Setting High Expectations
Roller Coaster Physics
In the Roller coaster video, it is clear the teacher holds
high expectations for a number of reasons. While we don’t see how she
introduces the activity, it’s clear from her divisions of responsibility, steps
for testing the students experiments, and criteria for success that she has specific
and clear expectations for student performance.
Her divisions with assigning roles to each member of the
group clearly delineates individual responsibilities, and by breaking these
numerous responsibilities up into smaller chunks, she makes them more feasible
and manageable. Both my fiancé(7-9th grade science teacher) and I
have attempted to create such divisions of labor before, and neither of us have
had the apparent success this teacher has- we often find that our student don’t
stick to their roles, that they fail to keep detailed records, and students are
often unsatisfied with whatever role they choose and desire more variety in
their activity. We have discussed why this is, and we think it is due to two
problems. 1- lack of structure and consistency in requirements and performance-
often these types of roles are the first time students are exposed to such
rigid divisions of labor, and so with no or little practice in previous
classes, the students naturally aren’t mentally prepared for such work. This
causes us to reevaluate the effectiveness of this method, and we are perhaps
giving up too quickly, and rather need to scaffold these skills and maintain
consistency in giving students opportunities to work on these kinds of tasks
with such divisions. The other problem is a lack of experience on our part- we
are uncertain of how much instruction and rigidity each of the roles need, and
so as a result students reflect our uncertainty, and this uncertainty
contributes towards us giving up too quickly. No matter what, its clear these divisions
can work, and when they are working as effectively as seen in the video, they
become an amazing tool for promoting development of multiple different skills
while working on a single project.
Beyond the division of roles, the teacher imitates the
natural environment of a science lab/experiment, with close monitoring required
of materials used, following rigid testing iterations and protocols- starting
with a model, applying through computer simulation, and finally creation of the
project- this structure is highly demanding and sets clear and lofty
expectations for the students while at the same time avoiding intimidating students-
they are competing against each other, not some mythical “perfect” version. The
required outcomes of safety, length of travel, and fun, are all imitations of
real world goals for roller coasters, so students immediately sense the real
world links to the projects they are working on, which greatly helps create
strong engagement. The best part of her project from a teacher’s point of view
is her ability to step away from a teacher oriented class to one that is fully
student guided- where they work towards a goal autonomously, and the teacher is
afforded opportunities to walk amongst the class and perform spot checks for
understanding.
The Third Grade Chinese math class and the blog post
explaining the Chinese teaching style is my least favorite style of teaching. It
appears to be recitation and pure memorization, and while there are certainly some
learning and understanding occurring, I particularly hate this method. It is
clear that there are some students not participating in saying the times tables
in the back as well, but as most of the students are reciting the math, it’s
impossible for the students not participating to be ignoring the multiplication
tables considering how loud it is. The best part about this lesson is the
reliance on mental arithmetic, and the reliance on patterns. Children this age
respond very well to patterns of repetition like this, and so it can be an
effective method. This is reflected in high test scores for mathematics in
China, but I wonder about the ability to apply conceptual or critical thinking
in mathematics, as I feel these techniques are insufficient to teaching
students to translate real world problems into their proper math equivalents.
The Vlog post by Jerry Liu
and the
article explain why Chinese students are mathematically apt compared to English
students, and Stanislas’ book, “The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics”
also discusses the reasons for these differences in performance. They can be
summarized as follows. Math concepts are clearly defined in the simple
performance of the problem- a fraction is a difficult concept to understand in English
because of terminology like numerator and denominator, but in Mandarin, 1/100,
which in English is called “one over one hundred” is phrased as “bai fun zhi yi”
or literally, “out of 100, 1” The concepts are much clearer in mandarin than in
English. In another example, base 10 is clearly understood because once they
get to 10, what we call eleven, they call “shi yi” literally translated as “10,
1”. Finally, the human brain can only memorize a certain number of numbers at
once. In English, we can only hold about 7 numbers in our head at once before
forgetting. In Mandarin, that number is larger. Why? Because the speed at which
we can say or think of numbers is what limits our ability to remember, and
since English numbers on average take longer to say than their Mandarin
counterparts, that means we are naturally disadvantaged when performing mental arithmetic.
That said, I would argue that the academic expectations for this are simply not
high as we don’t see her calling out the students who aren’t saying anything-
we don’t see individual checking for understanding, we see nothing but a focus
on the group as a whole, which allows students to fall into the cracks.
However, the benefits of this style are clearly seen in the norms and
procedures- the consistency of such lessons continually reinforces the teachers
expectations of students being able to recite lines and it appears to be a well
worn technique by now. My concern is whether the monotony begins to create
disengagement- in other words if the student has to recite this all the time,
is that why some students aren’t bothering to speak? Because they have done it
so many times?
I believe that the
natural advantages the Chinese language has are a larger contributor to their math
excellence than their teaching styles. This could be cultural relativism
speaking where I value my cultures emphasis on conceptual understanding and
individual learning/instruction as opposed to the one size fits all Chinese
mentality. I will need to revisit this idea in the future when I am able to
find more resources and perform a less biased analysis which doesn’t rely on my
negative experience with teachers in China.
Whole Brain
The whole brain lesson demonstrated a very high level of
student engagement. Much like the previous video of the Chinese lesson, the
emphasis on auditory and visual cues and uniform responses requires a good degree
of attention at all times to perform. From my understanding, of the materials
on the website, this technique is
used for challenging kids- the problem children. If that is so, does this mean
that the woman in the video has an entire class of “challenging” kids? That all
the lowest performers were put into this one class? That said, there seems to
be little focus on the challenge of the material- the material these students
appear to be working on seems quite below their age. If this is due to their
status as “challenging” students, it would make some sense, as one must assume
they had failed previous classes. This technique then seems designed to focus
solely on rules and procedures, with the procedures requiring intensive focus
in order to complete. The use of hand signals above the head creates a powerful
conformity signal- its obvious when students aren’t following instructions, and
allows the teacher to immediately spot the student not paying attention, which
encourages students to develop essential classroom skills such as paying
attention. Each activity seems designed to require this sort of conformity or
cooperation- the reading exercise where the students read the first letter
would appear useless at first, but in recognizing that these students would be
highly likely to simply sit and stare at their desk ignoring the instructions
to read the text, the teacher requires that 2 students alternate saying the
first letter of each word in the text. The inability of one student to continue
without the others input helps assure that not only do students read the
activity, but they read as fast as possible. In this scenario, the norms and
procedures and behavior expectations are tightly tied together, which again
reemphasizes that the focus of the class is not learning content, but rather
classroom behavior and ability to follow instructions. I imagine this is an
excellent method to help reintegrate poorly performing students back into a regular
classroom rather than letting them continually fall behind and fail a grade.
Setting High
Expectations for Students
In my third grade mathematics class, I try to set high
expectations for my students in all areas, from the classroom environment to group
and individual performance to work outside of the class. I haven’t fully
succeeded, but it is a work in progress. The climate of the classroom is one in
which I try to create as much student ownership as possible- I’ll try to avoid
saying things like “you broke the class rules” and instead ask students how
what they did might have disrupted other students learning, or ask the students
involved to reflect on what happened and ask other students what their
perspective on the matter is. I also give students a large say in what goes on
by creating roles and changing them each week- from leaders to cleaners. These
rotating roles allow students to feel the frustration of a leader when they are
trying to get the class to pay attention, and to understand how to act when
they aren’t the leader considering that they may be a leader next week. Certain
phrases are not allowed in my class either, as I focus on trying to create an
empathetic classroom. Students can’t say “it’s so easy”, as the process may be
difficult for others. If they do say it, they are then put in a responsibility
role where I send students who are struggling to those students who say it is
easy, and it becomes their job to show how to do the problem.
I often give the students extremely difficult homework, that
creates real world examples of the math concepts we learn in class. Learning to
apply their knowledge in these new and creative ways is very difficult, which
is why I emphasize that students get a pass/fail grade for homework- either I see
that they attempted the problem, attempted to recognize the TYPE of problem and
took the steps they learned in class to solve it, OR they didn’t try. Students
aren’t graded for how many problems they get right or wrong- only for the
effort they put into the work.
Finally, I usually follow the release of responsibility for
my class, so even though they are grade 3’s, they are given a good degree more
autonomy by the end of class than any other teacher at my school gives them. I
tell them I give them just enough rope to hang themselves- I treat them like
adults until they prove incapable of acting like adults. Generally, this results in
kids who stay focused on task, even when the material is particularly
challenging.
Resources
Conversation, The (2014, March 25). Explainer: what makes
Chinese maths lessons so good? Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-makes-chinese-maths-lessons-so-good-24380
Chen, C. (Crystal Chen). (2011, Jun 13). 3rd grade Chinese–math class (Video file).
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7LseF6Db5g
Roxishayne. (2011, May 31). Whole Brain Teaching Richwood High –
The Basics (Video file). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iXTtR7lfWU&feature=youtu.be
Teaching Channel (n.d.). Roller Coaster Physics: STEM in Action.
Retrieved from https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/teaching-stem-strategies
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