Sunday, March 25, 2007

Reflection: Why do I bother?

Yes, why do we bother? Teaching today is a formidable profession to place oneself in. Last year (2006) I had started my university studies long distance, while teaching casually, I was then offered a block of teaching for two terms. Of course I jumped at the chance to have a secure work pattern for myself and my family for a time. This was to be a real epiphany of my inadequacy and shortcomings and whether I would actually even become a teacher.

During a short stint of working at TAFE, teaching adults drawing, I had enjoyed myself thoroughly. I approached my teaching with vigor and enthusiasm, and seemed to manage the classroom behaviour well enough. I had placed my resume at various schools in the area on the off chance that I might get a day of teaching now and again, nothing happened for about six months.

The work at TAFE had run out, we were financially stressed, I didn't seem to be able to get any sort of work that I applied for, things weren't looking to good. At Mass, with the family one Sunday I just sat there and said to God " I can't do this anymore, You have to show me what you want me to do, I give up I'm in your hands, just point me in the right direction", there was a lot more I said that night as I sat in the church going through the motions of the mass that I know of by rote but don't always appreciate. Two days later a school called me to do a days casual teaching as one of its visual art teachers was sick, that was in June 2005 and I haven't really stopped teaching since then.

"Be careful what you pray for", is a well trodden phrase in today's world of euphemistic jargon ism, but when it really happens to you, you will be presented with really big challenges. I had no idea what teaching teenagers was about when I first started, I was flying by the seat of my pants, so to speak. If I had been a lot younger I might have crashed and burned long before I did. I need to give you some idea here of how I was employed, they called me in to do a days casual work that ended up lasting a term and a half, working as a casual everyday, which means every period was filled and then I would go home and construct lesson plans, classes, exams, assessment tasks and all the marking in my own time. Surprisingly although this was very exhausting and stressful, I managed to get through it all. With virtually no direction or support I've had to make my way through the jungle on my own and learn (on my own) what it is to be a teacher,(and I'm still learning and always will be) I've always liked a challenge.

In 2006 I started studying again, and working in the same high school, I was offered another block of teaching Visual Art from years 7 - 11. I said yes and within weeks regretted my decision, I was temporary part time, I was there five days a week, I was earning a quarter of the money I used to earn, and I was working even harder than I had the year before. There were a few fundamental factors here that made this job really hard for me at this point. Firstly I just did not have the experience, here I was, trying hard to put into practice what I was learning from the textbooks on how to be a teacher and it wasn't working, especially the two elective classes that I had of year9 and year11. I had quite a few students in both these classes with learning and psychological difficulties and some really lazy students who resented the fact that I made them work. I realize now, that I had no support from my colleagues, I was left to sink or swim, at the time there was just too much for me to worry about with the classes I had, than to give time to my own psychological state.

My year 7's and 8's were fine, and I had already covered this work the year before, so I was well informed of the content and outcomes required for these students as well as the programmes being in place to work from. Years 9 and 11 had no programmes written or assessment tasks or anything, I had to construct these on my own, the teachers around me were too busy to help me except in the most minimal ways e.g. pointing to draws where I might find some information that might be useful. To tell you what happened to me during those two terms would take thousands of words, there was so much that went on, suffice to say that at the end of the second term I was a complete wreck. I really could not face going back into a classroom, I did not want to become a teacher. I didn't know what I was going to do, I was burnt out, fed up and terribly defeated, I had lost every bit of confidence in myself, I was just so much of a mess.

It isn't until you fail, or maybe I should say don't succeed well at something that you start to question and learn yourself. Yes I ran away for a while, after my perceived failure, ( I'm sure not too many people saw it the same way I did) and I really had to work out what had gone wrong. There I was trying to do everything right for everyone, without realising what it was I needed to do for myself. Paramountly, to be in a safe learning environment myself, and I wasn't. To feel supported and nurtured along the way, none of these things had happened. Not only this but human contact is vital in the learning process, doing uni on line was just to wrong for me at this time. As it happened a friend mentioned Notre Dame and said to look it up, which I did, now my life and learning are back on track(yes, the roller coaster track) . This time round I know why I bother.

Teaching isn't just all the theorists and how we learn, I see Vygotskys Zone Of Proximal Development being brought into play everyday I'm in the classroom "Miss, how do I do ....." I will then ask other students "if they were the teacher how would they show their classmate how to do ......" and there are always kids who will offer that guiding support and peer to peer learning. Constructivism gives us language to hang ideas on, a launching pad to operate from, with the use of the epistemology of how we learn, we then have the building blocks at our disposal. So that in turn, the individual teacher, no matter where they are teaching understands what they need to do to help students learn to form their own building blocks of knowledge for their future. When I read about Piaget and Vygotsky last year It made no sense at all I was so lost in all these theorists, now it's making sense, I can understand how they put their theories to work and how it functions in the real classroom everyday and how I use it as a building block of my teaching knowledge. I've read Gardner before and I already use his multiple intelligences in the classroom as much as I can, it made sense when I read these and to use them seemed so spontaneous and natural (teaching visual art gives me a good scope for this) The article by Costa and Kallick " Habits of Mind and Thinking" was really important to me in regard to my own ability to think and grow, and in return help my students think and grow. Margaret Wheatley's article will be an invaluable tool for me in my future classroom teaching and how I get students to interact and support each other in the process of learning.

In future assignments I will show in a more specific way how I can use theory to develop lesson plans etc, back to the point of why I bother! Just this past Friday I had a year10 Religion class for the last period of the day, it had been raining, they hadn't been allowed off the verandahs and they were just feral when they came in. I would like to say some how I won them over with engagement and lively discussion, but this wasn't the case, work was set for them and we had to do it. Yes, it can be such a battle, but in that class there were boys that I have had in other classes, and they were great, they did their work, and the others were what I expected them to be. look at the week, lots of rain, so not much burning off of testosterone playing footy or sport, look at the subject, yipee! boys love religion in year 10, not to mention having to find bible quotations and explain them.
Bringing Christ's message into this world is a formidable task (especially to yr10) but I will persist. They need the love shown to them that Christ showed to all mankind, yes I make my classes clean up their room before leaving it, as a respect for their environment, how can I know if their parents teach them this. Sometimes the role I am filling is almost parental, I never leave a class without having learnt something from my students. And as a parent I've learnt so much from my own children. Teaching is a two way street of giving, and the more you understand how to facilitate this giving, in all it's complications and convolutions, I'll refer to Costa and Kallick here, thinking flexibly, creating, innovating, imagining, gathering data through all the senses, listening and understanding with empathy, remaining open to continuous learning and a sense of humor and much more, the more you give selflessly the more you receive in personal growth.
How else will we give hope to our youth and try to arrest this breakdown of society that we are constantly being presented with, that they are constantly seeing. how do we show them that they are loved and that there is hope and not just empty materialism and vanity. I can't just walk away, even though I not a very good teacher yet I hope in time to be a better one, God didn't give me the talents that he did for selfish purposes, he wants me to grow and develop them and with this type of awareness I can help other people to see and develop their talents, and maybe go on to do wonderful things with their lives, or maybe have a better day because they had art with Miss Rooney.


http://www.teacherfiles.com/animated/animated_school.htm
Wheatley_Archive\wheatleysolvingnotattacking.html36
Costa, A and Kallick, B. (2002) Discovering and Exploring, Book1 of Habits of Mind a Developmental Series (2002)ASCD

Sunday, March 18, 2007

John Hattie

The article that I used is the one that Tony McArthur gave us on John Hattie, mainly because it was the most easily accessible and understandable one and the further I got into it the better it became. Firstly is what applies to New Zealand applicable to Australia, are the statistics that he presents the same or similar here in Australia. He demands higher quality teaching, higher quality results from students. But doesn't agree with the current approach the the education system is using with the big stick approach that it adopts. The fist part was all to do with stats, and graphs but it all heads toward a well presented case of five major dimensions of excellent teachers. The first point, expert teachers can identify essential representations of their subject, they have complete pedagogical knowledge and create interesting classes because of this. Secondly, expert teachers can guide learning through classroom interactions, they are very conscious of the classroom climate for learning. I noted in this area expert teachers needed to know about the ability, experience, and background of the students they were to teach, and they needed to know about the facility in which they would be teaching. I learnt this the hard way that this is really important. Thirdly, expert teachers monitor learning and provide feedback, if we learn to use Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner, Glasser to name but a few theorists, our skills will increase so that we assess using many theories to get good feedback . Fourthly, attending to affective attributes, this pertains to a teachers care and respect for all their students and how they can overcome barriers to students learning. Lastly, influencing student outcomes, by understanding surface and deep learning and how to achieve this with all students and how to increase their self esteem and enjoyment of learning.
Building Teacher Quality, John Hattie. University of Auckland , October 2003.

William Glasser

Control Therapy, William Glasser.
I am sure that you will think I'm mad but I find Glassers approach talks to me on a very profound level. The psychological contexts of what he is talking about as fundamental human needs resonate with my own fundamental belief of my spiritual life. I cannot approach teaching without a deeply rooted belief in Christs message of developing and using our talents in every way we possibly can. I often reach the point of tears when I read Glassers work because it rings so true with my own experiences. He gives a ideal of what we can aim at, in quality teaching, teachers do not need to scold or punish or coerce. Instead they befriend students, provide encouragement and stimulation and show unending willingness to help, but they are also consistent and fair."By understanding the drives for SURVIVAL, POWER, LOVE, BELONGING, FREEDOM, and FUN in people, we become more conscious of the need for our world to be a quality world of our choosing".http://raider.muc.edu/~schnelpl/Control%20Theory%20-%20Overhead.html. Students not only need to know their rights but they also need to be very aware of the rights of those around them, in other words, their responsibilities to themselves and those around them. We can use Glasser to help us understand fundamental psychology that motivates a students actions that help them to make better choices. By understanding this proccess that Glasser has devised, we can learn so much about ourselves and our choices and in turn guide and help our students.

http://raider.muc.edu/~schnelpl/Control%20Theory%20-%20Overhead.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Glasser
http://changingminds.org/explanations/needs/glasser_five_needs.htm

Jerome Bruner

Jerome Bruners theoretical basis is similar in a way to Vygotsky in the sense that he wants individuals to be able to develop "beyond the information that is given"http://tip.psychology.org/bruner.html. So the individual develops not only their schema but the added benefits of developing in an individually creative way (which I find is great for individual confidence and self-esteem, and of course the courage to keep trying to learn).
"Bruner (1966) states that a theory of instruction should address four major aspects: (1) predisposition towards learning, (2) the ways in which a body of knowledge can be structured so that it can be most readily grasped by the learner, (3) the most effective sequences in which to present material, and (4) the nature and pacing of rewards and punishments. Good methods for structuring knowledge should result in simplifying, generating new propositions, and increasing the manipulation of information".http://tip.psychology.org/bruner.html. Lets look at aspect No1, it runs along a parallel with the other constructivists on "how they learn". Aspect No2 I can see Gardner's Multiple Intelligences being used effectively here. Aspect No3 suggests similar mental pictures to me of Bloom's Taxonomy, ans I use this a bit loosely because i can feel the differences between the two. I will try to explain what I mean more fully with an example."
His approach was characterised by three stages which he calls enactive, iconic and symbolic and are solidly based on the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget. The first, the enactive level, is where the child manipulate materials directly. Then he proceed to the iconic level, where he deals with mental images of objects but does not manipulate them directly. At last he moves to the symbolic level, where he is strictly manipulating symbols and no longer mental images or objects. The optimum learning process should according to Bruner go through these stages.

In 1960, Bruner (then a professor of Harvard University) proposed a “spiral curriculum” concept to facilitate structuring a curriculum ´around the great issues, principles, and values that a society deems worthy of the continual concern of its members´ (Bruner, 1960). The next decades many school system educators attempted to implement this concept into their curriculum. Bruner (1975) described the principles behind the spiral curriculum in the following way:

”…I was struck by the fact that successful efforts to teach highly structured bodies of knowledge like mathematics, physical sciences, and even the field of history often took the form of metaphoric spiral in which at some simple level a set of ideas or operations were introduced in a rather intuitive way and, once mastered in that spirit, were then revisited and reconstructed in a more formal or operational way, then being connected with other knowledge, the mastery at this stage then being carried one step higher to a new level of formal or operational rigour and to a broader level of abstraction and comprehensiveness. The end stage of this process was eventual mastery of the connexity and structure of a large body of knowledge”…(p.3-4). http://starfsfolk.khi.is/solrunb/jbruner.htm_3.htm
I have included this large slab of text because it showed me clearly the way I could teach visual arts to a wide range of ages and abilities in students. Teaching a creative skills based subject allows a topic to be introduced in an intuitive way, once you have a grasp and hold on the spirit of the topic you can then introduce the formal or operational way which might relate to a skill or a observation process or a textually based process. Then the development of all this information into the scaffolding of comprehension of the artist, their society, their practice, the world, the audience, meanings of then and now, etc, etc.


http://starfsfolk.khi.is/solrunb/jbruner.htm_3.htm
http://web.lemoyne.edu/~hevern/nr-theorists/bruner_jerome_s.html

Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget emphasises the learners interaction with their physical environment, his general theoretical framework is called "Genetic Epistemology" because of his primary interest in how knowledge developed in the human organism.
http://tip.psychology.org/piaget.html from reading some of the articles that I have on Piaget's theories, I can see that having these well instilled in my mind, will help me when I am in the classroom. I will have to understand and possibly assess what each student is capable of understanding and how they are computing the information. Giving us all these different stages and periods in a child's life, and how they all pass the same sequence of stages of cognitive development at similar ages and personal meanings which they can construct from experience depending on their current stage, is a platform for me see where they are at. It gives me a basis, a structure of criteria that will help me understand each student so that I can manage the individuals in my class to the best advantage for all of them.
Then you can tie in the other theorists and use techniques from all of them to help all your students, so students then have the ability given to them to all learn a topic or whatever it is that you are showing them, but learn it in relation to their own schema of their world. So this gives every child in the class a possibility to achieve good learning outcomes whether they are very bright and quick or they have learning disabilities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget
http://www.piaget.org/biography/biog.html
http://www.piaget.org/biography/biog.html

Lev Vygotsky

Now, here is a chap with the most amazing mind!, allot of what he has written at first has seemed just so confusing, but when I slowly get the hang of the language he uses and what he means, I can see he really had a great perception of how the learners minds work. I found a web site that helped me see some implementation of the tools that Vygotsky proposed for educators to use, Information on Tools of the Mind is now at http://web.archive.org/web/20Information on Tools of the Mind Following the links from this web address I was able to see some real ways of using his theories, which gives me something concrete to grasp hold of in a mental picture for myself to start understanding.
The way Vygotsky talks about us learning from the outside, from the social context that we are in as children, the environment around us. His theory of The Zone of Proximal Development,gives the individual the tools to step up to the next level of learning and understanding, using external help. The way our cognition grows and matures is not independent of our social environment but because of it. Now this has rather profound implications for how we as educators teach in this country and all over the world, we funnel these little ones into a class room and try to teach them. The use of scaffolding or mediation ( when an educator or peer ) assists with the solving of problems by tips, hints or demonstrations. These learning tools must be relevant to the individual, they have to be able to make sense of them, using their cognition of the social context they are in. I think their peer group is a very strong way for them to grasp this learning. Setting tasks and giving the students time to work in groups can be one of the ways to aid this learning process.
http://chd.gmu.edu/immersion/knowledgebase/theorists/constructivism/vygotsky.htm
http://www.funderstanding.com/vygotsky.cfm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky
http://www.kolar.org/vygotsky/
http://tip.psychology.org/vygotsky.html

Saturday, March 17, 2007

MI After Twenty Years

MI After Twenty Years, Howard Gardner.
It was very interesting to read that when Howard Gardner called his book the Frames of Mind that he caused such a stir against the establishment that cherishes the IQ test, because to me his multiple intelligences are broder and wider and deeper than just an IQ test. I suppose also on a personal level I had an IQ test performed on me when I was quite young in primary school and they told me that I had well below the average IQ for my age. That really undermined my learning capacity for most of my life. It wasn't until I went to uni in my fourties that I started to overcome my insecurities about my learning abilities. Then very recently my son was diagnosed with learning problems and since he has been in therapy I have found out that I have some difficulties of my own. I guess if Gardners Multiple Inteligences had been used when I was in school I might have attempted a university degree a lot earlier in my life.
Now! I realize that we all have these wonderful intelligences, some are stronger than others and of course these will all develope differently depending on, Physiological factors, psychological factors and enviromental factors. This is an enlightening piece to read because we are not discussing what has already been well reasearched and documented, but what is also an ongoing development of other (as yet not completely defined) intelligences. The very fact that Howard Gardner still searchs for clearer ways to help us understand the way the mind works is an encouragment for the questions that still need to be answered.
I am glad there are people like Howard Gardner who have this much higher intelligence that mine to ask these questions and seek the answers, because people like me can then have a chance to understand our own processes of learning, and then we have the ideas of how we should help the students in our classes learn through a variety of ways. They can then present information they have learnt in a way mostsatisfyinh to themselves, or learn through variety of different styles aimed at each of the different intelligence groups.
Another important aspect of these Intelligences is that it gives educators a great basis for creating great projects for the students to get involved with at school. I see this with my own children when they have a teacher who does utilise the multiple intelligences into the structure of how the children present their research and findings, my own kids embrace the project and get excited about what they are learning and how they can show what they have learnt.