The Blue Blog

Here is a link to the podcast of my presentation, which is based on the final paper (also posted on this blog) for TE 302. My feed address is:

http://katie-lowden.edublogs.org/feed/

In my position as a junior in a teacher education program, I feel that I still have a long way to go in the process of defining myself as an educator.  Through this blog and the writings posted within it, I have made some of my earliest attempts to begin this process by exploring a number of vital questions, including what literacy is, how to effectively motivate students, and what results are to be desired from schools.  In posting this final project for my Teacher Education 302 class, my goal is to discuss all of these themes in general and how they relate to the central question of who I am as a teacher.

Ultimately, the goal of any effective educator is to give each student something positive they can take away from the classroom, whether it be empirical knowledge, a problem-solving strategy, or knowledge of how the learning process works.  As a teacher, I am hoping that students will be able to progress through my course and gain something from each of these categories of knowledge.  However, each of these categories represents a different type of literacy, in that each is a different system of knowledge with different instructional methods and varying degrees of salience to different types of learners.  This being the case, I feel it is necessary to determine which kind of literacy I would like to facilitate in my classroom.  In his article about literacy, Tozer evaluates literacies in terms of whose interests are being served by the way it is defined.  I would like to adopt this approach for my own purposes and start with the assumption that the interests I am trying to serve are those of the students.

This said, I would have to use what I know about students in order to begin my evaluation.  From my experiences tutoring at Meadow Valley Middle School (pseudonym) in an urban school district, I know that any group of students will be diverse in their backgrounds, ability levels, and interests.  If I am trying to serve diverse needs, I think that empirical knowledge as a literacy goal would not be in the best interests of my students because of the nature of much of the required curriculum of schools, which tends to be exclusive to certain cultural values. If all I want the students to take away is a certain set of knowledge, I will be promoting a very limited literacy.  Promoting problem-solving strategies would probably meet the needs of the students more closely, but the problem with this approach to literacy is that not all students will use the same strategies.  In some cultures, for example, it is the norm to use groups to problem-solve, and each student will have something that works the best for them.  However, helping students recognize how the learning process works will give them the knowledge of how they learn the most efficiently and how to use those talents to reach their goals.

Therefore, if I perceive the goal of education to promote knowledge of the learning process, it will definitely affect the way I teach.  I will essentially be asking students to make connections with what they already know, to find the problem solving methods that work for them, and to think about how to use this knowledge in other contexts.  In this case, being an effective teacher will mean providing scaffolding for the students so they can gradually increase their skills in identifying what works for them. I will also have to provide a variety of assignments, projects, and activities to stimulate cognitive awareness of what the learning process means for each student.  Ultimately, my role as a teacher will be the facilitator and supporter of an ongoing process that will help students gain competency in the literacy of learning.

Having identified this type of literacy as one of the main goals of my instruction, I need to consider how to have students become engaged in the same goals.  This is where the issue of motivation comes in, and once again I need to ask myself what I know about students.  I know that students are sometimes being pulled in several directions with the different demands on their time, and for this reason they may not have that much energy or motivation to devote to a single class.  I can also anticipate that students may not have a high self-efficacy for new tasks, and the process of discovering their own learning styles could very well be a new concept for many students.  If I want to be an effective teacher, there are several things I will need to do in order to motivate the students in my classroom.  When dealing with the issue of motivation in general, it would probably be effective for the students to realize that what they are learning can be generalized to other things they are involved in, whether it be their other classes or their hobbies and extracurricular activities.  If students know they can improve in other areas by monitoring their own learning processes in those contexts as well as in the classroom, they will have achieved one of the important goals of cognitive awareness about learning as well as gaining motivation.  Being an effective teacher will also mean motivating students to take part in different types of activities that promote problem solving, so I should also provide engaging activities that will help students learn about themselves and how they deal with finding solutions to problems or tasks.

When dealing with low self-efficacy, I would draw on the work of Brophy and say that the most important methods to teach the students would be proximal goal setting and periodic self-evaluation.  Since exploring how the learning process works is a process in itself, it would be important to set small goals at first so that students do not feel that they need to come to an understanding about how they learn all at once.  Rather, they should have the opportunity to begin with a few short-term goals that will help them start the process of evaluating how they are learning.  I think that this is an especially important motivation strategy because it can be effective for students with varying degrees of self-efficacy, since everyone can benefit from a series of small successes.  After students can realize successes, they are usually more likely to be motivated to try more and experiment with what they are doing, namely, learning how they learn best.  Periodic self-evaluation can also be motivating for diverse learners because it emphasizes progress monitoring, and making progress is an important intrinsic motivator.  If a student realizes that they have made progress in recognizing part of their effective learning process, such as how they best approach a particularly difficult task, their motivation will probably get a boost.  Of course, these are general strategies that would have to be tailored to the needs of the individuals in the classroom, so part of being an effective teacher will also mean identifying these needs and modifying my strategies.  In this way, I become a researcher of motivation methods and their effectiveness so that I may assist my students in ways that pertain to their particular experiences, learning styles, and goals.

Up to this point, I have been discussing what I would like to have happen in my classroom.  However, as I indicated previously, there is also the question of what we should be expecting from schools.  My perspective of the classroom as a place for students to become aware of their own learning processes affects how I teach, and in the same way different perspectives on the place of the school system in our society will affect which results people think we should be getting from schools.  According to David F. Labaree, schools have been subject to the conflicting demands of producing citizens, training workers, and preparing students for a competitive society.  As a teacher, I reject all of these goals, as they are all too narrow and restrictive to what schools can accomplish.  This is because some of these goals teach students that they are nothing but individual islands, standing alone as they make their way in the world, and others teach that the purpose of each person is to fit into their needed position in the greater community.  Students should have the chance to explore both parts of their existence, as individuals with potential and talent and as members of communities.  Therefore, what we want from schools should be opportunities to let students do this exploring.  As a teacher, I am prepared to advocate for those opportunities if it means a change in how things are organized or the addition of programs.  Of course, I realize that schools have become socializing agents and may always remain so, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t expect more from our system of education and look for opportunities to change it for the better.

Thus far, I have identified myself as a facilitator, a supporter, a researcher, and an advocate. Thinking about myself as a teacher from the perspective of a few central questions has brought me to these conclusions.  However, through reading articles and observing other teachers in general, I believe there are still many questions related to my identity as an educator that I will have to explore as I continue to ask, who am I as a teacher?  At times, teachers take on the roles of advocates for students, mentors, politicians, and representatives of the school according to the situations they encounter, and I think that as I begin my career as an educator I will have to make decisions about how I fill these roles.  There are also the issues presented by Ornstein and Levine in their discussion of educational philosophies, including the questions of what theories we use to guide our educational practice and how our philosophies will affect the learning of our students.  Fortunately, through the topics I have discussed in this paper, my tutoring experiences, and the discussions in my teacher education class, I have been able to answer a fundamental set of questions that will guide me in making future decisions about what roles to assume as a teacher.

Works Cited

Brophy, J. (2004). Supporting students’ confidence as learners. In Motivating students to learn (2nd ed., pp. 55-86). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Labaree, D. F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34, 39-81.

Ornstein, A. C., & Levine, D. U. (2000). Philosophical roots of education. In Foundations of education (7th ed., pp. 388-420). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Tozer, S. E., & Willis, A. I. (1995). Liberty and literacy today: Contemporary perspectives. In S. E. Tozer, P. C. Violas & G. B. Senese (Eds.), School and society: Historical and contemporary perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 247-264). New York: McGraw-Hill.

I would like to respond to Debbie’s writing concerning an article from Cnn.com, which discusses the high dropout rates in American public high schools.  Debbie writes that at times, it seems that politicians are only worried about this problem because they would be heroes if they come up with a solution, and school administrators sometimes seem to worry only about how much money they are losing.  While I think that, at times, this can be the case, I think the focus on the number of dropouts can also be attributed to the need for everyone to figure out just “what’s wrong” with our schools.  There are low test scores, there are lower grades, there are lower standards, there is insufficient instruction for teachers- I have heard all of these, and the dropout question just seems to be another way of stating the question of the day: Why are our schools not doing what they should?

So, what would a plan to stop people from dropping out of high school look like?  We might hear things like, “We’re going to encourage after-school programs” or “We’re going to provide alternate classes that are more suited to the interests of the students,” or a number of other strategies that, as Debbie suggests, are merely there to make it seem that those in power are really trying to care about the students.  I, however, would like to paint a realistic picture of what schools have to deal with in order to tackle the issue of dropouts: students drop out because they are in trouble with the law, they get pregnant, education is not valued in their family or community, they have an unstable home life, or they think that working a low-paying job is fine for them.  They also drop out because of alcohol and drug use, the attitude that school is worthless, and to show defiance to authority, and probably for a number of reasons that are too lengthy to list here.  The point is, since there are so many varieties and combinations of problems that cause students to drop out (and I have observed quite a few of them affecting people I knew in high school), how will one program made up by any committee or politician really work to lower dropout rates?

Debbie points out that, in the article posted online, no one asks the vital question, why are students dropping out?  While I have tried to answer this in a brief and superficial way, I would be interested in reading the full article published in Time magazine to get a feel for what the “experts” are saying about high school dropouts.  It also leaves another question in my mind, which is whether in the future, when I am an educator, there will be an even longer list of reasons for students to drop out and what, if anything, I will feel I need to do about it as a teacher.

I think that, in his article about conflicting goals in our educational system, David Labaree does a good job in describing the historical and social forces that are pushing and pulling at our school systems.  Going on personal experience, I think that I have seen democratic equality and social efficiency play a part in what and how students are taught in public schools.  I myself feel that I also used my high school career as an opportunity for social mobility.  Not that it was, by any means, an elite school from which a diploma would mean something extra.  However, while I was in high school, I used classes not so much as a means for gaining information but for getting good grades to put on college applications.  According to Labaree, this could possibly mean that I didn’t get as much out of my time at school than I could have.  But, is social mobility really the main problem for our schools?  I think it is worth it to look over Labaree’s claims and evaluate this argument.

I have already mentioned one of the points Labaree makes, which is that a focus on social mobility decreases the value students actually put on learning.  I think that this is a fairly accurate description of the effects of social mobility, since it does indeed promote extrinsic instead of intrinsic rewards.  Not that the presence of a grading system will necessarily erase any and all intrinsic motivation for learning, but the presence of the other rewards, such as entrance into a certain college, certainly might.   I don’t think that social mobility is the one and only reason for outside motivations to take over a learning experience- parental pressure or peer groups can also have an effect.  However, these pressures could also come from social mobility goals on the part of others as well.

Labaree also blames the lower standards that have come to be the norm in our schools on the presence of social mobility goals.  He says that schools are now promoting “an educational system that is willing to reward students with formal compliance with modest performance requirements rather than for demonstrating operational mastery of skills deemed politically and socially useful” (p. 56).  Again, I would say that if people are merely using schools to get high grades that will reflect well on them, then this could definitely lead to lower standards as teachers struggle more and more with the low motivation to actually master content.  There are other reasons, in my opinion, that could also add to this effect.  One example would be standardized testing, since teachers may need to change what is expected of students so that they will score higher on tests.  This brings the argument full circle, then, because standardized test scores are also a means through which students can gain access to more opportunities.

This article from the Boston.com Education News covers a story that is local in its content but national in the implications and topic that has been causing debate for some time- affirmative action.  The reason the article was written was to point out that the amount of minority students at Boston Latin, an elite public exam school, has actually risen as a percentage of the total enrollment since an affirmative action admissions policy was removed.  Since the last academic year, the number of black and Hispanic students at Boston Latin has rose from eighteen percent to about twenty-five percent of the student population, with the admissions being based solely on the test scores and similar criteria.  This rise in minority students, however, comes eight years after a court ruled that they could not consider race in admissions eight years ago- since then, the school has been criticized for plunging minority enrollment.  Officials credit the rise in admissions to an outreach program to underrepresented students.

So, why am I tackling the issue of affirmative action now, in this context?  With all of the debate and disagreement related to the issue, I feel that it is about time that I explored the topic in greater depth and begin to form my own opinions, since at this point I don’t know whether or not I think affirmative action is a positive or a negative practice.  When I read information such as that in this article, I am prompted to think that maybe, even if admission of minorities to elite public schools or even public universities drops after affirmative action admissions are dropped, the amount of minority students will eventually rise again.  The problem is, would all institutions start outreach programs to minority students as this school did?  After all, it took several years for the percentage of minority students to rise at Boston Latin, and that was only after five years of such an outreach program.

A parent of a Boston Law student was quoted in the article as saying that “Going to Boston Latin historically is a real ticket to opportunity for working-class students in the city.”  If social mobility is the goal of the school, then those with the most social mobility will probably already have an advantage to attending Boston Latin because they are already in the best schools.  I do believe that white students are more likely to be privileged than minority students, and I think the reason that affirmative action was created in the first place was to offset this advantage that arises from the history of the society we live in.  So, if it is already easier for white students to get into better schools because they have had more opportunities and gone to better schools, then to me it seems that affirmative action is nothing but a band-aid for the problem of racial inequality.  If minority students are given fewer opportunities in the first place, put into worse public schools and denied access to the resources available at better schools, then this should be the target of correction.  Of course, undoing the effects of several hundred years of inequality is no easy task, and it’s a topic that I think it would take up too much space to discuss here.  What I do think is that, if we really want to see a change, we are going to have to start changing things before students start trying to get into elite public schools or a university.  Putting a quota on how many minority students need to come into a school may be our best tool for battling racial inequality at the present time, but it should not be the only one- the source of the problem needs to be addressed.

This week I returned to Meadow Valley Middle School* for the sixth time, and once again I worked one-on-one with sixth-grade student Lynn* in Ms. Smith’s* third hour math class.  Ms. Smith asked us to work on some social studies work from the previous class that Lynn had not gotten anything done on.  The assignment was a worksheet to be completed with one or two sentence answers that corresponded to a few pages in the text about the history of the Mayan people and culture.  As soon as Lynn heard Ms. Smith ask me to help her with social studies, she began to act out in a way I had not observed before.  She broke her pencil in half and called Ms. Smith a liar for saying she hadn’t gotten anything done.  (Lynn had partially answered the first question.)  After this we went into a separate classroom and Lynn continued to resist doing work.  First she said that it’s boring, then she said that she shouldn’t be expected to do as much because she can’t read quickly enough.  After that she told me that she didn’t know enough of the words and then, finally, Lynn said, “I know that I can’t do this assignment.”  Lynn has never acted this way before, so at the end of our hour together my question was, why the change in behavior?

First of all, I think I would like to say what I don’t think caused Lynn’s behavior.  When I talked to Ms. Smith after class, she said that Lynn is not doing the work because she is “just plain lazy” in general.  This is not, in my opinion, and accurate description of what was going on, and furthermore I was taken back that a teacher would write a student off as an overall lazy person.  Do students lack motivation sometimes?  Yes, they definitely do, which is why Brophy and so many others write about motivating students.  However, when we are usually working together Lynn gets a lot of work done even though she likes to talk as well, so I do not think the trait of laziness can always be applied to her.

This leads me to a first possible reason for Lynn’s behavior.  When we are working together, we are usually doing math assignments, which I think Lynn prefers to social studies.  Her preference of one subject over the other seems like it very likely could have caused her behavior.  I have often seen the attitude of students flip-flop when they have to do a task they see as unpleasant, and Lynn did say that the work she was required to do was boring.  This may be why she was lashing out and acting upset.

As second reason for Lynn’s behavior could be that she was using avoidance to keep from doing work that she has a low self-efficacy for.  She spoke repeatedly about how she didn’t know how to do the work, and during our time together Lynn slouched, chatted, put her head down, wrote slowly, played with her pens, and a number of other things to avoid completing the worksheet.  She also tried writing in really tiny print so that if her answers weren’t that good they would be virtually unreadable anyway.  I tried to give Lynn a boost by showing her that the assignment really was possible for her to do, since the answers were all in the text, but this did not seem to help Lynn feel that she had the ability to do the work.

A third reason for Lynn’s behavior could have been that she was having what I guess I would call a bad day, but not in the sense of just a few bad things happening.  Lynn is labeled as emotionally impaired, and this constant problem could have been having more of an influence on her behavior.  While I can’t claim to have made any formal studies into the characteristics of emotionally impaired students, I have observed the behavior of several students in similar situations as Lynn, and I can say from experience that her emotional state seemed very off balance while we were working.  This, of course, could be connected to another outside factor such as an event at school or at home that upset her, but when I asked her if something else was bothering her Lynn started talking about Ms. Smith being a liar again.

*These names have been changed.

My second attempt to use iTunes was moderately more successful than the first.  Navigating this extensive program finally became possible when I searched for all podcasts listed under education, then selected one that sounded relevant.  It turned out to be a podcast about Internet security, which was wasn’t what I thought I had selected based on the description.  Next, I finally managed to find a podcast about using Wikipedia, but the iTunes program closed in the middle of it.  When I tried to go back and find it, I couldn’t, so I chose another podcast, this one about the use of blogs in the classroom.  It was short, and offered one educator’s perspective on why blogs are such positive classroom tools.  Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted this podcast shortly after listening to it, so I am not able to credit the author of the material at this time.

The podcast began with a comment on the static nature of websites as a medium for classroom communication.  Websites were actually referred to as “old-fashioned” in the sense that they are static and give control to a single person (the teacher) in a one-way channel of communication.  Blogs, on the other hand, were praised for their ability to put some control in the hands of the students, as they write about topics that interest them and interact with each other.  I especially enjoyed two of the uses suggested for blogs- peer review and reporting local events.  While we, as a TE 302 class, used the Writely program to edit documents, blogs could be used in much the same manner as classmates leave comments for each other about ideas and writings.  As a teacher, my only concern about this would be that students would see it as an opportunity to post inappropriate comments or responses that are not constructive in their criticism.  Perhaps, if students know that the teacher is reading these constantly, they will refrain for such behavior and understand that harassment in cyberspace is the same as harassment in the school space.  With the power to view each other’s work comes the responsibility to treat it with respect.

The other use for students’ blogs that was mentioned was the ability for them to comment on local events from their own perspectives.  This would open up the possibility for students to read about the perspectives of others and to become aware of what is happening around them, as well as to have a space to express whatever views they may have.  In my opinion, there are far too few mediums for high school students to express what they think.  Sure, there are school newspapers, but principals have the legal right to edit these and remove whatever they don’t agree with.  As it was pointed out in the podcast, these spaces are not static, but dynamic and allow for expression.  One further positive aspect of blogs was also referenced, but in regards to what teachers are able to do by looking at the blogs of students.  Teachers can evaluate student problem-solving methods by reading their posts and comments and observing what kinds of processes they are using to help each other and to evaluate each other’s work.  This is yet another use for blogs that seems worthwhile and very useful for the teacher as they decide where to move with their lessons and how to help students who are struggling with an assignment.

Mission iTunes accomplished.

I have a few things to say in response to Amy Marsh’s comments on the Burbules and Berk reading about critical thinking and critical pedagogy.  I, too, see critical thinking as a method that could have very positive results for students as they learn how to consider things from different perspectives and collect evidence to come to informed conclusions.  However, I don’t think that critical thinking without critical pedagogy would be as beneficial to students, as the evaluation of evidence should go beyond just what is “true” or not.  If we come to the conclusion in my classroom that minorities are still underrepresented in government, for example, I don’t think we should stop there.  Instead, we should think about why this is and what institutional factors are at play.  This is, as Amy says, thinking politically, and yes students will hear the opinions of the students around them, but isn’t that what life is like?  Students already hear their parents talk about politics, and they probably hear their peers talk about it outside of the classroom, so any political conversation in the classroom won’t be the only influence on students.

Amy also comments that students should not be further encouraged to question authority or teachers.  While I would definitely agree that discipline would become an issue if students were told to question/challenge all of their teachers based on whatever injustices they perceive, I don’t think that this is the objective of critical pedagogy.  Rather, I think the purpose of critical pedagogy is to help students think about issues of power and inequality in our society as a whole and how they will choose to act according to whether or not they think it is necessary to do so in order to change things.  As I wrote in my response to the article, this could possibly include a discussion of the legal rights of the students, but that would not be the exclusive topic of conversation.  Critical thinking and critical pedagogy both seem to have their place in the classroom, neither one to the point of excluding the other.

I am glad that Amy Bastarache tackled the issue of teacher protests in her response to an article from Cnn.  I have also been reading about these kinds of events in the news, and struggling with the seeming conflict of interest between showing displeasure for my working conditions or pay and sacrificing a day of instruction for my students.  Yet, to me, the two are not mutually exclusive.  As Amy pointed out, calling in sick to show your displeasure with your salary demonstrates a strong point, but on the other hand it takes away from your students, and I totally agree.  However, even though students may lose out a little on the lost day, they will lose out even more if the teachers in their school are fed up with what is going on and lose their interest in working within a system that, while never overwhelming in its support of public educators, is becoming more and more blind to their needs.

From what I have heard, it is increasingly hard to find teachers and keep them in urban public schools, so every now and then I think it is important for those educators to speak up about what they feel.  If they do this, I think the students will ultimately benefit in the long run.  After all, if the teachers can at least feel that their concerns are getting some attention, then they will probably not see the need to take another day to all call in sick or similar action.  Also, if the benefits and pay for teachers in these school districts is fair, it will be easier to draw in and retain more teachers.  Not that, as Amy points out, all we want from teaching is money, but not paying teachers for the work they have done is definitely not going to attract new educators to the area where they are needed most.

All of this being said, I have to say again that I am glad that this topic has come up because, as a future teacher, I need to be thinking about how I will handle these situations.  As Amy said, teachers are professionals and need to be treated as such, but how would I approach the idea of a “sick-out” as a professional?  I want to say that, if I felt strongly enough about the subject that I really needed to participate in the protest, I would try to do it in a way that minimizes the impact on the students, who of course should be first in the thoughts of all teachers.  Perhaps this would mean organizing the protest for a half day of school or a day when there are already assemblies scheduled so that the students will not actually be missing that much more instructional time anyway.  I know I would still have ethical issues with this, but I think that in the event of extremely unfair treatment I would still feel compelled to act.

The first thing that struck me as interesting about the work of Nicholas Burbules and Rupert Burk on critical thinking and critical pedagogy is that I never had a teacher at the elementary or secondary school level who practiced critical pedagogy.  Perhaps this is not an uncommon experience, but I thought it interesting because the article states that critical pedagogy has featured prominently in educational thinking in the past decades.  Of course, literature and research don’t always translate into practice, but from my experience it was never the intention of instruction to undermine an “unjust status quo” in any way.  The only social injustices that ever came up were in the past, such as slavery and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.  These events could have been used as background to examine current issues, but they were typically just left in the past.  Since my experiences in college have not been much different, I feel that I don’t have any practical tools with which to evaluate the arguments made for critical pedagogy as a teaching method.

As critical pedagogy is a new idea to me, however, I would like to think about how I could possibly use it in my future classroom, as I plan on teaching either English or social studies at the high school level.  I feel I would have to go about teaching students to recognize social injustices by starting with an exploration of what exactly that means to different people in a variety of contexts.  This could easily be done through topics found in literature, history, cultural studies, or several other topics.  Once this initial discussion has taken place, however, there is the question of how to infuse students with the feeling that they should be actors against social inequalities.  As cited in the article, Freire would say that recognizing one’s own place in an unjust system leads to action.  He is talking about teaching a group of people to recognize that they themselves are being oppressed in some way, and if I were to work this into my classroom I would probably start with a discussion of the rights of students in an American high school.  I would ask questions about whether or not they were ever informed of their rights as students, whether or not they have ever felt those rights to have been violated and under what circumstances, and what they have the ability to do when they feel their rights are being compromised.  This entire discussion could be linked to other topics of injustice in society, and the action of analyzing their own experiences should help students understand the need to act using their knowledge about power systems and basic rights.