Week 4 & 5
The topics of reinforcing effort and providing recognition along with making homework effective are topics that every teacher deals with every day. I know that in our state of testing as the only determiner of achievement it is difficult to persuade hard working but struggling students that their efforts will �pay off�. I always have this fear that my �teacher pleasers� will decide �What�s the use?� and give up. I try to commend these students for their effort every day. I give them special privileges and keep in contact with their parents to let them know that they are on the right track and that I am happy with their achievements (no matter how small).
These two topics go along together so well because it is the hard working students that always do their homework, even if they didn�t completely understand the assignment. I only give homework as practice of the things that we have covered in class. Sometimes the students come back to school the next day and say that they had trouble with the work, and that is a clue to me that they need more instruction time on the topic. Then I will send home a similar assignment the following night to see if the extra instruction helped. It usually does. I really agreed with the book when it said that homework should require little or no parent assistance. I have found that the curriculum today (especially in math) is much more advanced than in the past and many adults (especially the parents in the classes I teach) are not able to help their child with the work. The other obstacle, is that most of the parents of my students do not speak English. The students are mostly left to their own devises when it comes to the completion of homework.
Isn�t it weird how while you are going through something you always end up reading or seeing something about the thing you are going through? Just last week I was asked to be videotaped doing an Interactive Writing lesson with my class. Interactive Writing is an Exll (Extended Literacy Learning) strategy that has the class and the teacher write an essay together. This is supposed to be the precursor to Independent Writing, where the students write an essay by themselves using the writing process. Anyhow�This experienced of being videotaped was something that I have always managed to avoid but because of my school�s involvement with Exll, it is part of the requirements for the trainees. I hated seeing myself on videotape, it was torture watching the tape and in a few days all my colleagues will get to see it as well. My students loved it! They liked the fact that they were on television and they laughed at the way everyone acted on the tape. Also, it was a great learning experience for the students. They could see what worked in the lesson and what didn�t. I found that I had a similar experience. While I wouldn�t say that I loved watching the tape, I did find it helpful to remind me of things that I needed to work on as a teacher. In the end it was a good experience. It was a useful tool for both me and my students.
I have used extremely limited hypermedia with my class. For the last two years, I have taught my students PowerPoint and had them put their state reports into PowerPoint form. I would then display the presentations to the class using our school�s LCD projector. The student�s love this! This activity has been very successful, but extremely time consuming. With standards based education, pacing charts and required minutes for each subject, allowing time for students to �discover� the computer is becoming less and less. I wish that I had more time. The students are given time every week to use the computers and look at educational websites that help them with math, language arts, science or social studies (whatever I want them to research that week). So far this year the students have only used the computers on a research-type basis. I have not had time yet to teach them PowerPoint. Unfortunately, I don�t get time to do that until the third trimester (after standardized testing is over). After reading chapter 4 in Learning with Technology� I have realized that I need to make more time to teach more modes of hypermedia in my classroom. Maybe I could have the students help me create a class website. I think they would love that. It could be a place where their work was showcased. I could also make it fit into the standards.
Speaking of standards (Who isn�t nowadays?) using nonlinguistic representations or graphic organizers, as my students know them is a great way to promote literacy and tracing the way in which students learn and organize information. Being at an Exll school, graphic organizers get a lot of use. We use them for every subject including math. Things such as T-charts and input-output graphs are readily used by our staff. After teaching 4 years I have grown to see the usefulness of graphic organizers. I must admit that during my own school experience, I never really used them. Because I am a very linear thinker, I preferred the standard outline for prewriting or organizing the information that I was reading. I felt that the other things such as bubble charts, input-output chart, T-charts, and spider webs were �fluff� and unnecessary. I know now that not everyone sees things the same as me. Throughout my short teaching career, I have had to rethink and reteach myself on the usefulness of these graphs. Now, I find them indispensable for all subjects and they are a great help to the students. I must admit that I have not used Inspiration in my classroom, but since beginning Etec 500, I see that I should use everything at my disposal to help my students achieve.