My+Final+Reflection+Paper

Timothy J. Andrews Return to Tim Final Reflection for Current Directions

My original purpose in entering this course was to develop my skills in differentiation for use in the classroom. This purpose has been fulfilled with some exciting and surprising bonuses added in. In the end, I found the elements of technology and brain-based learning to be highly valuable in advancing my thought about teaching. I overcame some blocks and blind spots that have long kept me from actively utilizing Internet technology in any but the most basic ways in my instruction. I am grateful to have taken this class after a year of teaching. Throughout the course, I had opportunity to reflect on my own practice, identifying cases where my instincts have put me on the right path, but probably more where my planning and practice have been flawed. All of the readings have helped me to put my finger on why some lessons really flopped, and have suggested some ways I might fix them. Particularly in my thinking about students I would have labeled as unmotivated or undisciplined, my perspective has shifted. I realize that I really have a responsibility to translate the concepts of Differentiation and brain-based learning into practice in order that these and other students can find multiple entry points into the material. Differentiation, as I understand it today, goes beyond heterogeneity of ability levels. It really goes beyond a compromise or a concession to those who are less academically advanced, as I might have tended to think before. During the previous year, I gave differentiation very little thought, since I was teaching tracked classes and could presumably depend on each class to be similarly grouped. This reasoning was flawed in two ways: 1) it failed to acknowledge the vast range of ability levels, interests and learning styles that would be found even in a tracked class, and 2) it failed recognize that students of all ability levels can benefit from the application of differentiation. A lot of it is just really good teaching practice, which leads naturally into methods which echo the research on brain-based learning. A very helpful thing I internalized and practiced during this course was structuring my lessons around definable learning objectives. I got a lot out of collaborating on honing and sharpening those, both with peers and with Charlie. These are a critical piece to differentiating without losing a clear learning focus—a key to Tomlinson’s assertion that “Differentiation is rooted in assessment” (4) Part of assessment is having a clear idea of what I am looking for. The reading we did on Mager’s model for writing learning objectives was very helpful to me. Differentiation has the possibility of becoming really inane if it is just about a variety of activities with no real conceptual thread to pull them together. As I designed my unit, I strove to be sure that each activity was integrated into the set of clear learning objectives I’d laid out for the unit. This was a departure from habit for me, as I often paste learning objectives onto lesson plans at the end, which makes the activities the drivers, rather than the learning. I hope that, having read The Art of Changing the Brain, there will be some teacher mistakes that will just feel too absurd to contemplate. I hope, too, that it will give me the courage to buck the established norms—I think here particularly about the drumbeat of “covering the material”—where they clearly don’t serve student learning. I have been guilty, in my first year, of just trying to hammer away at some concept that some or all of my students just weren’t getting—say, subject pronoun agreement—with the result that the students who already got it, continued to get it, and the students who didn’t get it continued not to get it. Zull explains why this is hopeless; “Each learner brings his own special set of neuronal networks to class. There’s nothing we can do about that. They really can’t check them at the door!” (104) I could repeat my instruction on subject pronoun agreement a hundred times and some students would be none the wiser for it, because the neuronal networks are just not there to receive that particular set of concepts, yet. I can either figure out where they are now and teach to that or keep beating my head against a wall. Yes, I can set the bar high, but without doing the scaffolding work and the prior knowledge work to bring students from where they are, I will be whistling in the wind. The use of technology will almost certainly form an important part of my teaching practice and I probably would not have said anything of the sort, two weeks ago. I have not been an early adopter of web technology, but now I believe it will occupy an important place in my curriculum. What seems the most exciting thing about bringing Web 2.0 into the classroom is to given the students an experience of authorship with the possibility that someone who is not a teacher will really read their writing on the web. I believe this is an exciting option. I am also excited to learn how within reach of my students will be the possibility of podcasting. This creates yet another way in which they can be heard. I have also gained a greater appreciation for all the resources available on the web. I will probably be less quick to narrowly define appropriate research sources. I have tended to take the position that appropriate sources were primarily those which could appear in print but were archived online. But lots of good information is to be had in Blogs and other purely web-based documents. I would want to push students to explore all that and determine some rules for acceptable use. Certainly gone are the days when I can draw a hard line between the “reliable” world of print and the “unreliable” world of the Internet. I am particularly excited about my podcast project. I think such projects can really build student engagement while also bringing across the major principles of my discipline. I believe students have a knack for picking up technical knowledge when it has a clear content application. In this sense, it makes as much sense to explore this technology in the English discipline as it does in isolation in a technology course. If the content is compelling, the technical know-how will spring up around it, I believe. On a very practical level, our class use of the wiki has impressed upon me how much the web makes sense to me as an architecture for organizing my course materials. I am not a well-organized person. My desk generally has an undulating pile of papers on it of long-forgotten provenance. I do a terrible job keeping track of missing work and what materials I need to provide to absent students. I have long heard colleagues speak of creating course websites and just felt intimidated. I loved the ease with which we grew the Wiki, adding links to websites and documents with a few keystrokes and clicks. This makes a course website feel within reach of my powers. I love the idea of creating a coherent, tidy, but also goofy virtual space for my students and me to navigate course materials. Gone, I hope, are the days of flipping through a folder to see if I saved an extra copy of the vocabulary list for the kid who’s had measles for the last week. Implicit in this is the idea that the website becomes a site of empowerment for the student where she can take responsibility and direct, productive action to keep up with the class. The flow of information from teacher to student and vice versa has another pathway. In a way, this is a piece of the differentiation puzzle, too, since students who may miss verbal cues can access a written record of teacher instructions at any time. The Internet is really creating the expectation of the portability of information and its access. We’ve stopped writing so many things down, since we can google, mapquest, or check our webmail when the need arises for a given piece of data. I believe the ways we manage and communicate classroom information will have to echo this trend. I am surprised at how much I have come to regard technology as a meaningful and substantive aid in serving students’ learning needs. There are powerful tools for differentiation in information technology. One explanation for this is the intense focus on media both in our culture and on our Internet. It is a world of images and sounds and they have become increasingly manipulatable. As an English teacher, I am vulnerable to the temptation to regard all this as a threat to the good old culture of books and eternal classics. I can believe my task is to create a bulwark against these new, transient forms. I believe this turns out to be a myopic view. Moreover, the Zull’s model suggests it is completely ineffectual. For better or for worse, the prior knowledge of our students includes a lot of visual and audio media. To ignore or to fight this is to pass up a valuable opportunity and to do these students a disservice. The trick, I believe, is to continue building bridges between the new media and the older literary forms. Blogs, Podcasts and Wikis present the possibility of actually reinvigorating the relationship of students to text. The irony of the whole thing is that, because of copyright law, many of the oldest texts are the first to become readily accessible in digital form in the public domain. This may present some interesting and counterintuitive possibilities. In sum, it has been a very rich two weeks. I hope that these ideas have found their way into my long-term memory and will emerge in relevant ways as I plan my lessons for the fall. Amidst the excitement, I must bare in mind that these ideas are at their best in proactive rather than reactive form. One of the realities of my second year will undoubtedly be days, even weeks when I am doing more reacting than planning. I hope we all will remember to be gentle with ourselves and avoid a deficit model when regarding ourselves as assiduously as we avoid it when regarding our students.

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