"Connected...An Autobiography" Session 5

In what way might the film relate to your content area? Give a concrete example.

This film relates to my content area in two ways. Biology is the study of life and the connections between all that is living. When the video mentions that if one part of the connection is disrupted then the entire network is disrupted, I can’t help but to relate it to the inner-workings of an ecosystem. For example, sea otters were once native to the California channel islands. The Aleutians hunted them to extinction. As a result the sea urchin population grew uncontrollably. The sea urchins ate all the kelp and created what is now known as the urchin barrens. Disrupting one part of the network created an environmental disaster.

The video also illustrates the importance of incorporating all subjects in all classes. Developing connections help students find deeper meaning in their learning. Watching how passionate the film maker was about connections and finding that deeper meaning made me realize how important it is for me to incorporate all subjects in science. I plan on developing more projects that use math, social science, english and the arts to help my students see, develop and find meaning in these interdisciplinary connections.

What questions does it raise?

I want to know a feasible way for us to rethink the way we educate children in public schools. How could we break the mold of traditional segregation of subject areas and teach skill mastery in an interdisciplinary way?

How is your content area interconnected with other content areas?

Science is connected to all subjects. Science involves math, writing, studying social issues and design. I am very fortunate that I teach science because it is easy for me to incorporate all disciplines.

How does an interdisciplinary lens deepen understanding for a “well educated person?”

It allows a well educated person to take and apply all knowledge the learn and experience. A well educated person is an individual who can see all parts of the puzzle. In order for this to happen a person needs to have a strong understanding of all of the components of the puzzle. Experiencing an interdisciplinary education is also important because it allows people to take different approaches to problem solving, innovation and communication by diversifying their points of view. This makes the person a stronger thinker. For instance, if a person is charged with solving a certain problem, if one approach does not work, they will have the tool kit to solve that problem in a different way.

Blogs I have responded to:

Marshall Kratter

Jeff Vangene

"Content Knowledge" Session 4

Disciplinary Lenses

What is one specific way that your content research thus far has caused you to re-think and idea, or question, or caused you to challenge assumptions that you had previously not considered-or-even pushed you further in your thinking?

My content research has been focusing on teaching/creating a culture in my classroom to help my students develop the core life skill of academic resilience. I have always thought that by putting students in a safe but rigorous environment they will grow more resilient. After this past school year I have realized that there is more to creating resilience and perseverance than originally thought. Through research I have found that resilience is determined by the environment but is influenced is by many factors other than school safety and academic rigor. 

I have found that students will become more resilient if they develop six different motivation factors. These factors are: self-belief, learning focus, academic identity (the value of schooling), persistence, academic planning and study management. Resilience is a personality trait that is directly linked to motivation. The factors previously listed boost academic and personal motivation. All the factors also involve building academic, social and cultural identities. 

It can be noted that these personality factors are cultivated through classroom, home and social environment. Due to this I now know I have to develop a strong enough curriculum that gives my students the skills to counter whatever resilience “guzzlers” they encounter outside of my classroom, at home or in their social circles. My curriculum also has to be powerful enough to help reverse many years of possible psychological damage my students have endured from bad teachers, unstable home lives or the cruelty of adolescence life. I have picked a very difficult project that I do not know if I can accomplish. I want to continue though because developing a curriculum to promote resilience, will improve my teaching because I will be teaching my students the social, moral and personality skills needed in order to succeed in college, in the workforce and as a member of society.

The Death and Life of the Great American School System

How do you think the Common Core standards might fit in this narrative of school reform? 

I think the Common Core standards partially fit the Ravitch narrative for school reform. The Common Core standards are a drastic improvement from the testing culture that has developed in our school system. The Common Core standards are also interdisciplinary and encourage making deep connections between concepts. The new standards encourage thinking and give students flexibility. 

Ravitch actually does not agree with the common core standards. According to her blog: “Such standards, I believe, should be voluntary, not imposed by the federal government; before implemented widely, they should be thoroughly tested to see how they work in real classrooms; and they should be free of any mandates that tell teachers how to teach because there are many ways to be a good teacher, not just one” (http://dianeravitch.net/2013/02/26/why-i-cannot-support-the-common-core-standards/). The problem is that the standards are not voluntary and they still dictate what a teacher should teach. Ravitch argues for complete freedom of choice in what to teach. She also believes that the standards should be tested first instead of being taught “cold turkey.”

I feel that the common core standards do not fit into Ravitch’s argument because the new standards do nothing about how to educate teachers. The downfall to the standards is that it requires a new type of teacher. In order for these standards to be taught well, a teacher needs to have a degree in the field they are teaching. The standards also should make us rethink how we teach elementary school and what we should require of multiple subject teachers to know. The common core standards are going to push the way teachers teach, what teachers know and what teachers should know. I feel that Ravitch would also disapprove because we have now established a ambitious set of standards that will be harder to teach because of what we require our teachers to know. The government is now putting the burden on the teacher again. This is no change from what was required from the original standards.

In Chapter 9, Ravitch says critics argue that schools would improve if unions ceased to exist. What argument does she present based on available research? What do you think?

Schools would improve at first, but then as usual, the school will be run like a business, teachers will not have job security and as a result the lack of unions will create a similar cut throat political environment that exists today in education. The lack of unions will create a culture like it is presently: where we will only look out for ourselves and not for the interests of our students. 

Here is an example. For two years I worked at a catholic school in Hayward. I was not unionized. I made $28,000 a year and had an awful healthcare plan. I did not qualify for a pension unless I taught at the school for 7 years. The pension would have only be at 40% income where other pension plans cover about 80%. I taught 6 different classes and one elective at 4 different grade levels. I was the only science teacher. While I was a new gun-ho teacher, other teachers in the school had been teaching at this school for many years. I would sit in faculty meetings and hear about how state regulations were the reason why two of the teachers refused to go on recess duty. I watched one teacher manipulate my principal into creating a meaningless class so that she could get an extra hour prep each day. At one point my school was so broke that they couldn't get substitutes and that when a teacher went out on disability I was teaching two classes in one period. I would teach 15 minutes in one classroom while my principal watched my other class and then I would switch. Teachers were awful to each other and did not work together. I even saw our parish life director call a newly married, pregnant teacher into his office and berate her for not getting married in the church and would not let her get communion at the next school mass. He then proceeded to tell her students that he gave communion to murderers and that Christ forgives everyone. These school policies created a hostile, counter-productive and toxic work atmosphere. This environment destroyed school culture and took away from the education experience of my students. This culture existed because there was no union to protect the rights of the teachers.

Like everything in our world today, the whole realm of unions is polarized. I feel that unions are part of the ruining of education in the state BUT we should not get rid of them and instead reform them. For years teachers have been treated like the butt of the professional society. Our government does not prioritize education but the success of our society and economy is rooted in it. Violence, collapsing economies, and a lack of cultural cohesiveness is due to the failures of our education system. Teachers and unions have been saying this for years, but their voice has not been heard. We do not get paid enough and have a hard time trying to have a comfortable life that most of society gets to enjoy. Due to this, unions, tired of not being heard, have become a selfish adult interest groups... and they have every right to be.

I do not like unions because they limit teacher productivity and protect bad teachers. This being said, I do not blame them for what they have become. This year I was not unionized. As a result I worked 16 hour days, period subbed without compensation and saw my school close. This year was the first time in my career where I had the vague notion that I wanted to be part of a union because for the first three years of my teaching career I was taken advantage of. 

I will become part of the union when unions decide that they want to be in the political middle again. I would like to be in a spot where my union gets me better pay and benefits, but encourages me to work harder. I do not want to be in a union where in which my campus rep tells me to leave because its not in our collective bargaining agreement to stay past 3:45 PM (this happened to my sister repeatedly over her teaching career). I also want the government to realize the importance of our education system and so that unions feel they can stand-up for teachers and the children that we serve. 

Blogs I have responded to:

Jessica Bender and Catherine Samhan

"Raising America" Session 3

What strikes you as most important in this discussion of the relationship between social policy, child development and later achievement?

We all need to start on an equal playing field. Providing high quality early childhood education that is accessible to all helps make sure that children of all backgrounds start on a level education playing field. This is turn would help give people (especially of poor backgrounds) a high chance of succeeding in the future.

What do you think this perspective adds to school reform?

We need to rethink how we allocate our resources. We invest so much money into the bureaucracy and developing new curriculum. Instead we should take that money and invest it in molding the blank slates of young children. Some children are already disadvantaged the day they are born. They are born into poverty or with learning disabilities. The sooner we can provide a strong education for these children, the higher the chance we can create students who can overcome these difficulties and develop the skills and study habits needed to succeed in elementary school. This in turn puts them on track to learn the skills needed to succeed in middle school, high school and college. Providing children with a strong early childhood education allows them to start school at the same level or ahead of the pack instead of being academically or developmentally behind their classmates.

What is one question these videos raise for you?

What is the most effective way to convince lawmakers, policy makers and administrators that providing early childhood education is not only beneficial in the short term (increasing the number of mothers in the work force), but can create a economically profitable society in the long term?

Blogs I have responded to:

Anne Garvey
Karen May

"Mind the Gap" Session 2

1.) Chapter One: In recounting her journey though many educational reforms, Diane Ravitch makes a number of provocative statements. Choose two quotes and personally respond to them.

Quote One: “School reformers sometimes resemble the characters in Dr. Seuss’s Solla Sollew, who are always searching for that mythical land “where they never have troubles, at least very few.” Or like Dumbo, they are convinced they could fly if only they had a magic feather.”

I chose this quote for its honesty. Since I have begun teaching I have been trying to figure out that mythical “perfect solution” that would solve the country’s education problems. I feel that with every book and article I read, we try so hard only to “band aid” our problems. We need to fix our system one problem at a time with the knowledge that nothing is ever going to be perfect. Even though our system will never be perfect there is one goal that we should aim for: equality for all, through education. By giving everyone access to the same education we would ensure that a true democracy survives for generations to come.

Quote Two: “I argued that certain managerial and structural changes- that is choice, charters, merit pay, and accountability-would help to reform out schools. With such changes, teachers and schools would be judged by their performance; this was a basic principle in the business world. Schools that failed to perform would be closed, just as a corporation would close a branch office that continually produced poor returns.”

I chose this quote because it got me at a personal level. Until May of this year, I was a firm believer in introducing free market forces to hold schools and districts accountable. This May my school was closed due to under-enrollment. I work for a charter school system of 4 (now 3) schools. My school, Metro Arts and Tech, was losing half a million dollars a year due to under-enrollment. Because my school was a charter school we were treated like a business. Like  any business, if you lose money, you close. Metro was the first and only high school that the Bayview/Hunter’s Point community had seen in close to 40 years. We were the community school that was being placed at the center of neighborhood improvement. Market forces prevented that from happening and further marginalized the last working-class Black neighborhood of San Francisco. We need to treat education as a human right not as a commodity. Yes, if we subject schools to market forces we will close some bad schools, but we will also close schools in the neighborhoods that need a community school the most.

2.) Chapter Two: On page 16, Ravitch gives a brief definition of a well-educated person. How would you characterize a well educated person? What should any well educated person know in today’s world?

I feel that a well educated person has been given holistic interdisciplinary instruction in all of the fundamental subject areas of Math, Science, English, Social Science and the Arts (Music, Visual Arts, Performing Arts etc.). A person would able to apply what they learn in these classes to the real world and find connections between all subjects. A well educated person has the tools to ask, search for and find answers. In order to do this a person needs to master a native language, know how to analyze mathematical/scientific relationships, know how to use the scientific method in order to properly research and experiment, and know how to express themselves through various mediums.

3.) What would you have like to say and did not say about the 1st two chapters of the book.

So far I feel that the author is on point with her criticism. The one disappointing thing is that she has offered no solutions thus far. While I anticipate that she will, I have felt that the first two chapters have been very redundant criticisms of ANAR and NCLB.

4.) Choose one gap you listed from your subject area and identify 3 resources: a web site, an article, and a book that can help you fill that gap. List these and discuss what you learned from one of these.

Gap: How to identify with african american students and understand their culture

Website: http://www.blackvoicenews.com/columnists/joseph-a-bailey-ii-md/44660-overview-of-black-youths-biggest-problem.html

Article: State of our Black Youth (http://www.indianablackexpo.com/pdf/2012StateofOurBlackYouthReport.pdf)

Book: Black Youth Rising by Shawn Ginwright

Review of the Book: Black Youth Rising by Shawn Ginwright

My colleague gave me this book to read this past April. It completely changed my perspectives of teaching Black youth. The most profound chapter is when Dr. Ginwright talks about taking 15 of his Oakland-native students to Ghana for a three week self discovery trip. Dr. Ginwright describes the moment as liberating because for the first time his students looked like everyone else. He further describes how people on the streets were calling his students brothers and sisters. On top of that, his students were discovering part of the culture heritage they had been missing. Dr. Ginwright’s point is that a lot of Black youth in urban america lack a cultural identity and when he brought his students to Ghana they began to find part of that identity. After reading this book, it changed my perspective on how my black students acted in my classroom. A lot of the street culture (the not so good parts... because there are some pretty cool parts to street culture) they brought to school was a result of a cultural identity crisis. While I still and will not ever fully understand this culture because I was not raised in it, Dr. Ginwright helped me look at my student’s behavior in a new light. While I will always be the goofy White science teacher in the front of the class, I will at least have a limited understanding on why my students act in a way that is so different from the way I acted in White suburbia growing up.

5.) Your annotations of resources are meant to be both scholarly and brief. In the blog, discuss in detail why/how any two of these articles were useful to your topic/questions. Consider such things as listing specific information you learned that you didn't know before. How this new learning leads to other questions or sources. Why is this writer was convincing. Whether you seek this writer out for other articles he/she has written and anything else you'd like to state in a blog that others can learn from and read.

Article One: Social–ecological resilience and environmental education: synopsis, application, implications

Plummer, R. (2010). Social-Ecological Resilience and Environmental Education: Synopsis, Application, Implications.Environmental Education Research, 16(5-6), 493-509.

This article was interesting because of the approach to took to explaining the Social-ecological resilience model. The author took a biological approach to explaining resiliency. The article focuses on taking environmental/ecological data and look at how the environment and populations respond to disruptions in their ecosystem. The author then further uses this model to explain resiliency in the social model. This article is very useful because I feel that we need to take a more biological approach when working with children. Studying social resiliency, what affects it and what role physiology plays in resiliency is important in designing a curriculum for my classroom. My next steps are to examine the role of physiology in resiliency and see if social interaction can change that physiology. This is important when looking at improving resiliency within trauma victims because trauma has been proven to rewire the memory and judgment regions of the brain.

Article Two: Linking prevention science and social and emotional learning: The Oregon Resiliency Project.

Merrell, K. W. (2010). Linking prevention science and social and emotional learning: The Oregon Resiliency Project.Psychology In The Schools, 47(1), 55-70.

From this article, I learned that resiliency can be taught. The Oregon resiliency project was a 8 year long K-12 project that focused on fostering academic and emotional resiliency. This learning lead me to answer my question, can resiliency be taught? This article lead me to want to answer the question, what is resiliency and how do we measure it? Both of these questions are important in understanding and implementing my project. I need to know what to look for in my students and how to quantifiably measure that resiliency in order to see if my curriculum is working.

This writer was convincing because they used data to back up their claims. What I appreciated is that they also mentioned the weakness of the project and where to improve the project. For instance, the author stated that the project did not have much success in being pick up by high schools. As a result the project planners are trying to test out the curriculum in high schools over the next few years. I plan reading more about the Oregon Resiliency Project and trying to contact the project coordinators as an experiential learning source for my capstone project. While I feel that this source is related more to pedagogical-content knowledge and not pure content knowledge, I fell that it was useful because it gave me a source of potential curriculum to try in my classroom.





Blogs I have responded to:

Allison Broude

Jessica Bender

MAIT 402 Blog Post #1

MAIT 402 Blog Post #1

Describe how outside-school experience(s) have expanded or deepened your subject area content knowledge, and tell how it enhanced or changed your understanding. Include at least one specific experience

I have had many outside classroom experiences that have expanded and depended my subject area content knowledge. Two experiences at the Catalina Island Marine Institute shaped me as a science student as a science educator. I went to CIMI as a 7th grader. On this 5 day trip I snorkeled (day and night), kayaked and hiked around Catalina Island. During this trip I was encouraged to take an apply what I had learned in my Life Science class to my experiences on the island. Knowing how different organisms of the kelp forrest interacted or different adaptations of souther california plants showed me the relevance of Biology to the real world. This experience also enabled to make deeper and stronger connections to the subject area and its inner workings.

Due my experience on Catalina Island, upon graduating from college, I applied to work as an instructor at CIMI. Become a teacher at CIMI allowed me to explore teaching science in the best possible setting. I was able to experiment with different pedagogical ideas and try them out. I was also able to see the profound effect that hands on science learning and inquiry has on the subject matter knowledge, retention and mastery for students. I am really grateful for my experiences at CIMI and what they did for my scientific and teaching career.

Respond to the class discussion of Ball’s “The Subject Matter Preparation of Teachers.” Have your initial judgments or opinions change based on the discussion?

Quote: “Philosophical arguments as well as common sense support the conviction that teachers’ own subject matter knowledge influences their efforts to help students learn subject matter. Conant (1963) wrote that “if a teacher is largely ignorant or uniformed they can do much harm.””

Response to quote: I do not like the CSET. I do not think it tests wether or not a teacher is ready to teach their content. I know people who have never taken classical science classes at the university level but who have passed various of the science CSETs. The CSET does not test thought process behind the scientific method and experimentation, an integral part of teaching science. I would not be a good English teacher because I was not trained to know the intricacies of the language. English teachers have their own process and methods to writing, a process I do not know. But what if I took and passed the English CSET, am I really ready to teach English? Absolutely not.

I also do not think our method of subject matter competency is good. Different institutions have different levels of rigor. I feel like my science education at Lafayette was excellent, far better than at other institutions, but not as good as the best Biology program in the country at the University of Chicago. While I went through intensive lab training, my sister (a graduate of Chicago) was in graduate level labs as a freshman,with electron microscopes looking at how cytotoxins break down the cell membranes of animal cells. How can our two educations compare? There is no perfect way to assess if a teacher is ready, but I do feel we need to up our standards. What is wrong with treating teaching like a skilled trade or like being a doctor? We would go through intensive training, mentorships, apprenticeships and rigorous content assessment for many years. Unfortunately, I feel that at this time, this will not happen. Our system is spread thin, with no money and exponentially increasing school age population. In order to treat teaching like being a Medical Doctor or a Machinist, we need money, something we have very little of. Until then, I just hope we can find a better way to train teachers.

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Quote: “A central premise of this paper is that teachers’ understandings are shaped significantly through their experiences both in and outside of school and that a major portion of teachers’ subject matter learning occurs prior to college.”

We all associate expertise with how much you know. Today if I were to take a test and ace it, I would be expert with that content. But could I teach it? I have always thought that if you able to teach the material correctly, then you are an expert. I would love to think of a way to develop public education curriculum so that students are assessed on how well they teach the material. This would mean that when our students leave high school or university, they would have the foundation to become good teachers and experts in their field.

Where are you in developing and pursuing a line of inquiry?  What is your question?  Are you satisfied with your question?  At this point, what do you know about the research available in this area?  What ideas do you have for possible experiential learning sources?

I am almost done with my question. My research project is going to focus on resiliency in the classroom. I want to create a curriculum to implement in my advisory that helps improve my students’ academic resiliency. I plan on measuring this with academic improvement, video observation of behaviors in the classroom as well as through surveys. So far I have found a lot of articles. My biggest challenge is not a lack of information but instead there is too much information. I am going to need to work hard to narrow down the resources to what I can realistically use in my classroom. I have found many different type of curriculums. I have found scholarly articles that have analyzed the effectiveness of that curriculum. I have also started to read two different books on the effects of trauma on brain chemistry and how it can be treated in the classroom.

Feel free to add artwork, photographs, quotations, or personal experiences that connect to your content area. Express yourself.