tony assignment 1

EMBED MSPhotoEd.3

School of Education

ED 4236: ASSIGNMENT DETAILS

Assignment 1: Marking Key Student Name: Elizabeth Lillicrap ______________________


Research Assessment Criteria
Exceptional
Excellent
Good
Satisfactory
Limited /
Unsatisfactory
Quality and detail of content





Answer to the student’s question in the terms of the question.





Reference to the circumstances of the day outside the classroom.





Reference to the state of the classroom and why you acted to clean it up.





Reference to why you got the students down to work.





Evidence of reflective/inspiring reading







PRESENTATION





Structure/Organisation





Expression/Grammar





Quality of writing





Referencing and accuracy







COMMENTS



































Grade



















Marker Signature: _____________________________ Date: ______________________


Today I was asked a thought-provoking question by a student.
I was put on an extra with Year 9 for History. It had been raining all day so the students had been in the classroom during lunch break and the room was smelly and in a mess with food on the floor and chairs everywhere. I got the students to tidy the room (that was hard work!) before they started to work. That was when a girl asked me why I bother. I found it rather confronting. But I told her "because I love teaching!"
As Fetherston rightly points out (2007, p.15) “the teaching profession is perceived poorly by the public” and I sensed that the student had picked up precisely this attitude from her parents resulting in looking down on teachers and really wondering why any one would do it for a job.
So why do I bother? Some times it can seem like a waste of everyone’s time but actually I do it because I want to learn how to make the most of every class and every interaction I have with the students in order to be a true teacher: some one who teaches human respect and civil behaviour to the children, whatever the subject happens to be. If I am put on an extra I can also teach those things, encouraging diligence in the students even if I don’t know the subject matter.
It was really inspiring to read how Killen (n.d p.2) described Transformational Outcome Based Education, (as put forward by Bill Spady) stating that the purpose of school is to “equip students for their lives after school and successful learning promotes even more successful learning.” Clearly, even getting a group of unwilling students to clean the room before starting to work does have purpose when education is seen in this light. The students did feel better about the room when it was tidy, so experiencing this was in itself positive! There are certainly benefits to experiencing the positive effect of being in an ordered room and comparing that to working surrounded by mess. This is certainly behaviour considered valuable by adults.
When I read about Expert Teachers, (as opposed to Experienced Teachers or even Novice Teachers like me!) in “Distinguishing Expert Teachers from Novice and Experienced Teachers” (Hattie, 2003) and read how an expert teacher responds to the situation and is “context bound”, it seemed to make so much sense. I hope I can look forward to a time when I will be able to judge the situation successfully and react accordingly. Now I am wondering how I could have dealt with Year 9 differently. They did not want to tidy the room or later do their work. They were bored and just waiting for the end of the day. I had to cheer them along to get them to tidy the room. I suppose I could have more usefully helped them to see the benefits they would experience as a result of tidying the room by stating them clearly before we started. Instead of which I just behaved as the teacher, bossing them about!
If all learning is reliant on internal motivation as Piaget claims (Learning Theory, Constructivism vs. Instructivism), I would surely have done better to inspire them first! Had I been able to trust on a deep level that all and any learning is learning, I would have seen the benefits of the social interaction present in the tidying of the room and not seen it merely as something that needed to be done before the students started the History work.
The Constructivist approach tells us that students learn by constructing their own meaning to what they learn and the experience of tidying the room together may have been extremely positive. I am sure that there are some students who thought that it wasn’t their job to be tidying and this would have led to the Disequilibration spoken about by Piaget (Fetherston, 2007. p.156). But tidying is certainly something that all students will encounter, so it was definitely "equipping" the students for life after school and as such was a worthwhile activity to be doing during school time. But there was part of me that thought that it needed to be done fast, so that the students could get on with their ‘work’. Somehow, I was concerned that the students might go home and tell their parents that they had spent time cleaning a room which reduced the time spent doing written work. But I believe that, as stated by Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch (1996) “the teacher’s most solemn job is to instruct the young in (…) behaviours determined by adult society to be valuable.” Cleaning up is valuable and a significant part of my own education was when we learnt to work together as a group to get a job done and very often the task at hand was not academic. I could see how in Year 9 the “slower learners” as mentioned by Guskey (1997) were able to show the “faster learners” that they were as able to tidy the room. Their success at tidying would have been helpful for the History work they were about to do because as Roy Killen (n.d p.2) said “successful learning promotes even more successful learning” and there seems to be no curricular barriers in this. Experiencing success in cleaning up will lead to increased confidence in History.
So why did I bother to get them to do their work? Well I suppose that my desire is to be a teacher and as a teacher I wouldn’t miss the opportunity to encourage students to work. I also know that when I have set work for students when I am away it is frustrating to discover that the students have wasted their time when they could have been learning. Missed learning is a missed opportunity as far as I see it. With the weather being wet as well the students were apathetic and suffering from a lack of movement so getting active in tidying helped. They needed to focus on something and actively engage their brains. I know that students often like to claim that they enjoy doing nothing in class but I know that the truth is quite the opposite: they love the feeling of completing their work and I intend always to encourage students to get down to work. If I ever stop wanting to do that, I should stop teaching!




References:
Fetherston, T. (2007) Becoming an effective teacher South Melbourne: Thomson

Finn, C and Ravitch, D. ( 1996) A Report from the Educational Excellence Network to its Education Policy Committee and the American People


Hattie, J. (2003) Teachers Make a Difference: What is the research evidence?


Killen, R. (n.d) William Spady: a Paradigm Pioneer


Mastery Learning: A basic introduction
Retrieved March 21, 2007 from
http:allen.warren.net/ml.htm