Direct Instruction

The first learning target of the school year entailed familiarization with the parts and operation of a microscope, observation of specimens—ranging from microorganisms (e.g., tardigrades, rotifers, nematodes) to plant (e.g., elodea, onion) and animal cells (e.g., students’ own swabbed cheek cells, amoeba), and preparation of wet mounts.  During my focused observation of my mentor teacher’s periods 3, 4, and 6 biology classes, I witnessed student response to direct instruction and the corresponding forms of questioning [2.1]. Direct instruction is explicit teaching of concepts and procedures using lectures or demonstrations of the learning material to students.

For the first 10-15 minutes of a period of Biology, my mentor teacher lectured on the parts of a compound microscope using a camera-projector and provided background information on the microorganisms used for compound microscope practice with a PowerPoint presentation.  Afterward, I interacted with each individual student in order to assess for understanding of the microscope parts, calculation of magnification, and how to use the microscope. Once I saw that they understood what they needed to about the microscope, I signed their handout so that they could proceed to practice microscopy with the moss petri dishes they prepared [6.4].

In the days following, I had an opportunity to use direct instruction in conducting a demonstration and lecture for the subsequent class periods after having observed my mentor teacher demonstrate for 10-15 minutes using a document camera-projector on how to prepare microscope slides of plant cells—elodea and onion—and animal cells—the students’ own cheek cells and purchased whole mount microscope slides of amoebas—for use in practicing microscope operation and explain using a PowerPoint presentation acceptable and unacceptable examples of documentation of microscope findings. For this specific lesson, students were expected to continue familiarizing themselves with the microscope and learn how to adjust the microscope in order to get an introductory look at the different, observable cell parts that was then introduced the following day through a lecture spanning for most of each class period. Specifically, this lab required students to properly focus the compound microscope so that they can then illustrate their observations on a pre-formatted handout provided by the teacher. Students worked in with their tablemates (each table group contain 3-4 students).  Findings were reported with illustration and description.

Closed-ended questioning was used throughout the demonstration and lecture, specifically because most of the students had no background knowledge of microscopy use or the specimens utilized for practicing microscope usage. At the very beginning of class, my mentor teacher stated that the day’s learning objective:

·       In table groups, students need prepare two microscope slides: one of an elodea leaf and one of a group member’s swabbed cheek cell(s).

·       Students are instructed to replicate the procedure my mentor teacher demonstrated on preparation of microscope slides with the target specimens (e.g., elodea, human cheek) in order to further practice their ability to properly focus the compound microscope for study of specimens and familiarize themselves with the different parts of the plant cell (i.e., elodea) and animal cell (i.e., human cheek) as an introduction to a comparison of plant and animal cells.

Immediately following the demonstration, my mentor teacher shared poor and excellent examples of student observations using the compound microscope and corresponding documentation with illustrations and descriptions. For most the PowerPoint presentation, my mentor teacher told the students the reasoning for acceptable and unacceptable examples of documentation of observations with the compound microscope.

During my turn to lecture and demonstrate procedures to the students, I prompted students to think about the content by asking them, “if someone could tell me why this is the case?” More often than not, students raised their hands to volunteer answers.  Students who raised their hands to volunteer answers were of no particular ability: one student is categorized as 504—noted as having an undefined learning disability—and another has no special notation on their student file. I did not have to resort to cold-calling on students to volunteer answers. A willingness to volunteer answers to prompts might indicate that the learning environment is one of respect and students feel safe to participate [5.1].

Introduction to Teaching Course Reflection

Teachers meet the goal of professional standard 8.2. Growing and Developing Professionally by voluntarily seeking out feedback from peers and supervisors in settings of professional collaboration. Given feedback is respected and consequently applied to improve student learning success if such advice is offered in the ideal atmosphere of respect and inclusiveness—where teachers acknowledge their differences is only in their backgrounds and their sameness, in the heart they have for affecting positive change in society through successfully educating their students. Ultimately, professional growth and development of teachers should lead to assumption of leadership in directing collaboration among fellow teachers [8].  

A classroom in which the teacher embraces culturally responsive teaching follows the same pattern of growth and exhibits the same level of respect and professionalism in communicating to students’ parents that their children are (1) in the hands of capable and caring teachers and (2) deriving the most from their schooling and in teaching students so that their learning has maximum authentic value and can be applied to the real world [7]. Through interaction with the guardians of students, teachers can acquire a better understanding of their students’ sociocultural backgrounds and improve planning of differentiated curriculum that maintains respect for all learners while fostering their educational success that leads to improved socioeconomic mobility [3].

Consequently, I would expect students to self-reflect, speak on their own behalf and accept full accountability for their academic performance: a strong student voice cultivates the want and capacity of students to change society rather than just survive it so, for this reason, should have precedence over parental involvement [1]. As an immigrant student with parents although educated had limited proficiency in spoken English, I had internalized that self-evaluation, improvement, and accountability for my academic performance was wholly my own since parental involvement and their communication with my teachers was little to none. With the current surge in “helicopter parents,” this view may thus be a “dynamic of differences” between me as a teacher and the more fervently involved parents of my students (Almendrala, 2015).

However, it is this (1) practiced independence as a student as well as (2) firsthand experience with both multicultural sensitivity and discrimination as a bilingual student from an immigrant family coming to America during the Third Wave of Vietnamese Refugees that provide me an advantage of insight in creating differentiated curriculum which promotes all voices and cultures in learning [3]. Due to my heightened sense of empathy for the extra burden immigrant children face in having to align with two different cultures—feeling like an outsider to the one they are trying to join—I would vary instructional technique that enhances multicultural sensitivity among students. Within the curriculum, I could integrate inclusive teaching strategies like cooperative learning activities such as small-group discussions or inviting students to share relevance of learning material to their everyday lives, which might offer students glimpses into the sociocultural backgrounds of peers of “nondominant cultures” (Kozleski, p. 2).

Utilizing a range of assessments which elicits both written and oral discourse is another teaching technique that is culturally responsive. When I arrived in the United States at nearly five years of age with no prior exposure to the English language, I managed to learn to read and write English very fast. But, like many children from nondominant cultures—both born & raised and immigrated to the United States—my native tongue remained the language of communication at home. Therefore, I lacked the practice in spoken standard English that White, American kids most reliably receive through talking with their parents. Due to this deficiency, I was less enthused about volunteering answers orally. My experience highlights the fact that some students may not reveal their understanding through speech as well as writing or vice versa, therefore by giving equal importance to written and oral discourse, I give all students—especially those of situations similar to my own—a better chance at applying their learning and revealing its progress. 

Finally, using inclusive examples for explanations but avoiding exclusionary language—either implied or overt—creates and allows for a classroom atmosphere of tolerance and inclusiveness, which in synergy facilitate student cooperation and expected learning outcomes.

References

Almendrala, A. (2015, Sept 30). 5 Signs You Were Raised by Helicopter Parents. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/5-ways-to-tell-you-were-raised-by-helicopter-parents_us_5609de6ee4b0dd850308e260.

Kozleski, E.B. (2010, Jan). Culturally Responsive Teaching Matters! Equity Alliance at ASU. Retrieved from http://www.equityallianceatasu.org/sites/default/files/Website_files/CulturallyResponsive Teaching-Matters.pdf.    

Characteristics of an Effective Educator

An effective educator is a leader that successfully leads groups of students toward achieving their learning goals. The following qualities and attitudes that characterize successful and happy people and of which effective educators possess and help them succeed in teaching are (arranged in no particular order):

·         Preparedness: effective teachers come prepared to demonstrate their expertise and all the effort they invested in instructional planning;

·         Skilled management: successful teachers manage their teaching duties and administrative tasks efficiently so that they can devote as much time and effort as possible to their students’ learning;

·         Positivity & Faith: effective teachers have an optimistic view of student ability and see their students' potential as plastic, therefore they consistently encourage and challenge their students in order to stimulate their students' potential;

·         Creativity: effective teachers use available resources to create lessons and learning aids and vary instruction so that students are constantly engaged in learning;

·         Compassionate & Fair: successful teachers care for students’ well-being and display fairness and understanding in how they treat students and grade student performance;

·         Promotes a sense of community: effective teachers are skilled mediators and foster a sense of belonging and mutual respect for all students in their classrooms;

·         Humility: effective teachers are modest and comfortable with admitting their mistakes or wrongs;

·         Patience: effective teachers realize that results (i.e., students’ understanding) are often not immediate and apparent, so they calmly persist in their teaching efforts as they anticipate their students’ grasp of the learning material.

·         Sense of humor: effective teachers are mentally and emotionally flexible enough to be receptive to having fun—a valuable impetus for learning—with their students.

Reflection 2

This course started off with a discussion on the major, enduring debate of nature versus nurture—of which I would argue has been the impetus behind further development in the study of child and adolescent development and cognitive processes relevant to how students learn. Class discussion about this common debate highlights to all of us who are preparing to be effective educators the importance of believing that the classroom is a large source of nurture in children’s lives. As a teacher, the view that intelligence is plastic—having the potential to decrease and increase due to stimuli—is a compassionate one that makes for a teacher willing and capable of stimulating student potential. Moreover, it is with this optimistic mindset that teachers can sincerely acquire teaching strategies that would drive academic success.

Teaching students so they successfully learn requires an understanding of how their minds work and how it develops through different stages of childhood. That we then studied biological development in children and development of their cognitive skills was an appropriate segue into exploring effective teaching skills. While I had prior understanding that the younger a child, the less items they can retain in their short-term memory span at any given time, reading the Pressley and McCormick (2007) discussion on the short-term memory limitations which are strongly constrained by biological development really drove home the point that as a teacher I must always be conscious of creating lessons that challenge kids but not overwhelm them to the point of becoming discouraged. Since younger children have slower information-processing speeds and use more of their short-term capacity demand on information-processing than adults, the importance of aiding and facilitating their learning with strategies that reduce the capacity demand of learning material goes a long way in keeping them interested in learning (Pressley and McCormick, p. 81).

Further exploration of helpful strategies teachers can use to specifically work around this limitation in younger children highlights three broadly applicable teaching methods for teaching a fact-heavy subject such as biology. Considering them as a three-point strategy rather than several a la carte techniques, the plan of assessing the capacity demand of a learning goal, dividing up a complex of concepts into simpler parts to conquer and coaching students toward completion by providing a supportive learning environment and learning aids (e.g., worksheets, writing prompts, mnemonic devices, etc.) reduces the short-term memory capacity demands of students and encourages further learning. Since learning of biology naturally progresses from details that explain the broader concept, I would routinely use at the beginning of class a major learning aid called an advance organizer in the form of a PowerPoint presentation in order to give the students 1) a conceptual preview of what they would be learning about in that day’s lesson and 2) an organizer for which students can "label, store, and package ideas" for a broader understanding (Borich, p. 298). The goals of this advance organizer guide students toward conceptualization, connections-building, of many biological concepts and help them further build their semantic-network for biological knowledge.  

This guided discovery approach is one of three ways of teaching Pressley and McCormick (2007) describe in the lengthy discussion we have been continuing on the mode of teaching called Constructivism—which is composed of three different degrees to which teachers allow for student-led discovery, or learning, in education. The direct explanation approach, the discovery approach, and the guided discovery approach to constructivist teaching are respectively rooted in the exogenous-constructivist, endogenous-constructivist, and dialectical constructivist approaches to teaching. The latter three correspondingly derive their philosophy from even earlier forms of Constructivism teaching approaches named cultural transmission constructivism, romantic constructivism, and progressivism (constructivism).

Constructivism was entirely new knowledge for me when I approached it in the text. I enjoyed analyzing the different types and considering their applicability to a teaching style I have been trying to develop (theoretically, at least). Ultimately, I find the third approach of guided discovery—or dialectical constructivism or progressivism—the most appealing because students realizing conceptual relationships mostly by their own effort end up having the most durable understanding and that is every teacher’s greatest wish. Moreover, like Nathanael from class suggests, letting students construct their own semantic-network of ideas facilitates deeper understanding and prodding them along when they are extremely lost will ensure that there will be time left to explore everything that needs to be explored. Given my teaching style preference, I would use many collaborative learning activities such as competitive question-and-answer team-based games, the guided discovery learning tool of a science lab, and online interactive learning modules to encourage distributed learning (i.e., distributed cognition) among my students.

References

Borich, G.D. (2014). Effective Teaching Methods: research-based practice (8^th ed.). New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.

Pressley, M., & McCormick, C. B. (2007). Child and Adolescent Development for Educators. New York, NY: Guilford Press.