. The video that also caught my eye, and my heart strings was, A Vision from Today's Students. NOT what I was expecting. I showed it to my 16 year old daughter, and not surprisingly, she quietly nodded in agreement throughout the whole thing. These particular students are not engaged, not feeling particularly interested in the curriculum or the way it is presented, feel the sting of too much homework, not enough sleep, wondering why they are constantly tested, and how much of that will be relevant in their adult lives. These two important videos portray very different ideas and are both extremely timely. How WILL we create a culture of the 4C's across all districts for all learners? It is not near enough to just put a laptop into every student's hands - that is standard stuff these days. It all comes down to well-researched, powerful instruction by educators, where we teach problem solving, how to collaborate with all types of students and in all types of situations, how to give and receive critiques, and all the while communicating and thinking critically.
hate to get too deep in my first blog, when times are hard enough right now, but when I think of America's commitment to education and how how it is playing out through our districts, it is BLEAK. I stand (via zoom) with 9 other teachers in this cohort who are clearly committed to their profession, their community, and their students. We all are doing a whole lot more than whatever it is that is detailed in our job descriptions. We are working FAR more hours than designated in our contracts. We are spending less time with our families that we should - period. Yes, Linda Darling-Hammond, America IS losing ground. Nations everywhere are funding their education systems so that their schools have the resources they need, and even extra resources for the communities that need it more. AND, other nations are doing it smartly! Teaching skills that will serve their populations for their entire lives - how to design and manage one's own work, how to think critically, how to work in groups for one collective outcome, how to analyze information, and how to communicate well. I am haunted by the phrase on page 5: "...Singapore recognizes that its human capital will determine its future."
How are OUR schools supporting its future? I am saddened to read about America's lagging achievement. I understand that Singapore and the United States are vastly different in terms of population (Singapore 5.6 million, US 328 million) but there is so much to glean from what a country does right. Teachers, the vast majority of them, are doing everything they know how to do and are doing it extremely well, given the resources. But what can be done to alleviate this significant achievement gap? |
Kathy FlynnAlways hoping, learning, and wondering...how am I making a difference in my student's lives? Archives
April 2021
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