Chapter 8 focuses on problems with our grading system. As the book says, grades are subjective. I quickly realized this when I became a teacher. The Met focuses on writing a narrative in order to better describe the students learning and progress. This takes away the focus from letter grades to over all comprehension and ability. The question we always ask is "what type of grade does he/she get?" That question is antiquated and reduces a student to a letter, rather than focusing and building upon their strength.
This chapter focuses on making parents and families an integral part of the students education. In order for a school to take their culture and effectiveness to the next level, parents concerns must be heard and acted upon. At one of the Met schools, parents even had a say in whether students should call teachers by their first names, or not. I really like what was done at Thayer regarding parent outreach. It is literally out of the box thinking and exciting. The underlying question for this chapter can be found on p. 144. It asks "who are we to make decisions for other peoples kids?"
The three Rs!!! This chapter sums up where education needs to be yesterday. Material must be relevant, rigorous and there must be relationships. The material must be relevant to the students lives, needs, and passions. The material must also be rigorous in the way that it makes the student have intense concentration to understand the material. Rigor can also be observed in activity that requires skill. Then there is the base, which is relationships. The mentioned can not be adequately applied without relationships. Without relationships there is a breakdown in communication and understanding. Relationships must extend past the school and be made parents and guardians and create pathways in the community.
In chapter five we learn the importance in understanding what the student is passionate about. If we can capture the passion of the students and incorporate that into their learning and goals, we can spark an interest int them. This would give them more reason to attend school and get involved in a deeper level. The take away from this chapter can be summed up in one sentence that is found on p. 98 and it reads "When we are interested in what we are learning, no one has to force us ti keep learning; we just do." As the book said "the people who are the best at their jobs are the ones who are passionate about their work." The students will perform better and surprise us if we can pinpoint what they are passionate about.
This chapter calls on educators to be accountable. It is easy to blame student behavior on the student, or the students family culture. However, this chapter makes the educator accountable. The chapter asks us to question what about our school environment, or school culture allows the behavior. It is easy to say the culture is the result of the students, but staff plays a big role in the culture expectations. Also, educators must reexamine how consequences are given. For example, it would be more beneficial to the students to be given a consequence like community service, rather than just suspension. The student may learn valuable lessons through community service. This chapter speaks to me in my role as a police officer and my on campus interaction with students.
A great analogy I liked reading about in this class was Rethinking Student Motivation, which was a comparison of education and business. The role of business frankly speaking is to sell a good or service. Businesses have marketers and salespeople. Education has administration and teachers. Our goods and services are knowledge and activities. We have to become expert marketers in order to "sell" our product to our customers. Our customers are the students in our classrooms. How does a business become successful? It becomes successful by marketing a product or service in a way that is specifically designed for the targeted demographic. As teachers (marketers), first we must know our own product (material). We must know and understand our specific demographic. Demographics can change dramatically depending on where we teach.
PBL's. Well I there is another fancy term for something that teachers have been doing for decades.....not quite. The introduction to PBL's made me realize how much I have been doing them wrong. Specifically, I have not made my projects relevant. Relevant to what is trending in our culture, or the law enforcement community. This was made even more clear through the idea of "doing projects vs project based learning". I have been making my students do a "project" with easy directions and no in depth creativity. I essentially made it the cute little bow at the end of a lesson. PBL's should be the lesson. The project should engage, challenge, and make them answer a complex question.
The driving idea in this chapter that made me think, was the small schools idea. I especially liked how the Shore-ham Wading River school was intentionally kept small. Shore-ham knew they could do a better job of creating relationships so they built upon the idea and reorganized into having three small schools with grades 6th through 8th. This allowed teachers to teach the same students for three years. In turn, this allows for deeper relationships to be constructed and for teachers to truly get to know their students and understand them. My wife and I put our daughter into a Montessori school for Pre-K. We struggled with the idea of keeping her in IT for grade school as Montessori prides itself on being small and creating relationships with their students. We were able to put her in a new dual immersion school in which she is the second kindergarten class. In chapter three, Littky advises that students in smaller schools continually perform better in math and science, and appear to have a better attitude towards education. This is interesting as the mainstream opinion is the bigger the school the better. The two most recent high schools in Stanislaus County are huge and look like a college.
Being introduced to the concept of the Big Picture school has been enlightening.
One of the ideas I like the most was the real world learning. Big Picture students intern twice a week for an entire day. This allows the students to be immersed into the culture and requirements of the job while allowing them to truly grasp how to do it. I was particularly interested in this part of the program because I am a CTE teacher. I believe it would be extremely beneficial for my students to be immersed in law enforcement for two days a week all day. This immersion leads to "authentic assessment" of their work. These students are not given test, but have to show they have obtained and understand the information through real world projects and exhibitions. This directly correlates to CTE as most of the work is hands on and must be exhibited. We do not take test in the real world on the job. We show we understand and can do the job by exhibiting the required behavior and providing the desired outcome. As a CTE teacher, I was taken back when I learned a little more about the origination of CTE. The idea behind CTE was developed decades ago with the hope of literally attempting to keep students in school. The problem was students that were not planning to attend college, or were not from a certain demographic were not staying in school. CTE was developed with the thinking in mind that the students who would be taking CTE courses were not as academically literate. Also, at that time, they observed there would be a reduction of the work force and had to come up with a way to fill the gaps. Fast forward a few decades and it appears we are back in the same position. Drop out rates are continuously high and reflect negatively on the culture and aspirations of the US on the world stage. I have been preached at the past few months by the powers that be that CTE is the one of the new frontiers of public education and that we are preparing student to be career ready. That students should be able to seamlessly move into a hands on career from our programs. However, it appears the targeted demographic of CTE are the same students the founders targeted with the idea decades ago. We are targeting students that might otherwise drop out of school. We are targeting them with of softer approach to logical and in depth learning. At the same time I wonder if this is not the purpose of our job. Should we knowingly target those that might otherwise not succeed in a purely academic environment? After all we are giving them a pathway to succeed.
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