servicelearninglog

SERVICE LEARNING

ESE 310 5-12 Methods: Social Studies

Service Learning Log

Name Keith Scott Course Methods for Teaching Social Studies Term Fall 2002

Agency Byron Middle School Supervisor Gary Prantner Phone (507) 775-2189

10-24-02 0800/1400 6 hours What can I say? I was a little nervous today. All of my previous experience has been in urban schools, and Byron, located just a few miles west of Rochester, was very different. It was really more like the middle school I went to in Bettendorf, Iowa in terms of economic and racial makeup. At my other schools, I was blessed with the familiarity that a parent has for a school that his children attend or where a personal friend teaches. This was different, sort of like jumping into a cold pool. But I digress.... Minorities were few in Byron, and since most of the workforce in Byron was employed either at the Mayo Clinics or IBM, the incidence of poverty, though not entirely absent, was rare.

My supervising teacher, Gary Prantner, was extremely welcoming and very easy to be with. He was clearly loved by his students, and the respect they had for him was obvious. In his off-hours he served as an assistant football coach, and was quite a booster for school spirit. He was a graduate of Minnesota State University at Mankato, and very close to tenure. The class was a geography class.

Most of the day was taken up by a weekly geography quiz. Students were given an atlas, and had to identify what a given country, city, or other feature was based upon a random number, which was generated from a program called "Numble Jumble." Numble Jumble allowed the operator to select a randomized number. When it was selected, the number was called out and the students had to write down the answer on their own sheet of paper. After ten of these randomized numbers, the students exchanged their papers with the person behind them, or in the front row as the case may be, and we then graded the papers. After grading, the quizzes were returned, and the students recorded the results in their own personal planners. I then tallied the results for the class as a whole, and Mr. Prantner charted them on a whiteboard so students could see how their class compared to the other geography classes. These scores were not recorded in the gradebook, but progress was being monitored.

Because the tenure process required Mr. Prantner to be observed by his principal, I spent one period up in the science room. And what a treat it was! I graded tests over cell structure, and got to see the projects students were working on. They were creating cell models with objects and materials of their own choosing, and they were using the internet as a resource. I was really impressed by the wireless PCs the students had to use. Wow! I hadn't seen those types of resources in St. Paul. But back to the science tests. I was impressed with the structure of the tests used by those students with learning issues. Multiple choice answers were reduced by one choice to three selections, instead of the usual four, and matching questions were grouped into groups of four or five, instead of a whole page. The questions were exactly the same, but these accommodations allowed the students to focus more on the answers, and it showed in the results they got on their tests, nearly equivalent to the regular exam results.

10-31-02 0800/1500 7 hours It was Halloween and the lack of any sort of acknowledgment of the holiday was apparent to me. Oh well, it's the times we live in. Otherwise, the day was identical to last week. It was time for the weekly geography quiz, and I got to operate the Numble Jumble program again, and once or twice, I got to lead in the grading of the quiz afterwards.

The main difference between today and the previous day was that teacher prep time today consisted of a team meeting, which I was pleased to attend. The discussion was pretty general, though it was apparent that the teachers looked forward to confiscating any "unlawful." Halloween candy that showed up in school! More seriously, there was discussion about the behavior of particular students and how that could be improved.

Sometime later in the week I'd sent a PowerPoint presentation, which I had, designed about the movement of the Aztecs from the pre-Columbian United States to the Valley of Mexico. To my relief, Mr. Prantner said that it looked "pretty good."

11-15-02 0800/1400 6 hoursMy supervising teacher, Gary Prantner, was able to take a personal day. He came in to leave instructions for the substitute, Mrs. V, a retired Byron School District teacher. The substitute and I administered the weekly geography quiz and the chapter exam over Mexico. The schedule was out of order. By that I mean that owing to a band exercise, the order of the classes was changed to accommodate the band students being able to participate in an activity outside of class. It was a good thing that the students were good at keeping track of where they were. It was difficult for me at times! Students had five minutes of study time before each geography quiz and ten minutes before the chapter exam. Exam scores, which I had the pleasure to grade, were pretty good. Quizzes were not. Mr. Prantner had given us two sets of tests to use, and the intent was that Test A would be given to one row, Test B to the next, and so on. The questions were the same, but the order was different. This was to reduce the incidence of cheating, and was commended as a great idea in my Classroom Management class, especially in light of the fact that it takes extra time to prepare such tests. It was disheartening to see that some students simply didn't read through the directions, even though they were admonished to do so. (The True/False section also required the students to defend their answers with an explanation. Most did not, and in some cases, those that did wrote down, "because it says so in the book."

During Home Room, which occurred after lunch today, we had time to practice for upcoming parent-teacher conferences. Students participated in these conferences, a new experience for me. Each student practiced introducing their parents to the teacher, and then gave an oral presentation of what their strengths were and their weaknesses. Their content was pretty good, and they were pretty forthright about their strengths and weaknesses as near as I could tell. All students had some difficulty maintaining eye contact and many needed guidance in terms of what they could do to improve their performance. Their responses were pretty vague, so they were encouraged to work on specifics, e.g., study at least fifteen minutes a day.

11-26-02 0800/1400 6 hours Home Room had a special treat today. Because they had done so well in a food drive the previous week, Mr. Prantner rewarded them with fresh pastries from Otto's Bakery, a Byron favorite. They had juice as well, and their appreciation was quite apparent. The recognition of their achievement also coincided with someone's birthday, so it was a celebration as well.

Academically, the students began presenting their Central American projects. They were either in traditional display board format or in PowerPoint, a first for them. They presented a country in groups of two or three, and their presentations required that they meet a very specific rubric designed by Mr. Prantner. (It was an excellent rubric!I wish I could have used it a couple weeks earlier when we needed to bring in a sample rubric for my Classroom Management class.) Before presenting, each class had ten minutes of last minute preparation time.

Most of the PowerPoint presentations were quite good, although it was apparent that some of them were simply cut and paste jobs, evident by the fact that students struggled with the vocabulary they'd pasted in to their presentations and by their inability to explain what was meant by the text. During prep time in 3rd hour, I was very impressed with one student in particular who bothered to seek us out for help in pronouncing a Spanish place name. Not every group was able to present today, so they'll present the next class. During the presentations I tried to be observant that those items required to be present in the presentation, e.g., a graph indicating racial makeup, discussion of the currency, discussion of the economic structures, etc., etc., were present. The displays were bound by the same content rules, and each group presented its projects orally to the class.

12-02-02 0800/1400 6 hours The Home Room began by sharing their holiday experiences. Otherwise, students continued their presentations on Central America. One of the other teachers, who was the "resident" expert on Guatemala, taught one class in the afternoon while Mr. Prantner taught her class. Ms. White had adopted a child from Guatemala twelve years ago, and agreed to teach this class (and every other geography class, though not on the same day.) Schedules would be changed to accommodate her. We put up a real Guatemalan flag for her presentation. She had a great PowerPoint presentation, and she also had a great demonstration project as well. She handed out cards to the students which indicated whether the bearer was Mayan, Spanish, or Mestizo, whether they were poor or rich, whether they could read or write, etc. Each time she made reference to one of those rolls, she had those students stand up. It helped to make clear in a very visual way to the students how poor Guatemalan society was, and how the wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few. She also handed out worksheets for the students to fill out as they watched the PowerPoint.

I thanked Mr. Prantner for allowing me to observe and participate in his class, and he invited me to come down and do formal student teaching with him in the fall.

31 hours total

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