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This is such a great image!! I can totally imagine how in awe Michelle and the Heron’s must have been, what a cool experience. I also agree that flexibility in lessons is a huge strength that Prairie Creek teachers demonstrate. It is inspiring to watch them flow along with spontaneous events and incorporate them into their lessons seamlessly. I wish I’d gotten to see the murmuration!
Hi Thomas,
I enjoyed reading your blog about the SSC, especially because I am in a Prairie Creek classroom which is a pretty different setting. Your thoughts about how teacher expectations interact with student motivation are really interesting. I especially relate to the distinction between quality and quantity. I used to get bothered in high school when I felt like my teachers emphasized quantity over quality by giving us busy work that I didn’t feel like I was actually learning from. Instead of rising to expectations of high quality work, I dropped to the expectations of just getting work done. I realized that there was a flaw in the system when I was able to get good grades (by completing work thoroughly) without really learning or being interested in the material. It is easier and takes less effort for teachers to evaluate students based on how much work they’ve done instead of how well work was done, but is this the best way to encourage intrinsic motivation and hold students to expectations that ask them to challenge themselves, engage critically with material, and rise to their best selves?
Hi Sophia and Logan,
I loved reading your blog!! It was super interesting. The first thing that I wanted to ask about was the teacher putting students’ progress on the board in front of everyone. I was thinking about how I would feel if this happened in my class – if I wouldn’t care because I was used to it, or if I would compare myself to others, or if it would motivate me to work hard to show my progress. I was wondering why you thought that tactic didn’t go in the “motivation” part of the lesson plan? How did you see it affecting students?
Secondly, I thought your stories about working with students individually were amazing! Both of your abilities to embrace student passions/wonderful ideas to help them learn are impressive. I could see it being easy to immediately tell a student to stop singing, or stop counting rabbits, because they need to focus on the assignment. But in reality those tendencies could be connected to the assignment in a way that increases student intrinsic motivation to learn! So cool!
Hi Adam,
I really enjoyed reading your post! Your observations about behavior reinforcement and punishment in your tutoring location are really interesting. I especially appreciated your discussion of the tutor who was allowing their student to avoid work by talking about video games. I like that you acknowledged the tendency to do this in order to bond with the student, but also made the point that you need to find a balance between being liked and also being an adult that can guide the student to finish their work well and learn from it. This is a balance that I also find can be tricky to find. I also enjoy your philosophical musings and your interest in Waterford. You might be destined to be a math teacher! You seem to easily incorporate math into the world around you and that’s a really important part of making math feel applicable to real life that I often found was lacking in my own mathematic education. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Isaac,
I really appreciate your response. I do think that in this post my observations focused on where gender differences were enforced, not where they were challenged. You make a good point that this may not be a holistic representation of Prairie Creek, and that my observations about gender rolls are more reflective of socialized behavior that originates outside of the school. I actually didn’t know about the cooking classes, that’s so cool! I agree that Prairie Creek does a unique job of encouraging all students, regardless of gender, to learn different skills and experience the outdoors. Thank you for reminding me to step back out of the small interactions and look at the bigger picture of the school’s approach to gender.
Hi Molly, I enjoyed reading your blog. I think that your point that girls seem to gain social capital by being surrounded by people is an interesting one. Do you think that boys are able to have an equal amount of social power even if they’re not surrounded by others? I wonder why that might be. I also appreciated your application of Gilligan’s “morality of care” to the girl’s response about masks. What are the mask rules in your school? Do student opinions on wearing masks seem to be influenced by their friends?
Hi Izzy, I enjoyed reading your story about being able to help the student who was stuck on calculating percent error. It seems like you really caught him in his ZPD, when he was struggling to figure it out himself (especially because he missed the class when it was taught) but was able to successfully find the percent error with your help, and later on his own! That seems like a great example of social learning. I am also interested by your observations about students building identity. You identify that one student (the one who often misses class) seems to still be in the industry vs. inferiority stage as he is not very confident in his own abilities. I wonder how this overlaps with his identity building – has he decided that part of his identity is that he is not “good” at school? Can Erikson’s stages overlap in such a way? Or maybe they’re not actually overlapping, but rather this student has come into the identity building stage feeling inferior? I’d be interested to see what you think about these questions.
Hi Angela, I enjoyed reading your blog! One part in particular caught my attention because we’ve been talking about Erik Erikson this week. When you talked about the common questions that you get, it’s interesting to me that they seem to be more about checking if students are on the right track than asking a question because they don’t actually understand the material. I’ve been thinking about the Erikson stage of industry vs. inferiority because that’s the stage my students are in, and the questions that students are asking you make me wonder where they’re at with that stage. Because they seem to be concerned with making sure they are on the right track before continuing to work on a problem. I wonder if this actually suggests that they don’t have much confidence in their own ideas/processes, because they need to be told that they’re right throughout the process instead of fully working on a problem before seeing if they got it right. Like it seems like they’re not super confident in their own decision-making/problem-solving. Do you have any thoughts or observations about that? This is just something I’m thinking about and popped into my head when reading your blog – not a judgement of you or the teacher or the students at all! It’s awesome that you’re able to be a helpful MKO in the classroom!
Renee, your observations about the differences between ninth and eleventh graders are really interesting! I was chatting with a friend the other day and they brought up the fact that the last time ninth graders had a normal full school year was sixth grade, and they only got part way through seventh! High school is already often a big change for students coming from middle school, but to barely have gotten any time in middle school and then be thrown into high school must be overwhelming. On the other hand, eleventh graders already had some experience in high school. So your observation that eleventh graders are more comfortable in the space and with each other makes a lot of sense. I enjoyed reading about how your two classes are adjusting to school with this chem teacher, and it’s cool that you get to see how the same teacher interacts with two different grades and classes!
