EDSS 531

Journal #5

Human beings are expert at the art of self-delusion, and I am no exception.  So when I walk into a room and I think I ‘know’ the 40 or so kids staring back at me, I could be completely mistaken.  Still, it was surprising, the more I became familiar with my students last semester, how much I recognized in them the personality traits of people I know and have known.  That’s great, because it gives me a ground on which to relate to them, but it is also in a way pointless, in that my relationship to my students is different than my relationship to anyone else I’ve ever known.  I have a purpose with these kids that I don’t have with anyone else. Actually, two purposes.  One is to somehow implant in them the Science Content Standards for Public Schools.  The other is to somehow support and nourish their growth into adulthood and their expression of themselves.  They seem anxious to do both, and it seems that the most important thing they want from me is to let them.  It’s important to remember that I teach an elective and all my students have made a conscious decision to be in my class, but with that in mind, far as I can tell, the best thing I can give them is to encourage and appreciate their efforts to succeed.  Since they do want to succeed, I find that if I can keep myself open, they’ll let me know what they need from me, or at least they’ll try to.

That said, there has been one group of students that I’ve been unable to relate to.  There are two or three in each class.   These are the silent ones.  They are always Hispanic.  They never speak except when spoken to.  When I try to engage them they answer in single syllables and show little or no emotion (at least not that I can read).  And they don’t get good grades.  I think, if they were succeeding academically, I wouldn’t care so much that I can’t communicate with them, but they aren’t so I find myself feeling frustrated and helpless.  To me, these kids stick out.  I notice them because they are so un-noticeable.  At first, I thought poorly of them and figured they didn’t care and were just marking time.  But I don’t think that’s it.  As I say, I am at a loss as to how to approach these kids.

Which leads me to get on my soapbox for a while, and I’m grateful to Brianna for tweeting this website yesterday and reminding me of it.  I believe that THE most underserved population in America is the deaf community.  Have you ever had the alarm go off while you were leaving a store because the checker hadn’t properly deactivated the security tag on your new dress?  If you were deaf, you wouldn’t hear that alarm. You wouldn’t hear the checker calling to you.  You wouldn’t know anything at all was amiss until the loss prevention man tackled you in the parking lot.  Security systems, disaster systems and schools are all geared to the hearing.  Deaf students have a dropout rate approaching 45%.  It is estimated that up to 50% of parents of deaf children never learn to sign, leaving their children without access to language itself until they reach school age.  The developmental deficit those children begin with is almost incomprehensible.  So that’s the most negative reaction I’ve had so far.

EDSS 541

RR 14 & 15

We went with a team approach and a complementary approach.  

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RR13: IDENTIFY what co-teaching approaches were modeled this week.

Working from the assumption that the main point of this response has to do with the co-teaching seminar on Feb. 15, I would say two of the approaches were modeled.  During the first half of the evening, we saw the Supportive approach, in which Dr. Thousand led the presentation while other faculty members were in attendance to help as needed.  During the second half of the evening we saw a parallel approach in which our two professors moved around checking in with the different groups as we did our independent group work.

On a more general level:  a summary of the four co-teaching approaches we’ve been introduced to follows

·         Supportive – one teacher leads the classes while one or more others are there provide support.  The support teacher may help with classroom management,  housekeeping, providing individual attention to students who need it, etc.

·         Complementary – one teacher still seems to be leading the class, but the other will take a more cognitively active role, paraphrasing, clarifying or amplifying points or modeling student participation.

·         Team – two or more teachers share all of the teaching duties, from planning to execution and assessment.  They plan closely together, each expressing their strongest skills.

·         Parallel – the class is split into two or more groups and the teachers work independently with those groups.  Each teacher may work with one or more groups exclusively, or all teachers may rotate amongst all the groups.

EDSS 531

We've been assigned the task to pose some questions for discussion based on our reading this week.  Might as well put them on the blog.  Both questions come from a single reading:

From Understanding Unconscious Bias…….

 “…in ,many situations we are able to direct our behavior using our conscious attitudes – what we choose to believe or our stated values – rather than our ‘racial attitude on and unconscious level – the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we’ve even had time to think”.

Here’s the question:

The great objection I have to digital communication – twitter et. al. – is that it completely erases those  “automatic associations” that communicate what we unconsciously think and feel as opposed to what we school ourselves to think and feel.  My question then becomes, does that erasure make it better or worse?  Our we more or less able to internalize and make automatic the attitudes we want to cultivate in ourselves in a situation where those we are interacting are able to see and respond to only our “best face”?

Also from Undestanding Unconscious Bias:

Table 1 shows the time it takes a team composed of a white and black member to complete a task.  The teams were sorted by the existence of overt bias, no bias and covert bias on the part of the white member.   What accounts for the increased time to complete the task when the white team member exhibited covert bias?

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 Journal Writing 4:  What are your biases and how do you mitigate your behavior when working with students?

Warning!  The next few sentences may be pretty ugly.  Blacks are dirty, lazy, noisy and stupid.  Hispanics are hard-working but so dumb they can’t even speak English.  Indians are drunken bullies. Asians are treacherous, just pretending they don’t speak English.  Germans are pushy and rude.  Poles are stupid.  Those are the stereotypes I was brought up with.  Lurking like a virus in my lungs ready to emerge in a moment of stress.  And as much as I to ignore them, they do affect my first impression of everyone I meet.  The trick is to keep them from affecting my ongoing interactions, particularly with my students.  The first thing is to ignore that first impression, which with practice is not too hard to do.  The second is to cultivate curiosity about my students.  Try to understand their thoughts and feelings.  The third is to care about them and let them know it, which, once you’ve got to know them a bit, is really almost unavoidable. 

That’s my approach.  I don’t know how successful I am.  There’s a big difference between modulating your behavior so as not to show bias and really not having any bias.  The first is relatively easy.  The second – well prejudice in some form at some level may be an inescapable part of the human condition.

Before I conclude though, I’ve noticed a new prejudice in my teaching, which surprises and troubles me.  When grading papers I’ve noticed that if I know the student whose paper I’m grading; that is, if I know their name and picture their face as I read their work, I am inclined to be more lenient in assigning grades.  As a practical consideration, that means that the more outgoing students, who I get to know sooner, will get better grades from me than the retiring ones.  

EDSS 531  Journal #3

To what degree do you think you really understand the needs of your students and what they need for the 21st century?  How wide is the “gap” between them and you? In what areas are the gaps? What can you do to make connections?

OK, I may be full of it, but I really don’t think the gap between me and my students is all that great.  Which is not to say that I think I know what they need for the 21st century.  Indeed, I think that very lack of knowledge is what we have most in common.   For all that we all try to pretend otherwise, none of us, I say none of us, has any idea at all what knowledge and skills these students will need to succeed in the world ahead of them.   The professional prognosticators of the world have been proven wrong pretty much every time anyone has bothered to go back and check their predictions against reality.  So for me to imagine that the communication tools and the social interaction paradigms that I don’t share with my students will somehow cripple my ability to relate to them is, I think, wide of the mark.  Those paradigms will most likely be unrecognizable by the time these kids finish college.   More importantly, I don’t believe that the things I have to offer my students depend strongly on those paradigms. 

My subject is Physics and, to be brutally honest, if one of my students were to learn absolutely nothing of Physics in my classroom, they would be at almost no disadvantage in a college level Physics program.  The concepts that we spend weeks covering can be mastered in hours by a student who is intelligent, internally motivated and curious and will never be mastered by one who lacks those characteristics.  Formulas are easy to memorize, facts are easy to memorize.  The heart of the Physicist is skill and persistence in asking questions and finding answers.  So if I want to give my students the best professional gift I possibly can, I will strive to inspire in them a spirit of curiosity, a desire to see beyond the surface values of the world around them and a vision of the beauty they will find when they do see beyond those surface values.  And if I want to give the best human gift I can, I will strive to inspire in them that same spirit, as expressed in the form of charity, compassion and empathy toward their fellows, which really amount to the same thing . 

These, I believe, are qualities that do not depend on the means of communication.  They are, however, also qualities that don’t appear anywhere in the California State Science Content Standards.  I hope that won’t turn out to be a problem.

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RR10:   Revise your team's Task 2: ITU Cover Sheet

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RR9: Begin your ethnographic research on your school site to complete your ethnography for EDSS 530 and to complete Task 3 for the ITU.

RBV School Data
Demographics of School:
Total school enrollment and listed percentages of the total population by race
Total Enrollment	3061
Black/African American:	4.0%
American Indian/Alaska Native:	1.4%
Filipino:	1.4%
Asian:	3.2%
Pacific Islander:	0.9%
Hispanic/Latino:	45%
White:	43%
Two Races or More:	0.8%

The API growth report for 2011can be found at RBV API GROWTH 2011  and it's nice to know that the school met its growth targets in all categories.

Some other websites related to the school:

The School's Website

The Parent/Teacher/Student Association

The Longhorn Foundation

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RR8: LIST ideas and resources you can use for your Service Learning and ITU (Task 11).

Our ITU is on the topic of Hydraulic Fracturing, which is a rather large-scale topic and, by itself, not easily addressed in the form of a direct service project.  So I think we would do best to incorporate an advocacy experience.

1.      The environmental impact of fracking in areas where it occurs is controversial, and it would be a good component of the unit for the students to do research and reach a consensus as to their opinion on the subject.  They could then follow up on that with a letter-writing or editorial campaign in support of their side.  The project would not really be very locally oriented, as there is no hydraulic fracturing going on in California, so they would have to use mostly remote resources like internet research and communication with advocates on both sides of the issue in the various areas where it is occurring.

2.      The subject is related to topics of energy use, energy conservation and carbon footprint.  So another  project that comes to mind is carbon footprint auditing.  Students would research various strategies that could be used to reduce energy usage with a particular focus on their school.  They would be able to connect with local businesses in the industry for help.  The project could include a financial analysis of each strategy.  The project might culminate with a “footprint reduction day” at the school or at any local institution or even just around the neighborhoods.  On that day they might enlist parents or other teachers or students or even professionals to participate and go through and implement the changes that they had previously identified

EDSS 541

RR7: Identify the key elements and process for Service Learning

In the first major section of this book Ms. Kaye approaches the subject of service learning from multiple perspectives.  Each of those perspectives contains key elements of the subject and in many ways each could become a blueprint for a service learning experience, she also presents a formal blueprint which she appears to have developed from the key elements she has presented previously. (I’m looking for a better word than ‘experience’.  While Kaye rightly rejects the term ‘project’ as implying that the service has a defined end-point and may be forgotten once it is over, the term ‘experience’ these days connotes a certain theme park touchy-feeliness and lack of rigor.  Maybe ‘program’ would work.)

Those key elements boil down to:

Four categories of Service Learning: These are Direct Service, Indirect Service, Advocacy and Research.  She points out that Direct Service and Advocacy are more impactful to High School students than the others, which makes sense in light of the moral passion which is so much a part of adolescence.

Service Learning standards for quality practice:  I can only describe these as essential points to consider in the planning and execution of Service Learning programs.  They are very much process-oriented and tend to skew toward a student-centered philosophy.

A five-step process which lays out the essential stages of planning and executing a Service Learning program.  These are Investigation, Preparation and Planning, Action, Reflection and Demonstration.  It is worth noting that here also she shows a very student-centric philosophy, often recommending that the students, rather than the teacher, take the lead in defining the process.  It is also worth noting that she takes the time to explicitly discourage us from using competition as a motivator.

Finally, the Blueprint for Service Learning seems to be a more expanded and detailed exposition of her five-step process in which, along with the various forms summary documents on the CD, she provides the reader with almost a cookbook for an effective Service Learning experience.  The blueprint is a very comprehensive guide which includes strategies for finding connection to different disciplines, engaging parents and community and providing the students with opportunities for reflection and authentic assessment.

EDSS 531

Journal #2

Quote from the Text/Video	What it Means	Deeper Thinking
The reality is that diagnoses aren’t especially useful for understanding kids with behavioral challenges or for helping adults know what to do next. -From “Kids do Well if They Can	A diagnosis is basically a label.  The author here is saying that labeling the behavior does not by itself solve the problem.	I remember hearing about a psych study on the attitude of therapists towards their patients pre- and post-diagnosis.  The gist of it was that after a patient had been diagnosed, the therapist became less curious, less interested and treated the patient as a disease more than as a person.  The upshot seemed to be that therapy was more effective without a diagnosis.  My own thinking is that we have a left-brained tendency to want to be able to look up in a book the solution to our problems and apply it, secure in the knowledge that if we just get the diagnosis right, all will be well.  That approach works well for washing machines and cars, but not so well for people.  I think experience has shown, often tragically, that we frequently make the wrong diagnosis, and that once diagnosis is made, we carry on blithely with the prescribed treatment oblivious to its effects.
…kids who haven’t responded to natural consequences don’t need more consequences, they need adults who are knowledgeable about how challenging kids come to be challenging….. -From “Kids do Well if They Can	Teachers and parents need training in those skills.	Perhaps those people who we consider to be natural born teachers are the ones who are able to empathize with the adolescent experience and support their students’ maturation.  Take black-and-white thinking for example.  As long as a kids brain has not yet developed the ability to see shades of grey, they are stuck in that black and white world.  We can’t shake them out of it.  Perhaps teachers should be recruited from the ranks of psychotherapists.
“This is precisely what happened to the routine mass production jobs, which moved across the oceans in the second half of the twentieth century.  And just as those factory workers had to master a new set of skills….many of todays  knowledge workers will likewise have to command a new set of aptitudes.” -From A Whole New Mind	Adapability and lifelong learning are the essential skills for the current generation.	There has been an incredible increase in the standard of living in Asia over the past twenty years or so.  While the economies of America and Europe are undergoing recession, those of Asia are booming.  As a by-product there has been a small but significant increase in manufacturing in the United States.  During the 1950’s and 1960’s Japan became an economic powerhouse, flooding the developed industrial world with products cheaper than we could make at home.  The result was an increase in the standard of living of Japan and a continuing migration of low-level labor to China, India, Southeast Asia and South America.  Now mid-level labor is also migrating.  Prognostication is always dangerous, but I think the defining economic trend of the 21st century will be the leveling of the global playing field and a more even distribution of valued skill sets.  Throughout history those “right-brained” qualities have found expression in societies characterized by abundance.  But that abundance has usually been at the expense of the poverty of some unseen class, often in another country.
“The whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of University entrance and the consequence is many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not.” -From Do Schools Kill Creativity?	The whole thrust of the current educational system is misdirected.	He goes on to say much more about this topic and elaborate about the industrial revolution, etc., and makes a lovely joke about school being designed to create university professors, but here’s a scarier scenario.  If schools were initially designed to train children to be factory workers, once the factory work became automated goes away, the next most appropriate application for that type of unquestioning, regimented training is the military.  And now that warfare is becoming automated the next most appropriate application is the prison system.

EDSS 530

Reflection on the Visitors and Residents Video

Cyberspace:  It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.  The simple fact that I call it cyberspace is a giveaway; puts me in a generation that considers that realm foreign and somehow disconnected from the world of human interaction and experience.  Neuroscientists have determined that the music we listen to in our adolescence will remain our favorite throughout our lives.  Personally, I believe that the principle applies to the majority of our experience.  The psycho-emotional biases we are exposed to during the period when we are developing our higher-order thinking become the fundamental principles that govern our behavior and our preferences through adulthood.  So let’s look at some of those biases. 

We baby boomers all read Orwell, Kesey and Kerouac in school.  We’re deeply distrustful of Big Brother.  And while we envisioned him as an all-powerful, vindictive, reactionary government and he’s turned out to be more like the marketing department at Sirius Cybernetics, still we don’t want anybody (I say anybody) following us around and snooping into our business.  Still, we hear that  people will follow us around on the web if we’re not careful; that we need secure passwords and must be careful about the cookies left on our computers.  But we don’t really know what any of that means.  The password must be between 8 and 20 characters with at least one numeral and one capital letter and with no actual dictionary word embedded anywhere within it.  And cookies.  Shades of Hansel and Gretel!  Not truly understanding the mechanisms by which we may be tracked, we don’t know how to protect ourselves and generally elect to avoid the woods altogether. 

And we like words.  Orwell, Kesey and Kerouac.  I mean, #csusmedu just doesn’t trip lightly off the tongue.  We put a lot of energy into mastering our version of English and we don’t want to give it up.  We can become functionally literate in this other language if we have to, but we won’t bother to become fluent if we don’t see any joy in it. 

So I’ll visit from time to time, maybe even work there.  But at the end of the day I’ll go home to my books.  But really, what’s the problem?  “Old people just don’t understand this stuff.”  The young may build their homes on the foundation left them by their parents, but do they really want grandpa hanging around all day  yapping about his prostate and how he had to walk 12 miles through the snow to school uphill both ways?  I don’t think so.  Visits are good.

EDSS 541

Reading Reflection #6  CREATE a Personal Learning Network

So far my PLN consists of .......me & Carl.

No, not really.  I just get a little punchy after a few hours at the laptop.

My primary communications with my ITU team, my OSL, CT and US, still happen by way of e-mail, as does much of my communication with the professors in the program.

I can communicate with everybody in the program via our various blogs, and there are a few still who use the evening cohort Facebook page.  I've got diigo and twitter accounts happening, tweetdeck installed, and am slowly but surely learning how to use them.

It would be great to expand my digital network out beyond the world of CSUSM.  I've a lot of friends & acquaintances who are teachers and have been valuable sources of advice and support in the flesh & blood world, but I don't communicate with many of those folks digitally very often.

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Reading Reflection #5  IDENTIFY  a theme for your ITU and share ideas and a draft for a Cover Sheet with your ITU team

Here's a draft cover sheet.  The quality may be poor - 'cuz it's a screen shot of a word document, but you'll get the idea.

I'd say at the very least it needs a more reedable font.

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Reading Reflection #4:  IDENTIFY what tasks you would be well skilled at leading and contributing to for the ITU assignment.

These are all things that we are developing the skills to do as teachers, but there are some that I am more inclined to do well, by interest and inclination, than others:

Task 4 – develop a statement of enduring understanding

Task 5 – develop a schedule of activities

Task 6 – define objectives & assessments with rubrics

Task 8 – assemble, test & assign  technological tools for the unit

Task 12 – Student Descriptions, particularly the revisions thereof based on additional information and nteraction.

Task 20 – poster presentation, building a poster and doing the actual dog & pony show

Tasks 13-17 – I would assume that each member of the team will want to take the lead on one or two of the target students  as regards strategies for differentiation and assessment. 

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Reading Reflection #3 Make a list or highlight models & resources (from Roberts & Kellough) to share with our ITU team.

I'll be keeping my highlighted copy of Roberts & Kellough in my binder indefinitely in case I need it.  Meanwhile, when next I meat with my team (i.e. Carl) we'll be spending some time on what models & resources we wan to use.  I'd love it if we could do a lab toghether - the block system makes that a possibility.

EDSS 541

Reading Reflection #2:  COMPLETE Activities 7.1 and 7.2 from Baldwin & Keating:

7.1  Since we’re limited in the amount of time we have to work with our local districts or our cooperating teachers and students before we start planning our ITU, it seems we have to focus on the standards and the textbooks for our direct ion.  I think it would also be good to find something really relevant to the students’ lives, so they can see how our disciplines affect them and how they could participate in them as adults.

Our team is composed of 2 members; one teaching Physics and one teaching Earth Science, which doesn’t allow for a very broad range of interdisciplinary themes.  We’ve settled on hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, as a theme.  It has plenty of Physics, plenty of earth science, is topical and its relationship to other disciplines is elementary enough that we might be able to design some lessons around history or economics to supplement our science backgrounds.

7.2  Some Essential Questions for our theme:

How is it possible to apply enough force to fracture a rock formation miles underground?  Which speaks to how fracking works and leads into the subjects of hydraulics, i.e. pressure, Pascal’s principal, how Pascal’s principle reflects the definition of work and how hydraulic systems relate to simple machines.

How does the greenhouse effect work?  Which speaks to the ecological implications of finding abundant new sources of cheap fossil fuels and leads into a whole range of Physics, possibly more than we can really cover.  Quantum theory, optics, the nature of light, the Bohr model of the atom are all needed to understand scattering and the greenhouse effect.  Or, we could leave it at “The Greenhouse Effect”.  But I’d rather cover the details.

Where does electricity come from?  Which addresses both ecological and political/economic implications of  fracking by way of the fact that natural gas is the currently preferred fuel fior electrical generating plants.  A complete coverage of the question brings in thermodynamics and E&M as well as nuclear physics and solid state physics, if one goes so far as to cover nuclear and solar energy.

EDSS 541

Reading Reflection #1: IDENTIFY research-based instructional strategies you can use in you ITU. 

This series of articles seeks to identify specific cultural affects of specific American minority groups, and provide some insight into strategies that might be appropriate for those different groups.  As we learned in the multicultural environment of EDSS 555, differentiation based on culture or language is often just good teaching, and can easily apply to all the students in our classes.

In this response, I tried to use the reading as a basis to come up with a few specific ideas for activities that align to the general strategies discussed:

From Focus on Closing the Achievement Gap for African Americans:

In general, and applicable to all students, we should always practice unconditional neutrality, and we should practice “high help, high perfectionism” whenever we possibly can. 

This particular article bemoans the gap in reading skill, and mentions the value of having students read aloud.  What carrot, however, could be there to motivate students to follow such an instruction?  I think we could recommend a children’s book, preferably relevant to the topic at hand, and assign them to read aloud to their little brother or sister (assuming they have one) every night.  Explain to them the importance of reading to children for the child’s development and motivate them through their feelings of love and responsibility to their sibling.

From Focus on Closing the Achievement Gap for Asian/Pacific Islanders:

I hope I may be forgiven for excess judgementalism, but this article as a whole seems to me to represent racism at its most pernicious – it lumps students from southeast Asia, Pacific Islanders, students from the Pacific rim & students from other Asian countries together based on superficial similarity, with only passing reference to the vast cultural differences between the different groups.  Thus for these students, really for ALL students, active inquiry and curiosity regarding the application of their cultural affect to their current learning is important.  I would like to propose a classroom activity:  Have each student write a brief description of their family engaging in a discussion about some aspect of the ITU topic.  Who, if anyone, would lead the discussion?  Do individuals interrupt each other or not?  Does everyone have an opinion?  Things like that.  Then arrange them in groups to compare their descriptions.  After some time, have them, also in the groups, consider how their families’ style of discussion would be perceived if it took place within their classroom, i.e. “How would that go over in Mr. Wrench’s class?”  If time allows, they could also think about how those discussions would be perceived in the classrooms of some of their other teachers.  Such an exercise, I think, would tend to level the playing field; let the students realize that their way of interacting is not the only one, and let them realize that their teachers (i.e. me)  have some prejudices of their own which effect the way they (I) interact with their (my) students

From Focus on Closing the Achievement Gap for Latino/as:

Once again, these strategies are valuable for all students, but particularly very collaboration-oriented and very practical students.  First, real-world application; something we always strive to highlight.  And second, group problem-solving and peer tutoring are always valuable, but it is always very important to make sure none of the group members drift into a habitually passive role.