I thought the discussions today showed just how divergent we are in terms of our
background experiences,
years on the job,
disciplinary specializations,
program affiliations, sex (thank you, Leo) and
areas of teaching experience (for those of us with teaching experience).
I am looking forward to getting more specific about areas of immediate interest.
Also, I’m thinking we might add a focus on the culture of poverty, particularly generational poverty. Might it be helpful to look at some of what the research literature has to say about what people from vastly differing socioeconomic circumstances do to cope with what society has to offer for them. And, what successful schools and teachers have done with these populations?
Charlie
My email is katherinecrommelin@yahoo.com
I certainly got caught up yesterday moving and am still, of course, in the process. A huge thank you to Gina!!! I also want to say that even though we encompassed a great deal of material and discussion, I never felt too overwelmed. We were making connections and engaged in meaningful conversation. We were living proof of Vygotsky’s theories!
Dianna said something yesterday about listening that really stuck with me. How often do we truly listen to people, especially our students? We often hear what they are saying but have a million different thoughts in our head. Why is Joey out of his seat? Do I have all the materials for my math lesson? Ahh, I am hungry..did I eat breakfast? Looks like Travis did not. Can students read the facial expressions on my face and tell that my focus is not on them? I have practiced yoga for quite awhile. One of the aspects I like most about it is I am able, sometimes, to let my thoughts fade and focus on my body and breathing. I need to find ways to zone out the distractions and focus on my students during meaningful conversations. I think I could apply this to relationships throughout my life. It won’t always be possible, but being aware is the first step.
THnak you all once again for your insights and knowledge. Have a fabulous summer!
Katherine
I’m not sure if anyone will check in on the blog again or which postings they’ll respond to so I’m going to post in a couple of different places.
I felt badly that I had to leave before the end today. I wanted to say goodbye to each of you personally and tell you how much you enriched my LAST course. I learned something from each one of you and I want to thank you. The depth of your thinking and willingness to challenge yourselves, your beliefs and your practice is what will help change the course of public education where it needs to change. This was such a great ending after three years of work. In many ways it is catapulting me in the next things. My experience after my M.Ed program was “what now?” tinged with sadness. I feel some of the same sadness now as well but I also sense a new direction emerging that I doubt would have surfaced without all the rich discussion and intense reading and coursework. Charlie thank you for all you gave us.
I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to cross paths with you however late in the game it is for me.
One last request is for folks to post their email addresses here so that we can get in touch with each other if we are so moved. I want to know how things are going for Karen up north and how Katharine is doing in Winooski. I want to know how Christine makes out in New Hampshire and what’s going on for Leo with his group work. Ellen, your brain research is going to benefit all those SPED kiddos you work with. They are lucky to have you. Tara, Christie, Katie and Tammy I want to know about your experiences as you test the waters in your training. Melissa let us know if you decide to go back to the classroom or shake up parents from that perspective. Gina the student affairs perspective in higher ed was brand new to me. I want to know about the interface with the profs!
Anyway my email is artemis@gmavt.net
You are an awesome class! This “processing” and support was inspiring and very informative to me as your teacher. What a way to do ongoing formative assessment – keeping a finger on the pulse of the class. Ch.
There seem to be two areas for posting class comments. Be sure to check out the other one too. I think Charlie set it up at Christine’s request because this one was getting so long.
I also wanted to thank you Ellen for sharing your personal insight and experience during the Ruby Payne discussion. After you shared your experience, I felt compfortable sharing mine, and as a result I learned something about myself. So, thanks.
I just wanted to thank everyone today for your insights on student contracts and for being such a good audience. I can see how we can use each other’s projects to help us as teachers. My mind has done more expanding these last two weeks than it has in the past 2 years. We get so used to our daily routine that we forget to think (I mean really think). Our class is full of some really insightful people. I can only imagine what we could do if we used the other 90% of our brain 🙂 …Ellen probably can. Piaget, Thorndike, Dewey, Vygotsky etc. were each (in the times they were living in) great thinkers… can you imagine what the results of their collaborative group work would have been? Thanks, Melissa
Hello, I also wanted to commend Christine, Tara and Diana on a doing a great job today. I found that I knew only bits and pieces of your projects but came out in the end with a better understanding. Also, the converstion before the presentations was interesting to me because I honestly never considered how important understanding the process of memory could be to a teacher! Well, at least now I know! Good luck to everyone who is presenting tomorrow!
Hi 377,
I finally got to read all the comments from Tuesdays class. I spent much of yesterday afternoon feeling uncomfortable with sharing all those experiences, but I was very touched reading the comments about the discussion. I really appreciate the opportunities to share in a trusting environment.
I just wanted to congratulate Diana, Tara, and Christine. I was sorry I missed Diana’s presentation, but Tara’s and Christine’s were excellent. The amount of research and your abilities to share your information was awesome. Thanks.
Hello colleagues,
I too was stirred by yesterday’s (Tuesday’s) class meeting. One of my favorite things about education classes is how you can invariably see the theories you’re studying about learning played out in your own experience, and yesterday was a prime example of all of us making meaning together from the reading and our combined prior experience. The more I read and experience of education and American life in general the more convinced I am that the misleadingly quiet undercurrents of interclass mistrust, prejudice and discrimination are among the most destructive forces in our society. The fact that they are also among the most difficult issues to talk about openly is not coincidental. I am grateful for the space we had yesterday to begin that conversation. Thanks to all for speaking and listening, I learned much more from our sharing than I could have through a simple reading.
-Christine
Hey everyone, this is my first contribution to the blog as I have been having fun trying to log in. Anyway, I found today’s coversation about poverty uncomfortable because the Ruby Payne article had a negative affect on me. While I have never experienced true poverty and make an attempt to understand poverty in education and in all aspects of life, I couldn’t help feeling a bit frusturated with the general descriptions about the classes in our society. I was unable to comment in class on this subject because I don’t have a great backround in sociology or any experience in teaching, therefore I felt it would be better to listen to others on this subject. Yet I can’t help my frusturation that this article produced in me because by having categories in place about people before stepping into the classroom seems a though invisible boundaries on the potential of students would be formed. Dividing people into classes seems to undermine the true nature of a public education -one based on equality and a potential for all to be successful. I also appreciate the willingness to share personal experiences, because without those it is easy to get caught up in individual beliefs. Good luck to all those who are presenting tomorrow I am truly looking forward to it.
Hello all! Well I officially hate computers even more because I just wrote a really long comment and went to preview it, saw a huge typo and tried to fix it and lost it all!! So I’ll try and re-write what I wrote and not preview it this time!
The issue of generational poverty is definitly a sensitive one. I appreciated the openness of our conversation today and I learned from listening to people’s own life situations as well as other’s opinions. I have taken many sociology and social work courses that have touched upon the issue of poverty. My previous courses have given me some foundational information that I might use when I am a teacher and have students who are themselves in poverty. I agree completely with Harriet from the Vygotsky book when she said that there is a difference between knowing something and experiencing it. I might know a lot of information regarding poverty from my undergrad courses but I have never experienced it and therefore I don’t think I could ever truly understand what people in poverty go through. I would love to open my mind enough to understand but I know that if I just try to use my knowledge to help students I might have in poverty then I will be doing my job as well as I can.
I really enjoyed and appreciated our discussion today, and must say that I will miss all of our discussions after this class is over! I feel the same way as Katherine and feel that I have gotten so much out of each and every class because of how much people share and bring to the table.
Today during class I found the instuctional strategies very informative. It is amazing that even though we all read the same text we can all find different meaning in it. And for me personally, when Katherine was discussing how she corrected students throughout the year on making double negatives only to realize that doing that would not help to connect her with her stduents. In the end it could create a larger gap and raise questions for students about their parents intelligence. This helped me realize that I need to be supportive of my stduents habits, but try and change their bad habits without minimizing their parents.
Vygotsky stated that “as we think and discuss through our experiences with others, our learning expands and deepens our knowing and our development”. We have such an open cohort of learners in our class. Each day I come in with new thoughts and ideas about our readings, and each day I am amazed with the knowledge and discoveries I walk away with through listening to all of you. Today was a perfect example of how conversation and the interaction with others takes us through our zone of proximal development. Although issues were raised that took some of us out of our comfort zone, it was through conversation that we were able to open our eyes and see the many perspectives in our group. The empathy allows us to be reflective thinkers rather than taking offence and shutting down. Our environment, in just 6 days, is one of trust and safety, and therefore, our coversations have deeper meaning. Just think of what this means for our classrooms! Thanks to all for being open, involved, and most of all for sharing your thoughts.
Hi everyone! The discussion that we had on Friday (the whole standards/assessment/mandates/top-down thing) has been marinating in my head all weekend, and I think that it may take my project in a new direction. I want to find the value in all of this. If I can figure out how to comply with all of these mandates while maintaing the integreity of my philosophical grounding, and find an approach that allows me to be as effective as possilbe as a teacher in this oppressive structure, I will truly have gained from this class. How can we use these impositions to our advantage? Is it possible?
Diana, Thanks for responding to my comment. I feel much better now. Now… (after thinking about your comment) I am actually thinking of giving my project a unique format. I was going to compare my (1) previously conceived ideas with/against (2) the ideas/theories of the various authors (and research findings), and finally (3) Have my ideas/opinions/theories changed and if so..how. I was thinking a table (although a little “boring”) would be the most straight forward and easiest to understand approach. I am still trying to think of something less structured than a table but I don’t want my ideas and what I’ve learned to be “lost in translation”. The thing is… I have learned so much from the reflections that I wanted to have my report be a bunch of mini-reflections on some of the ideas from my sources. Anyway, I guess I should save my creativity for the poster project 🙂 So, thanks again for the input and I too would appreciate some more time to work on assignment.
Leo when I put “more time” in the context of the AE article I just read I think of developing expertise. It will take some students longer to develop expertise than others in certain areas. My Reading Recovery students get “more time” to become grade one readers by spending a 1/2 hour a day with me for 20 weeks on top of classroom literacy times not in place of them. My program is not a special ed program. Correct me if I’m wrong Ellen but SPED instruction often supplants classroom instruction. In High School some students might need double math or double english to master the material or meet the standard.
As far as teaching year round I was very surprised at the positive reaction at the workshop I was at among my own peers from my own school. Having 3 months off a year spread out over 12 months was very appealing. I love to travel but have a hard time going any place for any length of time except during the summer which is my favorite time to be here in Vermont.
Melissa my understanding of our project is that it is not a paper. We need to type up a bibliography and a one pager for everyone in the class. I’m presenting my project in a powerpoint format and will give that to Charlie as well. I’m much more stressed about our posters. I’m stuck thinking that I have to come up with some clever visual to represent Vygotsky’s learning theories and I can’t get beyond what is already in the book. Good luck.
Christine in response to your comment — I enjoy the conversation and learning in class too but I really want some more time to work on assignments.
Hello all,
I am interested in Diana’s comment above. When you were talking about more time, was it something different than IEP’s? I guess I am just looking for clarification. What I think I heard you say is that there are some students who can meet the standards without other accomodations, they only need more time to do things. If they were afforded more time, they could meet the standards that were set for everyone. If that is the case, it sounds good to me. I find myself looking at some IEP’s and dealing with students that don’t need some of the accomodations set forth for them. If they just had more time, they could meet the standards without the whole laundry list designed to keep them up to pace with a class. Just some food for thought.
One more thought on that comment, I wonder how easy it would be to get teachers to agree to teaching year round??
Leo
FYI for anyone who needs to check out books from the library… the library is closed on the 3rd and 4th…despite what the UVM website says. I went there today and they had a note posted on the doors. I hope no one else waited until today to check out their books and start their paper. I am going to get as much of my paper done as I can this weekend but I can’t do the bulk of it until Tuesday after class when the library is open again… and it is due on Friday! I am so stressed out. Roughly how long are these papers supposed to be? Maybe I am just trying to make this project more involved than it needs to be. I am probably doing the same with the poster project. Any feedback would be great. Thanks.
Hi Class,
I just wanted to let everyone know that I saw a movie at the Roxy Friday night called “Mad Hot Ballroom.” It is about 5 NYC schools that take a 10-week class in Ballroom dancing, then compete. It was definitely interesting and fun to watch. All of the students competing are in the 5th grade and they stay after school to take this class. It was inspirational and instructional from my perspective. Have a nice 4th.
Ellen
One of the things I’m really enjoying about this class is the chance to interact with everyone, and hear our different voices in small discussion groups, our walk/talks this morning, class discussion etc – this feels really good. I also enjoyed the jigsawing activity around case studies of multiage classrooms today; it felt like a good way to analyze one situation in more depth and still become familiar with several. Our time together in this course is so short, and it’s such a big and interesting topic! I’ve been thinking about the idea of our having some project work time in class next week and am noticing that I feel a little disappointed by the idea of losing class time together for work we could be doing outside of class… does anyone else feel this way too? I’m happy to go along with what the group wants, but noticed I was thinking about it and thought I’d put it out there:-). I hope everyone has a fun and safe holiday weekend!
-Christine
I agree with Ellen that it does seem like elementary students are benefiting from some of the great learning/teaching techniques but as the students move into high school less of them are utilized. I am not sure why that is but I am sure these novel teaching techniques would be just as effective as students get older… just look at our class. Anyway, I was wondering the same thing and look forward to any insight any of you may have.
Wow! What a great conversation we had today. It was exciting to hear about everyone’s presentations. I’m really looking forward to seeing the projects. My eyes continually are being opened to new ideas and perspectives. While I might be older and have a few more years experience in the field, I’m constantly impressed with the level of intelligence demonstrated. The enthusiasm is contagious and refreshing. The discussion on multi-age classrooms had me thinking about higher level education classes. It seems like a lot of the great learning/teaching techniques being utilized are designed for elementary schools. When kids get into higher grades the flexibility to try novel teaching techniques wane. I’m wondering if that has anything to do with teaching to the curriculum? Are there any other thoughts from higher level educators out there?
Ellen
Hi Everyone, It is strange for me to being taking my last class on campus with every face in the class new to me after going through a three year program with the same cohort of teachers but I’m really enjoying hearing new viewpoints and being in a program with newer teachers. Being on the other end of my career you all give me such hope about the future of public education.
I was thinking about Charlie’s seguay into our multi-age conversation and the concept of time. Recently I’ve heard a couple of other approaches to giving students more time. Carl Glickman talks about identifying HS students who are not meeting the standard and giving them more time to meet standards with extra support in the area of need. Some of our students have the ability to meet the standards but need more instruction or more time to get there. In his school they do everything they can to make that happen.
Kelly Pigeon, a teacher and workshop presenter from Long Beach, CA talked about a yearound schooling model designed to give those students who need extra time in school the chance to have it. This school operates 12 months a year with staggered one month breaks addressing the issue of students’ lost ground during the summer break.
I really enjoyed class on Tuesday. I found the small group discussions helpful. I had so many differernt thoughts about the previous nights reading and it was helpful for me to talk through my ideas with classmates as well as hear other prospectives. The role playing was great! I came to class with a very negative attitude about some of the grandfathers and granduncles of ed psychology especially Thorndike. I think that I left class with a much better understanding about what Thorndike was all about and how much he really brought to the teaching community even though he never entered it!
-Tammy
not I should write the final form of my project or try something different. I want my presentation to be so interesting you guys want to hear it over and over. (Especially in the event someone else has the same topic as I do) 🙂
As I am contemplating what subject I will be focusing on for my personal project I realized that I may have some resources that may of interest to you. I have posted some books in the resource section. If you are interested in any of the titles for your projects please let me know. (I have them in my personal library and I am willing to lend them out. The only caveat being that I may be using one of them for my project.)
Best,
Gina
Yahooooo! I am finally in. It only took me 7 tries and 3 different computers. I just want to comment on our class group. I love hearing evryone’s experiences and where they are coming from. Thanks for sharing and please keep doing so. Listening to everyone’s stories helps me put things in perspective and break out of my Essex High School bubbble. We really have lots of diversity in the settings we are coming from. Until next time…
Leo
Well it appears I was lost in cyberspace this morning after feeling very proud of myself for getting logged in etc. I’ll repeat what I said then and apologize if my former entry shows up as well!
I am very interested in issues of poverty. It is easy to assume that my school is less diverse because we only have one ELL student and less racial diversity than most but issues of poverty are very real for us. Gina’s wish to look at our own identity development is one I wish to explore too. Understanding who we are and what we bring to our teaching is important so that we may better recognize our students.
Yeah,
I finally can post a comment! I’m very excited. It’s amazing what a little tenacity will do. Anyway, I’m very excited about this class. My perspectives and views are being challenged. I, too, feel excited about the diversity of learners in our class and what they bring to the table.
Today’s class was fun. I really loved the role play and I learned a lot from each character using that format. I also liked the 10 conditions that support learning and how they all interwine. I’m looking forward to focusing on my project.
Ellen
I must make this quick because it took me so long to sign in! I wanted to say that I am very excited for this class and especially all that people seem to bring to the table! We really do seem to have a wide variety of people from different stages of lives, etc. I look forward to the rest of the course! I will comment more later!
It appears that many of us in the classroom are interested in the impacts of different socio-economic background, race, etc. on education. Although I of course am interested in these topics as well, I am hopeful that we will be able to focus mainly on the eight “areas of specialty” in Ed. Psych. – specifically motivation, instruction, human development and classroom management & organization. Thanks!
Hello Everyone!
Was any one else left feeling as unsettled about the 100 years of Educational Psychology article as I was? Seemed that there was so much confusion around the respective roles of “scientists” and and teachers – and so much animosity between the two realms. I found this to be very troubling. The field has seemed to come a long way, but by the end of the article, I wasn’t confident that the issues were resolved. Any thoughts?
Classmates-
I was a little nervous when I signed up for this class and worried it may be a boring, however, yesterday reassured me that it would all be okay. It was really interesting and enlightening for me to hear about all of the different experiences you all have had. I have had limited teaching experience and hearing about some of the struggles you all have had make me start to think about what I have to look forward to.
I am intersted to learn about the relationship between poverty and the education system. I haven’t had a class that focuses or even really touches on that subject so I am open to new material.
-Tammy
I am excited by the possibilities for our seminar discussions. I, too, hope to explore the intersections of student identity theory (around race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation), cultural influences, and socio-economic status have on students’ ability to learn. I would also like to have a discussion around our identity development process and how this may affect our effectiveness in educating others (how did I develop my identity around my gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and SES?; how do these identities color my view of the world and those around me?; what are my values?).
Best,
Gina
Howdy all,
I was really excited by the diversity of experiences in our classroom today. One bone I’ve picked with my grad program has been how homogeneous our classes have tended to be (i.e. mostly idealistic folks new to teaching and from similar backgrounds), and I’m looking forward to hearing and learning from all of our perspectives.
I for one would relish the chance to learn more about poverty and SES issues in relation to education. This topic has been touched on in other classes of mine, but I’d love to consider it from a research based Psych point of view.
-Christine