Month: April 2017

Motivation in education is very key for teachers.  If the students are not motivated to do homework or to do well on a test, it can have disastrous consequences for everyone and result in a very long semester.  There are several ways in which a teacher can motivate students.  The most common form of motivation is known as extrinsic motivation (Woolfolk, 477).  In other words, it’s doing well to avoid punishment, or in the classroom, a bad grade.  A teacher may also provide incentives (bribes) for students to help motivate them to do well.  Hooray for candy and stickers!  The other type of motivation is intrinsic motivation (Woolfolk, 476).  An intrinsically motivated student will take it upon themselves to do well in order to prove something to someone or themselves.  Unlike extrinsic motivation, intrinsically motivated people don’t need any incentives to do well.

In my future classroom, I hope to create an environment that will help motivate students to do well.  One way in which I can foster this is through a student centered (constructivist) approach.  Depending upon whether I have tables or desks, I can push them together into smaller groups to help encourage students to work together.  Seeing as I hope to teach history, we can hold debates and discussions on historical issues and events.  The main reason I would like to do this is just to get ideas floating around the classroom.  I know a fair amount of history but other students may be able to provide another perspective to a certain issue that I cannot.  If a student found something interesting during discussion, I would encourage them to research it further and they may get some extra credit out of it (just some more motivation for them).

Getting students to understand the facts and concepts they need to succeed is another key aspect of what a teacher does.  In history it can often be difficult for students to understand some concepts because they feel that history is just a series of dates.  It also doesn’t help that history teachers often teach out of a textbook, which makes the material all the more boring.  To help reduce the risk of this happening, teachers could reverse engineer (aka. Backward Design) their lesson plans so that they understand what the students need to know and how to go about teaching it.

Backwards Design starts with stating the objectives, what do you want the students to know.  For example, if I were planning a lesson on World War I, I would want the students to understand the causes of the war, what the soldiers went through in the trenches, how technological innovations affected the war, and the effects the war had on Europe after it ended.  I would also need to state the key questions that need to be answered throughout the lesson.  In order to make sure that the students had a grasp on all of these concepts, I would need to test them.  I could do a boring old test (which does work well), but some concepts, like the experience of the soldiers in the trenches, cannot be captured in a simple test.  In order to gauge some of the other concepts, I would have to try something different; like a wartime journal where a soldier (played by a student) catalogs their experiences in the trenches.  What they went through on a daily basis, the paranoia they were feeling, what an attack was like, all sorts of things.

Once the objectives and the assessments are in place, it is then time to draw out the lesson plan.  How are you going to go about portraying this information to the students to help them understand your key objectives.  For my World War I example, I could lecture at them (which would get most facts across), bring in videos of experts talking about some of the subject matter (like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2DLybNYta4), and also find actual journals and documents from that time period (primary sources) that help the portray what life was really like back then.  Once they’ve examined those documents we could hold a discussion and try to explain the rationale behind going to war, fighting for one’s country, and the effects that the war had.  The use of Backwards Design can greatly benefit a teacher, simplify their lesson plans, and save a ton of time.

References:

• Woolfolk, Anita. (2014). Educational Psychology: Active Learning Edition, 12th Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ. Pearson Education Inc.

As future teachers, we’ll encounter students from many different backgrounds.  Most of the students we’ll encounter will have backgrounds that are far different than from our own.  It is up to us to develop lesson plans and learning experiences that can help students from all sorts of different backgrounds maximize their learning potential.

One difference that I’ve encountered down at my Observation and Practicum in Beloit is students who come from low or working class families.  This is rough on the students because their families cannot afford the basic needs for their education.  Their parents might also be focused more on paying the rent, putting food on the table, and other more important things that what their child needs for school.  One way that my cooperating teacher tries to counteract this issue is by buying basic school supplies (pencils, notebooks, etc.) for those students.  He also ties in a behaviorist aspect to these supplies.  By that I mean, he allows other students to grab some of these supplies only if they have remained on task or have not disturbed class.

The School District of Beloit also tries to counteract this issue by providing a free breakfast and lunch to all students.  This way the students of parents who struggle to keep a good source of food on the table can get something to eat on a consistent basis.  Students may decline to take breakfast at any time but the option is always there.

As a future history teacher, I hope to maintain open communication about racial differences in my classroom.  Not only may there be barriers and tensions between different racial and ethnic groups but maintaining open communication provides a valuable learning experience when it comes to history.  Throughout history there have been countless examples of tensions between people of different races and ethnicities; and that is just in the United States alone.  I could try a similar activity to Jane Elliott’s discrimination activity (Weber, 2017), although that could have some unwanted backlash.

Not only could the racial differences in my classroom be a beneficial learning opportunity when it comes to history but it could help the students better understand what their fellow students experience on a daily basis (Munniksma, Scheepers, Stark, Tolsma, 26).  Open communication could help them empathize better with their fellow students and, who knows, they may find some common ground.

References:

• Munniksma, A., Scheepers, P., Stark, T. H., & Tolsma, J. (2017). The Impact of Adolescents’ Classroom and Neighborhood Ethnic Diversity on Same- and Cross-Ethnic Friendships Within Classrooms. Journal Of Research On Adolescence (Wiley-Blackwell), 27(1), 20-33.
• Nicole Weber Lecture, “Learner Diversity”, 3/28/2017.