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Angela, I keep thinking about the example you shared in class and in this post of Mrs. Talbot giving her students the superstar treatment! I have been thinking about the question of whether her reaction and methods are age appropriate, and how while maybe in our eyes her students may be aging out of them a little bit, they seem to be working great. Something I’ve noticed in my class is that I think very students would identify themselves as superstars or tell you that they are “good” at what we’re learning in class. I don’t have concrete evidence of this, and I know that most of the students I have been working with are those who need the most help in the class, but I would guess that very few of these students have ever been told that they are superstars in the world of school. I can only imagine what kind of effect it would have if their teachers at younger ages had told them that they were superstar Language Arts students, even if they would no longer be receiving that exact same treatment. I really like how your example captures the power to engage that can come from teacher enthusiasm and positive feedback – helping students to feel special is so important!
Arlo, I really appreciated reading about the two different times Mrs. McDonald was faced with issues around diversity and student opinions in a Global Studies class and seeing how she handled the different situations. It’s such a challenge because those two white students need to be educated on why their views in that situation are not inclusive of the latine student, but then should that education come at the expense of the latine student? It seems like the obvious answer is no, but then the question arises of how to get at these topics in a class composed of students with a variety of backgrounds. The second situation also gets at this, as it seems to be such a fine line between giving students the opportunity to share their own experience if they want versus demanding that they share their experiences and effectively tokenizing them. I’m not sure what the answer is to this predicament, but it seems like what is key regardless is teachers establishing a good relationship with the students, perhaps to the extent to that the teacher can ask the student ahead of time if they would like to have their voice centered in the class around the given subject. But even that could be harmful! A very challenging situation for sure.
omg Sophia! That was so sweet to read about how Allie told you that it warmed her heart when you praised her reading. I can only imagine how that must have felt to have her say that to you. It’s certainly strange how that sweet, appreciative behavior can come in tandem with things like yelling and hitting, and makes me wonder what kind of struggles Allie is having in other aspects of her life developmentally, whether at home or otherwise. It also makes me think about the students I have been working with, who seem to have similar capacities to be grateful for and appreciative of school and simultaneously not happy to be there and un-eager to learn. It makes me wonder how to reach these students, as they don’t seem to be as expressive of their opinions and their feelings as Allie may be. It seems that that expressiveness is something that makes it so fun (and certainly trying!) to work with Allie, and I wonder if there is a way to still eek out that kind of emotion with high schools or if it seems to fade as social capital gains importance in the adolescent’s life.
Shaw, I really enjoyed reading your entry. I think you bring up a really interesting question of whether, especially for things like gender imbalance that seem very challenging to dismantle, it is better to try and address it outright with something like the extra meetings you mentioned or to try and sort of phase it out of the classroom through positive reinforcement of desired behavior. It seems that there is a lot to be said for taking the time to talk with students about things that are going on, but you make a really good point that maybe students would see that extra time and care as a punishment and it would only serve to burden them and make class seem less desirable. Thinking about this in my high school class, for example, I would guess that if we talked with the students for 10 minutes about how gender manifests itself in the classroom, most everyone would be incredibly bored and be further disinterested in gender issues than they may have been beforehand. I’m not sure what the answer is, but hopefully we can come to something that can work to dismantle gender imbalances in the classroom.
Clarissa, I really enjoyed reading your last two paragraphs about what you would maybe do differently if you were in Sean’s shoes, as I am in the same class and I have been asking myself the same question for the past few weeks. Thinking about the question in tandem with the example you gave in your last paragraph, I think I personally am coming to the challenging understanding that there is honestly very little Mr. DuBe should be doing differently, at least that I can see. It’s hard for me to think about how even when it seems he is doing everything right, there are some students who just really don’t want to be there and that no matter how hard you try, you might not be able to reach them in an effective way. It’s something I’ve talked with Mr. DuBe about a bit, and maybe we’ll touch on it in class soon, but I’m curious what theorists and psychologists have to say about students who seem to be in a state of foreclosure regarding not wanting to be at school or learn.
Trina, I really enjoyed reading your blog post and seeing such a strong contrast between the work you are doing at Prairie Creek and the work I’ve been doing at the High School. The concept of having classrooms / classes made up of multiple grades seems like such a good idea for the providing of MKO’s for students, and seems like the kind of thing that would be a great thing to implement on a larger scale. The amount of interaction that it seems goes on at Prairie Creek also made me realize that very little to no academic collaboration occurs between students at the high school, as students essentially do their own work silently, and any talking they do is during breaks or as a distraction from whatever they are working on.
It’s also amazing to read about how integral and purposeful the concepts of modeling and scaffolding are, as it seems the school is much more able to implement the strategies and they are core to the mission of PC. I was talking to Mr. DuBe the other day, and he was telling me about how his Professional Learning Community is very underdeveloped and the amount of coordination between classes and grades is lacking, which contrasts strongly with a place like PC that seems to have a cohesive, well thought out plan for cultivating children as both students and as people.
The question that you raise at the end of your second to last paragraph, “Why bother trying to understand an uninteresting conversation below one’s developmental level?”, strikes me as an incredibly important observation to make and something core to the question of learning languages starting from an older age. I can recall myself being in middle school and high school talking about all kinds of interesting things during my regular classes, and then having to return to elementary concepts in my Spanish classes that often felt incredibly boring, even though the aspects that we were learning were still in our zones of proximal development for the language. It seems that one solution to this problem could be to start language education at an earlier age so that children can develop their language skills alongside their other skills, but this rather unrealistic, especially considering the variety of languages students have available to them. I wonder if the best strategy is to try and do things at a level that still engage the skills characteristic of the specific Piagetian stage, but focusing on simpler issues and using basic vocabulary. I don’t have any kind of a concrete plan as to how this could be done, but I would imagine what hurts children’s interest is not the specific content, but that they are asked to decrease the complexity of their thinking to engage with the content.
