__Proposition 2: Teachers know the subjects they teach, and how to teach those subjects to students
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- NBCTs have mastery over the subject(s) they teach. They have a deep understanding of the history, structure and real-world applications of the subject.
- They have skill and experience in teaching it, and they are very familiar with the skills gaps and preconceptions students may bring to the subject.
- They are able to use diverse instructional strategies to teach for understanding.
reading_3.pptx | |
File Size: | 2104 kb |
File Type: | pptx |
reading_4.pptx | |
File Size: | 1985 kb |
File Type: | pptx |
reading4_ppt_notes.docx | |
File Size: | 40 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Rationale
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Proposition 2 of the NBPTS’s Core
Propositions states that effective teachers “have mastery over the subject(s) they teach. They have a
deep understanding of the history, structure and real-world applications of the
subject.” In addition, “They have skill and experience in teaching it, and they
are very familiar with the skills gaps and preconceptions students may bring to
the subject.” Finally, these effective teachers “are able to use diverse
instructional strategies to teach for understanding.”
As evidence of this Proposition, I chose to include two PowerPoints on The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank that I feel speak to the multiple facets of this Proposition. These are the types of PowerPoints I have created for each book in my curriculum. I strongly believe that the best way to reach the “digital native” students of 2012 is to incorporate technology with best teaching practice. One of the reasons I use PowerPoints is because I can prepare class notes ahead of time, ensures a degree of continuity among the multiple sections of the same class, and allows me to easily catch students up on missed classes by printing out the notes. One of the things I debated when I began using PowerPoints was how I should ask students to take notes from the lectures. At this level, students have not yet learned that their notes should summarize the important parts of the lecture, so much class time was initially wasted as students copied down each slide verbatim. I didn’t want to simply print out a handout for the slides because I wanted students to remain focused throughout the lecture. Inspire by a grammar MadLibs activity I did with my students, I developed a time saving strategy. Students are given a handout with an outline of the PowerPoint, with blanks for important facts, vocab, or definitions. Students must pay attention to the PowerPoint to get the important facts, and the completion of the blanks helps me discern who is paying attention and who is not. I’ve included this handout along with the other two artifacts.
PowerPoints also allow me to organize the multimedia resources I use to accompany my lessons, such as the sound clips, videos, and photos. Not only does this demonstrate that I possess the “deep understanding of the history, structure and real-world applications” of the texts in my curriculum, but I began including such media in my Powerpoints because of my understanding of the “skills gaps and preconceptions students may bring” to the text. Each text in my curriculum--The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Diary of a Young Girl, and The Outsiders—requires that students have a certain degree of background knowledge on the time period of the story and creation to understand the text. Background knowledge is something I’ve noticed students as a general rule are lacking, so I spend a significant amount of time with each text discussing the historical and cultural context of each text. For example, in the slide on Anne’s entry of Wednesday, November 3, 1943 (PowerPoint 4), I include a video on what “keeping kosher” means. Woodstock is primarily a white, Christian town, so few students understand what “kosher” is, so we discuss the doctrine and relate it to more familiar practices, such as not eating meat on Fridays during Lent.
In addition, the PowerPoint format allows me to teach to the differing multiple intelligences of my students using the “diverse instructional strategies” recommended by this Proposition. My linguistic students can see the notes on the SmartBoard and also hear me speak to those notes. My spatial students have graphics and pictures to engage them, and I even include music to engage my students with strong musical intelligence. Where you see purple writing on the PowerPoints indicates a question that I will pose to the students to first write about in their notebooks and then discuss as a class. These questions are purposefully designed to exercise students’ intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences.
As evidence of this Proposition, I chose to include two PowerPoints on The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank that I feel speak to the multiple facets of this Proposition. These are the types of PowerPoints I have created for each book in my curriculum. I strongly believe that the best way to reach the “digital native” students of 2012 is to incorporate technology with best teaching practice. One of the reasons I use PowerPoints is because I can prepare class notes ahead of time, ensures a degree of continuity among the multiple sections of the same class, and allows me to easily catch students up on missed classes by printing out the notes. One of the things I debated when I began using PowerPoints was how I should ask students to take notes from the lectures. At this level, students have not yet learned that their notes should summarize the important parts of the lecture, so much class time was initially wasted as students copied down each slide verbatim. I didn’t want to simply print out a handout for the slides because I wanted students to remain focused throughout the lecture. Inspire by a grammar MadLibs activity I did with my students, I developed a time saving strategy. Students are given a handout with an outline of the PowerPoint, with blanks for important facts, vocab, or definitions. Students must pay attention to the PowerPoint to get the important facts, and the completion of the blanks helps me discern who is paying attention and who is not. I’ve included this handout along with the other two artifacts.
PowerPoints also allow me to organize the multimedia resources I use to accompany my lessons, such as the sound clips, videos, and photos. Not only does this demonstrate that I possess the “deep understanding of the history, structure and real-world applications” of the texts in my curriculum, but I began including such media in my Powerpoints because of my understanding of the “skills gaps and preconceptions students may bring” to the text. Each text in my curriculum--The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Diary of a Young Girl, and The Outsiders—requires that students have a certain degree of background knowledge on the time period of the story and creation to understand the text. Background knowledge is something I’ve noticed students as a general rule are lacking, so I spend a significant amount of time with each text discussing the historical and cultural context of each text. For example, in the slide on Anne’s entry of Wednesday, November 3, 1943 (PowerPoint 4), I include a video on what “keeping kosher” means. Woodstock is primarily a white, Christian town, so few students understand what “kosher” is, so we discuss the doctrine and relate it to more familiar practices, such as not eating meat on Fridays during Lent.
In addition, the PowerPoint format allows me to teach to the differing multiple intelligences of my students using the “diverse instructional strategies” recommended by this Proposition. My linguistic students can see the notes on the SmartBoard and also hear me speak to those notes. My spatial students have graphics and pictures to engage them, and I even include music to engage my students with strong musical intelligence. Where you see purple writing on the PowerPoints indicates a question that I will pose to the students to first write about in their notebooks and then discuss as a class. These questions are purposefully designed to exercise students’ intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences.
Reflection
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“Our students have changed radically. Today’s
students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach”
(Prensky, “Digital
Natives, Digital Immigrants”, 2001, p.1).
The world of today is drastically different from the world of yesterday. Today’s students not only need to develop traditional reading and writing skills, but they must develop digital literacy skills. These students enroll in our elementary schools already digitally literate; many have already learned to surf the web, blog, text, message, app, network, and game by watching the older people around them (parents, siblings, etc) use these technologies. These students, who Prensky (2001) calls “digital natives” (p. 1), spend over 6 hours per day with technology (Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010, as cited in Blanchard & Farstrup, 2011, p.287). Nearly all United States children have access to a computer and the Internet. Many of them also have access to other technologies, including interactive whiteboards, DVDs, MP3s, e-book readers; these technologies have also made their way into the classroom. This has led to what McPake, Stephen, and Plowman (2007) have termed an “’e-society, where digital connectivity—use of the internet, mobile phones, and other interactive technologies—is essential to daily life’” (as cited in Blanchard & Farstrup, 2011, p. 291).
Blanchard & Farstrup (2011) also emphasize that technology that students use outside of the classroom influences child development and thus reading instruction. This conclusion is nothing revolutionary. In 1974, Olson & Bruner concluded that technology-based tools play a central role in thinking and learning, and that each experience produces a “’unique pattern of skills for dealing with or thinking about the world’” (as cited in Blanchard & Farstrup, 2011, p.291). More recently, Brown (2008) concluded that the development of the structure and function of the brain could potentially be impacted by any change in children’s early experiences, including the amount of technology used in childhood. Prensky’s article “Do They Really //Think// Differently” (2001), a continuation of “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” concludes that “digital natives brains are likely physically different as a result of the digital input they received growing up” based on evidence from “neurobiology, social psychology, and from studies done on children using games for learning” (p.1).This realization has led to an increased interest by researchers in the influences of outside-classroom technology on in-school learning, as well as how technology traditionally used outside the classroom (i.e. “apps”) can brought into schools to improve instruction, particularly in reading.
As I mentioned in my Rationale, to engage students and encourage the development of digital literacy, I use technology whenever opportunity and school policy allows. From PowerPoint and SmartBoard based lessons to writing and reading activities using wikis, blogs, and digital texts, technology is used to engage students in high-quality discussion that strengthens their digital literacy skills and establishes a classroom community. As a member of what Marc Prensky (2001) calls the “digital native” tribe, incorporating technology into my teaching practice came naturally, and it has been the part of my practice that I felt has been most successful. However, I do feel, as I mentioned in my rationale, that technology must be incorporated with other best teaching practices to be effective. I’ve seen many programs that rely too heavily on technology—in other words, technology is being used to replace good teaching. For example, my school uses the StudyIsland online program to prepare students for the CMTs. While this program features games and can be fun for students to develop their skills, it has been so overused that my eighth graders see it more as a chore than as a fun tool to prepare for the test. This could have been avoided if the program was used as just one of the methods to prepare students for the test and was accompanied by other teaching practices.
The world of today is drastically different from the world of yesterday. Today’s students not only need to develop traditional reading and writing skills, but they must develop digital literacy skills. These students enroll in our elementary schools already digitally literate; many have already learned to surf the web, blog, text, message, app, network, and game by watching the older people around them (parents, siblings, etc) use these technologies. These students, who Prensky (2001) calls “digital natives” (p. 1), spend over 6 hours per day with technology (Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010, as cited in Blanchard & Farstrup, 2011, p.287). Nearly all United States children have access to a computer and the Internet. Many of them also have access to other technologies, including interactive whiteboards, DVDs, MP3s, e-book readers; these technologies have also made their way into the classroom. This has led to what McPake, Stephen, and Plowman (2007) have termed an “’e-society, where digital connectivity—use of the internet, mobile phones, and other interactive technologies—is essential to daily life’” (as cited in Blanchard & Farstrup, 2011, p. 291).
Blanchard & Farstrup (2011) also emphasize that technology that students use outside of the classroom influences child development and thus reading instruction. This conclusion is nothing revolutionary. In 1974, Olson & Bruner concluded that technology-based tools play a central role in thinking and learning, and that each experience produces a “’unique pattern of skills for dealing with or thinking about the world’” (as cited in Blanchard & Farstrup, 2011, p.291). More recently, Brown (2008) concluded that the development of the structure and function of the brain could potentially be impacted by any change in children’s early experiences, including the amount of technology used in childhood. Prensky’s article “Do They Really //Think// Differently” (2001), a continuation of “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” concludes that “digital natives brains are likely physically different as a result of the digital input they received growing up” based on evidence from “neurobiology, social psychology, and from studies done on children using games for learning” (p.1).This realization has led to an increased interest by researchers in the influences of outside-classroom technology on in-school learning, as well as how technology traditionally used outside the classroom (i.e. “apps”) can brought into schools to improve instruction, particularly in reading.
As I mentioned in my Rationale, to engage students and encourage the development of digital literacy, I use technology whenever opportunity and school policy allows. From PowerPoint and SmartBoard based lessons to writing and reading activities using wikis, blogs, and digital texts, technology is used to engage students in high-quality discussion that strengthens their digital literacy skills and establishes a classroom community. As a member of what Marc Prensky (2001) calls the “digital native” tribe, incorporating technology into my teaching practice came naturally, and it has been the part of my practice that I felt has been most successful. However, I do feel, as I mentioned in my rationale, that technology must be incorporated with other best teaching practices to be effective. I’ve seen many programs that rely too heavily on technology—in other words, technology is being used to replace good teaching. For example, my school uses the StudyIsland online program to prepare students for the CMTs. While this program features games and can be fun for students to develop their skills, it has been so overused that my eighth graders see it more as a chore than as a fun tool to prepare for the test. This could have been avoided if the program was used as just one of the methods to prepare students for the test and was accompanied by other teaching practices.
References
_Blanchard, J. S., & Farstrup, A. E. (2011). Technologies, digital
media, and reading instruction. In S. Samuels & A.
Farstrup (Eds.), What the research has to say about reading instruction (pp. 286-314).
Farstrup (Eds.), What the research has to say about reading instruction (pp. 286-314).