Reflection #7

1.       Descriptions of the levels of classroom discussion: 

teacher to teacher – After designing a project, teachers continue to communicate to work together on procedural and formative assessment to guide instruction.  This can be done in person, on blogs, and using Wikis, etc.

students to students – Students communicate about their learning experiences within their teams and with each other; while the teacher remains the facilitator to give feedback and allow for opportunities to practice skills learned and help students take on more responsibility for their own learning.

teacher to students – Teachers circulate, observe, carefully listen, and ask probing and follow-up questions to smaller groups of students to promote higher-order thinking.  These higher-order questions need to be in the form of evaluation, analysis, comparison, etc. from Bloom’s Taxonomy and help students garner a deeper understanding of content/concepts taught.
 

Overall, classroom discussion is encouraged with and in small groups and teachers need to stay away from too much whole-class instruction.   This is interesting, because when I did my pre-internship, my mentor teacher was required to do whole-class instruction everyday for twenty minutes for the language arts block alone.  It was a new requirement. 

I agree, however,  that teachers should not be the only ones providing information to students, rather students should be learning from each other by researching and investigating, using their curiosity to guide investigation and construct their own understanding, and learn how to ask good questions to find answers. 

2.       Questions for “checking in” on students during a project:

Questions for “checking in” are all probing questions that allow us to get a better understanding of how students learn best and where we need to focus to make necessary adjustments to our projects and to keep students on task.  As teachers, we need to ask procedural questions (e.g., Are we staying on schedule?), where we track student’s progress towards milestones and deadlines by reminding them of the project calendar and by monitoring their project logs and checklists.  We can ask questions about teamwork (e.g., Are team members getting along? Is one student carrying too much of the load for the whole team?), that allow us to find out about the team’s progress, the team dynamics, and who is contributing, in order to start a dialogue about team work if students are slacking.  Answers can be given in person, on blogs, in journals, and by using Wikis, which allow us to see who is actually contributing.  We can ask questions to promote understanding (e.g., Have you considered/thought about this…?), which are necessary when students get off task.  These questions or suggesting resources/tools to keep projects moving, redirect students, and are a way to push students beyond expectations.  Lastly, we can ask questions as encouragement for self-assessment and reflection about the project that allows students to describe their challenges and frustrations, as well as ask their own questions and share their excitement.   

3.       Benefits to students when optimizing the use of technology:

When optimizing the use of technology, students are able to gain new insight into how to communicate key content and with a culturally diverse audience; follow their interests to meet learning goals; replay technology such as podcasts to match their learning speeds without having to ask the teacher to go back over information they did not understand the first time; stay organized;  expand their horizons by connecting to outside experts or a broader community via e-mail and online collaborative tools; access their workspace anywhere, anytime, and from any computer connected to the Internet; use appropriate tools to extend their reach; take advantage of available tools to help organize their research; keep track of important milestones; collaborate with team members; receive timely feedback from teachers on their projects; critique their peers as authentic feedback, and use technology to keep parents involved in student learning. 

4.       21^st-century skills that can make or break a project:

One of the 21^st-century skills that can make or break a project is being familiar with troubleshooting strategies for getting a project back on track after dealing with real-world challenges that can cause setbacks.  As teachers, we need support students through questioning rather than giving them all the answers and emphasize conversation/discussion that includes brainstorming with students and teachers to help students understand that real-world projects come from real-world challenges.  Another skill that can affect the success of a project is teamwork.  Sometimes the team dynamics may be not ideal, and as teachers we need to help students learn to manage their own team conflicts with the help of team contracts where roles and responsibilities are spelled out, and make teamwork a focus of formal assessment with the help of a teamwork-scoring rubric.  I have not had very many good experiences with teamwork in the past since I often ended up doing the majority of the work.  Therefore, I feel that it is important to hold each student accountable for the success of the group.    

5.       How does this chapter relate to our project/topic:

This chapter informs us of how we can keep a project moving by giving us ideas of how to interact with each other and students, as well as thinking on our feet if unexpected situations arise or if students veer off in the wrong directions.  We are at this point of our project and we need to brainstorm to make sure we are not doing the same lessons and that all of our lessons are meeting learning goals by asking each other questions in our small groups to become real-world problem solvers.  Understanding the right questioning is important for student’s success and we need to discuss and ask each other questions as to how we can get to the final presentation of our project and make certain that each of our team members is contributing equally.  Our instructor has only used whole-class instruction to make announcements, to introduce a new concept, or to demonstrate a skill.  We are starting to recognize the benefits of using technology in our projects, such as accessing our blogs/projects anywhere, keeping track of our milestones, getting feedback from our professor about our lessons, and authentic feedback from our peers, etc.  Overall, we need to be aware that teaching students how to communicate properly and ask the right questions, troubleshooting, and managing conflict is critical to the success of a project.