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Inside Teaching: How Classroom Life Undermines Reform, Mary Kennedy, pg 29, The Gap between Reform Ideals and Everyday Teaching The most important finding revealed in this chapter is that intellectual engagement can significantly add to teachers' difficulties, and that as a result teachers frequently discourage intellectual engage-ment. Just as students who are disengaged can disrupt lessons by misbehaving, so can students who are engaged disrupt a lesson by enthusiastically offering ideas that move the lesson away from the direction teachers are aiming for. Student enthusiasm can substantially complicate classroom discussions about content.
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willow
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Inside Teaching: How Classroom Life Undermines Reform, Mary Kennedy, pg 54, How Teachers Think About Their Practices One difference is that no teacher indicated a specific intention to ensure that the content they taught was inherently important. In-stead, for teachers, content was important because it would be on a test, because it was in curriculum guidelines, or because the teacher at the next grade level would expect students to know it. Teachers seemed very aware that their instruction fitted into a larger system, and the importance of any given content was defined in terms of how well it fitted into that larger system.
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lol sure man
willow
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Inside Teaching: How Classroom Life Undermines Reform, Mary Kennedy, pg 85, Creating a Tranquil Environment Ms. Aires' Routines Ms. Aires (grade 4 language arts, 3 years experience) was a Hispanic woman who taught mainly Hispanic students. The lesson we observed began immediately after the students returned from lunch. Aires had more noticeable routines than nearly any other teacher we observed, and her students, far from seeming oppressed, appeared to be eager to participate and to please her. The first thing we observed was a collection of routines used to bring students into the room after lunch. When it was time to fetch her students, Aires went out-side, closing the door behind her as she left. She returned with her students lined up behind her, opened the door, leaned inside, and turned off the lights. Then she stood at the door as her students filed into the unlit room, patting each one on the back and speaking his or her name. One by one, the children went directly to their seats and put their heads on their desks. When they were all in place, Aires closed the door and turned on the lights. The students then lifted their heads and turned their attention to her. The lesson itself consisted of three parts, with students rotating about the room to work on the three separate activities. Ms. Aires stayed at one location and worked with a different group during each rotation. When it was time for them to move to the next activity, she rang a little dinner bell, and students promptly jumped up and moved to their next activity. At one point, when she wanted everyone's attention, she stood up and put her hands on her head. As students noticed her, they also put their hands on their head, or they saw other students put their hands on their heads and followed suit. Soon all the students had their hands on their heads, were quiet, and were facing Aires.
Then she spoke to them. It would be a mistake to interpret these many routines as evidence that Aires was overly authoritarian or that students were overly con-trolled. In fact her students appeared to be very fond of her and eager to participate in these routines. When she asked a question, hands went up eagerly, and when she stood and put her hands on her head, students seemed to want to do the same, and nudged each other to ensure that everyone cooperated. At one point in the lesson, a student interrupted to remind Aires of a routine that had been neglected. One had the sense, observing the lesson, that students wanted to participate in all these rituals.
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lawl dude its not authoritarian if they don't intend it to be, teachers are only trying to get them to focus!!!! i hate how the language is so hidden like "emotional and social tranquility" bruh youre just saying they shut up and listened bc you coerced them to
willow
i don't talk about it much any more but a pretty large part of my college curricula and personal reading revolved around education philosophy, policy, pedagogy, developmental psych, etc. mostly it just makes me sad and angry to think about now
willow
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Inside Teaching: How Classroom Life Undermines Reform, Mary Kennedy, pg 92, Creating a Tranquil Environment But for most teachers, routines were not intended so much to control as to foster a sense of community in the classroom and to encourage student cooperation. Table 4 shows the distribution of teachers intentions for classroom routines across their six areas of concern. The most widely mentioned intentions for routines were to increase student willingness to participate and to foster a sense of community in the classroom. These intentions are quite different from the authoritarian motives that critics often attribute to teachers' routines. Teachers clearly view routines as important contributors to emotional and social tranquility. Routines give them a way of making sure that they treat students equally, that they acknowledge each student or have at least one personal interaction with each student, that they give students special attention, and that they help students learn to cooperate with one another. All of these can increase the likelihood that students will focus on the issue at hand and perhaps even engage with important ideas.
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also holy shit tyranny of the clock is like so so so real in school holy fuck
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:(
willow
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Inside Teaching: How Classroom Life Undermines Reform, Mary Kennedy, pg 106, Sources of Problems in Teaching Kimberly opened the lesson by portraying air as an example of a resource, which he defined as something nature provides that we can use. He reminded them that they had studied water earlier, and that water was a resource too. He then asked: "Does air fit our definition of a resource?" Most students appeared to be nodding or saying yes, except Michael, so Mr. Kimberly asked Michael what his reasoning was for disagreeing. Michael said that different places around the world had different resources, and since the entire world had air, it couldn't be a resource. Michael's argument suggests that he understood resources as being attached to specific locations. He could have picked up this idea from the unit on water, or perhaps from a unit on minerals as resources. Kimberly could have addressed Michael's conception of a resource by comparing air to other kinds of resources that are location-specific, but he chose not to. Instead, Kimberly repeated his criteria for a resource, this time in Q&A form: Kimberly: Is air something we get from nature? Ss: Yes. Kimberly: Is it something we can use? Ss: Yes. Kimberly: Is it a resource? Immediately after this exchange, another student said he also didn't think air was a resource, because we didn't ask nature to invent it, and nature didn't give it back to us, but instead it was already there for us to use. Again Kimberly repeated his criteria, pointing out that air was from nature and we used it, and therefore that it was a resource. In each case, his students were intellectually engaged with the concept of a natural resource and had their own thoughts about what made something a resource, and in each case
Inside Teaching: How Classroom Life Undermines Reform, Mary Kennedy, pg 168, Sources of Problems in Teaching definition of a resource, not have a big conversation about it. Remember the definition: Something you get from nature that you can use. Write that down for me, please." After students wrote the definition of a resource, Kimberly moved on to the second question, which asked for a definition of atmo-sphere. Again he gave them the definition they were to write. The room continued to be noisy as students wrote the definitions he had given them. Kimberly then circulated through the room to see what students were writing. One student hadn't written anything. He stopped at her desk and said, "Resource. Atmosphere. What is it?" The student shrugged sullenly, and Kimberly walked off to another desk without offering the student any further help. She continued to sit still, staring blankly at her paper. Later Kimberly introduced the term "troposphere" to students, saying that it was the part of the atmosphere that was closest to us, the part "that we really use." It extended above the earth for 10-20 miles. He then asked students what they thought we got from the troposphere, and pointed to a student. The student said, "I don't know, but some of us are really confused." Instead of asking the student what was confusing, or asking how many others were confused, Kimberly didn't respond to this comment at all; he simply called on another student.
Kimberly then moved on to the next part of his portrayal, which was a physical demonstration. He told students that the atmosphere went up 62 miles, but then said this was really a very thin layer. To il-lustrate, he draped an overhead transparency sheet over a globe and said this thin cover was the equivalent of 62 miles. A student said he was confused: How can something that thin also be 62 miles thick? Kimberly said: "I's a comparison. It's a comparison. It's a compari-son. This is 25,000 miles around [hand encircles the globe) and this is 62 miles high [the transparency). It's a comparison." At this point, numerous students began speaking simultancously, saying things like "He's taking everything and making it smaller" and "Now I'm really confused." The commotion in the room suggests that students were actively attending, but also still confused on this point, but Kimberly apparently felt he had finished his portrayal and moved on to his learning activity, with no further discussion of the relationship between the transparency draped over the globe and the 62-mile-high atmosphere. The learning activity involved filling out a worksheet. Kimberly's approach was to lead the students through it, helping them figure out what to write in response to each question. The first question asked students to define a resource. Students seemed unclear on what to write, so Kimberly said, "Something from nature that we can use. Write it down." At this point, a student asked if the air could ever get a hole in it. Then another responded excitedly, saying, "It does have a hole in it!" Numerous excited voices then filled the room. Kimberly tried to quell this enthusiasm by using his hands to ask them to lower their voices and saying, "We'll get to that. We really will. (Still numerous voices) There is not, there is not a hole in it. [Still numerous voices. MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE! Time out. Kate. Dylan. Eyes right here. [Quietly:] I asked you to write down the
Then Kimberly went into the components of the troposphere. He handed out a circle graph with three different-sized sections marked off and asked students which one they thought represented oxygen (a guessing-game question, since he had given them no basis for answering this question). After several students offered guesses, he said oxygen was the middle-sized wedge. The largest was nitrogen, and the smallest represented inert gases, which he described. Then he said there was a very tiny slice on the chart that looked like no more than a heavy line, which had other types of gases, such as hydrogen and carbon dioxide. As students considered this news, two interesting exchanges occurred. In one exchange, a student asked about ni-trogen, thinking it might be a dangerous gas. Kimberly said, "You've been breathing it for 12 years! Has it hurt you yet?" Then another student asked if nitrogen made you sleepy, if it was a sleeping gas. Kimberly said, "In that case, you'd be sleeping all the time, because you're breathing nitrogen right now." Then a third student asked if nitrogen was that stuff that makes you laugh, that the dentist gives you. Kimberly said, "There may be nitrogen in there, but it's combined with other things." The entire sequence suggests that students were confusing nitrogen with nitrous oxide, but Kimberly didn't seem to pick up on that confusion, and he didn't address their underlying concern until after several exchanges. Finally he told them that the gas used by dentists was nitrous oxide, but he said nothing more about the relationship between nitrous oxide and nitrogen. Kimberly chose not to address their ideas, to explain the difference between his definition and theirs, to show them which kinds of resources fitted these definitions, or to do anything to help them see the relationship between his definition and their own prior ideas.
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:)
willow
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Inside Teaching: How Classroom Life Undermines Reform, Mary Kennedy, pg 217, Sources of Improvement in Teaching sources. One of the most dramatic stories of change motivated by a professional development program was told by Ms. Toklisch, who had been teaching for four years when she enrolled in a summer workshop on teaching a particular mathematics curriculum. After the workshop a mentor from the program came into her classroom to observe her teaching and to help her change her practice. One day the students were learning to measure. They were measuring their own heights, but instead of holding the rulers against a wall, they moved them right up against their bodies, jagging them in and out of curves and lumps in their clothing. Toklisch saw that their measurements would be wrong and tried to correct the students, showing them how to hold the rulers, when her mentor stopped her. The mentor took her out into the hall and firmly insisted that she let the students figure this out for themselves. Then the mentor took over the class and finished the lesson herself. Toklisch watched as the students reported out their findings. Somebody said, "Well I'm the same height as you, but your measurement says you are 20 inches taller than me. That can't be right." And so Mary [the mentor] said, "Well, why don't you show the way you measured?" And they showed the way. And the kids went running over and said, "But look what's happening when you're going up and over your hips and up over you shoulders. you're adding a whole bunch of extra." And "Oohhhhhhh," they said. And that was so much more powerful than what 1 did. So much more. Because she just let them make mistakes, and then they saw the mistakes themselves. And then they started to question each other. It was so much more power-ful. I think that was the day I think I went home and cried. I went, "Oh my gosh. This is bigger than I thought it was. This is a major change.