Part I: Preparing for the Realities of the Classroom
Chapter 1. Educational Psychology: Becoming an Effective Classroom Teacher
Chapter 2. Understanding Diversity in the Classroom
Journal Activity, page 4
1. What are some of the realities of classroom teaching that you may be concerned about?
I am concerned about the reality that my students will be coming into the classroom with a different set of values and ideas about social norms from my own. I tend to respond negatively to other people’s values when they differ from my own. I need to develop better insight into which of my values are important to the students’ success and which of my values I can set aside.
2. Think about teachers that you had during your educational experience. What are the characteristics of good teachers and professors?
I like teachers who have high expectations of my work. I like teachers who challenge the way I think about things and show me new ways to approach my work.
3. What are the types of knowledge and skills that teachers need to have?
Teachers need knowledge of their content area as well as pedagogy.
4. What is educational psychology and why should you take this course?
Educational psychology is the study of the process and practice of teaching and learning. Better
understanding of how we learn and the ability to observe learning and teaching from the perspective of educational psychology gives us another tool for reflective practice.
5. What are some strategies that you could use to develop into an expert teacher? Reflective practice is vital for becoming an expert teacher. We must evaluate our daily experience in order to improve our performance.
I am concerned about the reality that my students will be coming into the classroom with a different set of values and ideas about social norms from my own. I tend to respond negatively to other people’s values when they differ from my own. I need to develop better insight into which of my values are important to the students’ success and which of my values I can set aside.
2. Think about teachers that you had during your educational experience. What are the characteristics of good teachers and professors?
I like teachers who have high expectations of my work. I like teachers who challenge the way I think about things and show me new ways to approach my work.
3. What are the types of knowledge and skills that teachers need to have?
Teachers need knowledge of their content area as well as pedagogy.
4. What is educational psychology and why should you take this course?
Educational psychology is the study of the process and practice of teaching and learning. Better
understanding of how we learn and the ability to observe learning and teaching from the perspective of educational psychology gives us another tool for reflective practice.
5. What are some strategies that you could use to develop into an expert teacher? Reflective practice is vital for becoming an expert teacher. We must evaluate our daily experience in order to improve our performance.
Journal Activity Chapter One, page 21
How was your first response different from your new response? & Were your beliefs consistent with the
reviewed concepts and theories?
It is not at all different. There is nothing in this chapter that has not been covered by my previous studies. I try to base my beliefs about teaching and learning on empirical data, in other words, scientific studies of the
theories, so once a theory has been around enough that I know about it, it has already been studied extensively.
What were the most useful concepts that you learned about?
That is hard to say because I learned very little that I didn’t already know. The more you know, the harder it is to describe what is “the most important.”
What new concepts would you like to learn more about?
I would like to read more about Stage Theory, and additionally, I know I have to learn more about INTASC standards for PRAXIS.
Journal Activity, page 26
1. How would you define intelligence?
I believe in multiple intelligences where people are smart at different things to varying degrees; however, I believe there are more categories than defined in Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences. For example, there are some people who are very smart about horses, like the Horse Whisperer.
2. Do you think socioeconomic status has affected your learning or your friend’s learning? If so, how?
Aspects of my socioeconomic status affect my learning.
The stress of poverty has affected my ability to remember.
My memory is much sharper when I am not under so much stress.
Also, I feel that there are tools I would like to purchase to enhance my learning, such as modeling software for mathematics, that I don’t seriously consider because of the cost. Thinking about a friend who is in a different situation from myself, she reports that her study time is constrained by childcare. She can only afford so many hours of childcare each week, and these hours are largely consumed by her job. The hours that she cannot afford to pay for childcare are consumed by caring for her child herself.
3. Should teachers adapt lessons to students’learning preferences/styles?
In many cases, the law requires us to do so, such as in the case of modifications recommended in an IEP for a student with disabilities. When there is no disability present that requires the modification of lesson plans, I think it depends on the goals of the lesson. If one of the goals of the lesson is that students employ a learning method that a student does not prefer, then the lesson should not be modified. For example, if a student prefers not to read, and one of the goals of the lesson is that students acquire information from a written document, then the lesson should not be modified to fit the student’s preference. However, in all other cases, modifying lesson plans to suit student learning preferences and styles is ideal. We should seek to achieve it whenever resources permit.
4. Do you believe that boys and girls learn differently?
If so, how? On the aggregate, yes, I do believe boys and girls learn differently with boys tending to be more kinesthetic learners than girls and girls more verbal than boys, as this has been extensively studied; however, on the level of the individual, one cannot make any generalizations. Any individual girl will vary from any individual boy, as all students learn differently, but no assumptions can be made that they will vary from one another or from the general population as the entire population of girls varies from the entire population of boys.
5. As a teacher, how would you identify students with exceptionalities? First, I become aware of characteristics of various exceptionalities. Then, should I observe these characteristics in a student over a period of time, I would recommend the student for identification.
I believe in multiple intelligences where people are smart at different things to varying degrees; however, I believe there are more categories than defined in Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences. For example, there are some people who are very smart about horses, like the Horse Whisperer.
2. Do you think socioeconomic status has affected your learning or your friend’s learning? If so, how?
Aspects of my socioeconomic status affect my learning.
The stress of poverty has affected my ability to remember.
My memory is much sharper when I am not under so much stress.
Also, I feel that there are tools I would like to purchase to enhance my learning, such as modeling software for mathematics, that I don’t seriously consider because of the cost. Thinking about a friend who is in a different situation from myself, she reports that her study time is constrained by childcare. She can only afford so many hours of childcare each week, and these hours are largely consumed by her job. The hours that she cannot afford to pay for childcare are consumed by caring for her child herself.
3. Should teachers adapt lessons to students’learning preferences/styles?
In many cases, the law requires us to do so, such as in the case of modifications recommended in an IEP for a student with disabilities. When there is no disability present that requires the modification of lesson plans, I think it depends on the goals of the lesson. If one of the goals of the lesson is that students employ a learning method that a student does not prefer, then the lesson should not be modified. For example, if a student prefers not to read, and one of the goals of the lesson is that students acquire information from a written document, then the lesson should not be modified to fit the student’s preference. However, in all other cases, modifying lesson plans to suit student learning preferences and styles is ideal. We should seek to achieve it whenever resources permit.
4. Do you believe that boys and girls learn differently?
If so, how? On the aggregate, yes, I do believe boys and girls learn differently with boys tending to be more kinesthetic learners than girls and girls more verbal than boys, as this has been extensively studied; however, on the level of the individual, one cannot make any generalizations. Any individual girl will vary from any individual boy, as all students learn differently, but no assumptions can be made that they will vary from one another or from the general population as the entire population of girls varies from the entire population of boys.
5. As a teacher, how would you identify students with exceptionalities? First, I become aware of characteristics of various exceptionalities. Then, should I observe these characteristics in a student over a period of time, I would recommend the student for identification.
Journal Activity, Chapter 2, page 67
How was your first response different from your
new response? & Were your responses consistent with reviewed theories and
research?
Again, I have to say that my first response was informed by the information in this chapter.
I’m not trying to sound like a jerk, like I think I know everything, but I took Intro to Special Education and Intro to Teaching recently so that information from those courses is very fresh in my mind.
Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, in addition to being covered in my other education courses, is frequently discussed on the homeschool circuit, so I have engaged in many conversations about it over the years.
I would like to study Sternberg’s Triarchic Intelligence Theory more because this is totally new to me.
The chapter suggests that it hasn’t been studied much, so I imagine that there are few studies to read about it.
Still, it is a very interesting idea that I can intuitively understand, although it makes sense to me that it would be extremely difficult to measure how much “creativity” a person possesses.
Dialect Formation in High School
For years and years, I have been taught that dialects in the United States are disappearing. I do not believe this to be true based on my life experience living in different regions of the United States where I have found use of dialectical speech alive and well. I suggest that research definitions of how we measure the prevalence of dialects is flawed because knowledge of the existence of a dialect requires that the research subjects, people, to engage in the use of dialect with the researcher, and this is less likely to occur as Americans overall have increasing levels of education that allow them theexperience with code-switching to Standard American English. Fluency in Standard American English does not mean that a person stops using dialectal speech in informal settings, especially those settings where children learn language, e.g. home and church, whereas linguistic geographers tend to measure the prevalence of dialect in formal speech, such as printed materials and especially advertising, and these situations are those where a speaker of a dialect who is fluent in Standard American English would be most likely to engage in code-switching behavior.
The concept of code-switching from a dialect to Standard American English in the classroom I borrow from its use and definition in the study of Ebonics or Black American English. Ebonics gives us a familiar lens with which to study language and identity since the connections between Ebonics and Black American identity has been written about extensively by social scientists, linguists, and educators as it pertains to primary and secondary education in American public schools. (See for example http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/PD/Consulting/WheelerLAJuly2004.pdf ). In the words of Chuck D, "We went to school where we learned that white is good and Black is bad." However, this experience of the suppression of dialectical speech in the classroom is not unique to Black Americans. It is also experienced by speakers of other dialects, especially when migrating to another region within the United States. (See page 11: http://www.marshall.edu/csega/research/lindacapper.pdf ). As our nation continues to accept immigrants from places around the world where the language spoken is other than Standard American English, and these immigrants settle in American cities, we can expect new local dialects of English to be created and the preservice teacher must be amenable to working in a classroom where students will be speaking dialects with which the teacher herself may be unfamiliar. The legacy of our national experience with Ebonics and the negative identity formation that occurs when a student is repeatedly told that her home language is "incorrect," should make us sensitive to how our attitudes towards language set the tone for not only how our students understand and experience diversity, but also how our students value their own self-worth. Our challenge is to teach our students fluency in Standard American English at the same time that we embrace the linguistic diversity our students bring to school.
For this to really work, for us to meet this challenge, the teacher herself must be fluent in Standard American English and possess the desire to model it in the classroom. In some public schools, I find this first requirement is not met. The first school my daughter attended was a public elementary school in rural Appalachia. The faculty and staff spoke primarily the local dialect inside and outside of the classroom. This was not the result of Board policy, and in many cases, I suspect that it was not a result of conscious decision. Certainly, some teachers must have been fluent in Standard American English, but that was not the case with all. I remember frequently making jokes with my daughter when she would come home with stories about her language arts teacher attempting to "correct" the grammar of my daughter's classmates while modeling her own idiosyncratic version of hillbilly which she deemed to be "proper."
Myself, I think that I really need to work more on consciously modeling Standard American English. Although I possess a high degree of fluency in SAE, my desire to teach compells me to code-switch to the dialect of my students, because I want to remove the distance between us. I don't want language to get in the way of the message I am trying to communicate. I want to put ideas into words that my students use. There is a tension between teaching the content, modeling the ideas that I want to impart about race, ethnicity, and social class, and teaching SAE. It has been observed that Black teachers teaching in Black classrooms will code-switch between Ebonics and SAE in lectures, speaking primarily in SAE and code-switching to Ebonics when describing a difficult concept or to punctuate an important idea. I find myself engaging in this behavior, but overall, I think my speech is a mangled mess. When I lecture, I tend to meander among the jargon of my academic discipline, my own home dialect, and the various dialects of my students. I think that my verbal play is completely lost on my students and they have no idea what I am talking about much of the time, because they lack proficiency in their own first language. I forget that the children (or adults) I am teaching have limited vocabularies and often very weak grammar. Upon reflection, I realize that my primary goal is to educate, and to meet that end, I think I should adopt a strict attitude towards using SAE in the classroom. Using SAE as classroom speech gives students a strong model and the opportunity to practice, and thereby gain fluency, in a language that they may have no opportunity to use outside of the classroom, and they need to learn SAE to prepare for working in a global economy.
Two things influence the development of my attitude. First, my awareness of increasing language diversity among the student population, including exceptionalities in language ability. In the future, I am not going to be teaching in a linguistically homogenous classroom. Not only will my students speak more than one dialect of English, some of them will be English Language Learners. Some of my students will have speech and hearing disabilities. My code-switching and use of dialect may be helpful to communicate with individual learners, but in a public school classroom of thirty students, this is likely to create an additional obstacle for students already struggling with language.
Secondly, I have had the experience of being in college classes where the instructor is a non-native speaker of English, and I have observed how Americans who possess little proficiency with SAE experience a strong negative response to lectures. For example, I had a teacher of mathematics who was ethnically Chinese. He has been teaching in the United States for over thirty years and is highly proficient in English, although his pronunciation of certain sounds is imperfect and the cadence of his speech sounds unusual to a native speaker. This Chinese teacher lectured using Standard American English, yet half of the class complained that they "couldn't understand" him and made remarks that "he can't speak English." At first, I was confused by the other students response, because I had no difficulty understanding lectures and hardly noticed the teacher's accent. I observed the students who complained that the couldn't understand and noticed that those students used the local dialect when speaking in the classroom. I inferred that their inability to understand the professor was related to the students' lack of proficiency with SAE. It was not the teacher who "couldn't speak English." It was the students.
The state of the world today is that English is our modern-day Latin. It is the lingua franca. In North America, SAE is the variant of English that is most widely used in commerce as well as scholarship. Proficiency using SAE can be a major determining factor in the opportunities for work that a student will have. This is why I want to model SAE. It is probably unusal for a math teacher to spend so much time thinking about teaching language, but the language of mathematics has been emphasized as vital to what we need to be teaching at the K-12, and the national content standards reflect this. There is a precise formal language used for the discussion of mathematics (See http://wac.colostate.edu/llad/v4n1/jamison.pdf I love this quote the author employs, "One should NOT aim at being possible to understand, but at being IMPOSSIBLE to misunderstand. -Quintilian, circa 100 AD", however much of the teacher speech in a high school classroom is not delivering content knowledge. When we engage in classroom management, this is the time for us to be modeling SAE. Even though discussing hall passes is a perfectly appropriate situation for speaking in the dialect of the students, speaking SAE in these situations provides ELL as well as English-speakers not proficient in SAE to improve their language skills.
The types of scenarios related to the use of minority dialects in the classroom that students describe as being damaging to their self-esteem, I don't think I need to worry about perpetuating them. My ethics regarding how teachers behave towards students, consistent with national standards, dictate that teachers do not bully students nor do we permit a climate of bullying in our schools. Singling out individuals or members of minority groups for ridicule in the classroom is not consistent with modern professional expectations of educators. I won't be engaging in behavior like this for any reason, so why do I worry about it so much relative to students' use of language? Respecting the diversity of language that students bring to the school is a small part of the basic idea of respecting students.
The concept of code-switching from a dialect to Standard American English in the classroom I borrow from its use and definition in the study of Ebonics or Black American English. Ebonics gives us a familiar lens with which to study language and identity since the connections between Ebonics and Black American identity has been written about extensively by social scientists, linguists, and educators as it pertains to primary and secondary education in American public schools. (See for example http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/PD/Consulting/WheelerLAJuly2004.pdf ). In the words of Chuck D, "We went to school where we learned that white is good and Black is bad." However, this experience of the suppression of dialectical speech in the classroom is not unique to Black Americans. It is also experienced by speakers of other dialects, especially when migrating to another region within the United States. (See page 11: http://www.marshall.edu/csega/research/lindacapper.pdf ). As our nation continues to accept immigrants from places around the world where the language spoken is other than Standard American English, and these immigrants settle in American cities, we can expect new local dialects of English to be created and the preservice teacher must be amenable to working in a classroom where students will be speaking dialects with which the teacher herself may be unfamiliar. The legacy of our national experience with Ebonics and the negative identity formation that occurs when a student is repeatedly told that her home language is "incorrect," should make us sensitive to how our attitudes towards language set the tone for not only how our students understand and experience diversity, but also how our students value their own self-worth. Our challenge is to teach our students fluency in Standard American English at the same time that we embrace the linguistic diversity our students bring to school.
For this to really work, for us to meet this challenge, the teacher herself must be fluent in Standard American English and possess the desire to model it in the classroom. In some public schools, I find this first requirement is not met. The first school my daughter attended was a public elementary school in rural Appalachia. The faculty and staff spoke primarily the local dialect inside and outside of the classroom. This was not the result of Board policy, and in many cases, I suspect that it was not a result of conscious decision. Certainly, some teachers must have been fluent in Standard American English, but that was not the case with all. I remember frequently making jokes with my daughter when she would come home with stories about her language arts teacher attempting to "correct" the grammar of my daughter's classmates while modeling her own idiosyncratic version of hillbilly which she deemed to be "proper."
Myself, I think that I really need to work more on consciously modeling Standard American English. Although I possess a high degree of fluency in SAE, my desire to teach compells me to code-switch to the dialect of my students, because I want to remove the distance between us. I don't want language to get in the way of the message I am trying to communicate. I want to put ideas into words that my students use. There is a tension between teaching the content, modeling the ideas that I want to impart about race, ethnicity, and social class, and teaching SAE. It has been observed that Black teachers teaching in Black classrooms will code-switch between Ebonics and SAE in lectures, speaking primarily in SAE and code-switching to Ebonics when describing a difficult concept or to punctuate an important idea. I find myself engaging in this behavior, but overall, I think my speech is a mangled mess. When I lecture, I tend to meander among the jargon of my academic discipline, my own home dialect, and the various dialects of my students. I think that my verbal play is completely lost on my students and they have no idea what I am talking about much of the time, because they lack proficiency in their own first language. I forget that the children (or adults) I am teaching have limited vocabularies and often very weak grammar. Upon reflection, I realize that my primary goal is to educate, and to meet that end, I think I should adopt a strict attitude towards using SAE in the classroom. Using SAE as classroom speech gives students a strong model and the opportunity to practice, and thereby gain fluency, in a language that they may have no opportunity to use outside of the classroom, and they need to learn SAE to prepare for working in a global economy.
Two things influence the development of my attitude. First, my awareness of increasing language diversity among the student population, including exceptionalities in language ability. In the future, I am not going to be teaching in a linguistically homogenous classroom. Not only will my students speak more than one dialect of English, some of them will be English Language Learners. Some of my students will have speech and hearing disabilities. My code-switching and use of dialect may be helpful to communicate with individual learners, but in a public school classroom of thirty students, this is likely to create an additional obstacle for students already struggling with language.
Secondly, I have had the experience of being in college classes where the instructor is a non-native speaker of English, and I have observed how Americans who possess little proficiency with SAE experience a strong negative response to lectures. For example, I had a teacher of mathematics who was ethnically Chinese. He has been teaching in the United States for over thirty years and is highly proficient in English, although his pronunciation of certain sounds is imperfect and the cadence of his speech sounds unusual to a native speaker. This Chinese teacher lectured using Standard American English, yet half of the class complained that they "couldn't understand" him and made remarks that "he can't speak English." At first, I was confused by the other students response, because I had no difficulty understanding lectures and hardly noticed the teacher's accent. I observed the students who complained that the couldn't understand and noticed that those students used the local dialect when speaking in the classroom. I inferred that their inability to understand the professor was related to the students' lack of proficiency with SAE. It was not the teacher who "couldn't speak English." It was the students.
The state of the world today is that English is our modern-day Latin. It is the lingua franca. In North America, SAE is the variant of English that is most widely used in commerce as well as scholarship. Proficiency using SAE can be a major determining factor in the opportunities for work that a student will have. This is why I want to model SAE. It is probably unusal for a math teacher to spend so much time thinking about teaching language, but the language of mathematics has been emphasized as vital to what we need to be teaching at the K-12, and the national content standards reflect this. There is a precise formal language used for the discussion of mathematics (See http://wac.colostate.edu/llad/v4n1/jamison.pdf I love this quote the author employs, "One should NOT aim at being possible to understand, but at being IMPOSSIBLE to misunderstand. -Quintilian, circa 100 AD", however much of the teacher speech in a high school classroom is not delivering content knowledge. When we engage in classroom management, this is the time for us to be modeling SAE. Even though discussing hall passes is a perfectly appropriate situation for speaking in the dialect of the students, speaking SAE in these situations provides ELL as well as English-speakers not proficient in SAE to improve their language skills.
The types of scenarios related to the use of minority dialects in the classroom that students describe as being damaging to their self-esteem, I don't think I need to worry about perpetuating them. My ethics regarding how teachers behave towards students, consistent with national standards, dictate that teachers do not bully students nor do we permit a climate of bullying in our schools. Singling out individuals or members of minority groups for ridicule in the classroom is not consistent with modern professional expectations of educators. I won't be engaging in behavior like this for any reason, so why do I worry about it so much relative to students' use of language? Respecting the diversity of language that students bring to the school is a small part of the basic idea of respecting students.