Author: Simon Harris (Page 1 of 2)

During my EDUC 490 teaching practicum, I was placed in a Grade 8 mathematics classroom and DP Todd Secondary School. The experiences I’ve had in the classroom over the past 4 weeks have expanded my conceptualization of changing, or adapting, pedagogy to fit different learners in different environments. Having taught grade 11’s in Chemistry for my previous practicum, it became quickly apparent that some of my pedagogical approaches would need modification to fit the needs of the Grade 8 students at DP Todd. In general, some of the primary factors that affected pedagogy included the mathematics curriculum, the age and maturity of students, classroom management, the school demographic, the distribution of diverse learners and abilities, the mathematics department, attendance, expectations, the block semester system, the time of year, Math 8 being a required course, the effectiveness of student-choice, and student-centric approaches. Exploring and adapting categories such as these helped to expose some of my strengths and stretches which I am refining and working on in my teaching practices.

As a new teacher in training, I found myself entering classrooms with initial expectations based more in theory than practice, which of course is an inevitable consequence of academia. The teaching process then becomes one of inquiry—what actually works in practice? how does theory transform into practice? what factors of teaching will have the largest impact on student learning? how does a classroom change day-to-day? how long will something really take? Although my educational expertise is at an early point on a continuous growth curve, I would classify one of my growing strengths as the ability to recognize the power of relationship building in classrooms and how to apply it towards student growth and development. The first week of practicum was by far the most difficult. Because of the block semester system in place this year, the students had been learning around one another for at least 6 hours per day since September, making my position as an outsider exploitable for the initial days. To me, it was fascinating to experience how strongly getting to know the students, and having them get to know me, changed our practice over the four weeks. Something as simple as knowing students by name became immensely influential over classroom management practices, for example. Rather than simply calling students out by name for ‘misbehaviour,’ names were a powerful tool for personalizing the learning, individually focusing/redirecting attention, and integrating distracted students into the lessons. Furthermore, getting to know students allowed me to diversify the lessons. As mentioned, the distribution of learners in a grade 8 math class is larger than might be found in an elective academic course (say, Physics 12); as such, getting to know the students provided me with informational tools to tailor lessons to fit diverse needs. Throughout my practicum, I used a lot of exit slips that asked students to report feedback on their learnings and interests. Through these, I was able to quickly identify the students who were in debilitating fear of being singled out to answer problems in class, those who needed more challenging problems to stay engaged, those who really benefited from hands-on activities, those who took art seriously, those who “hated math,” and more. In the Pythagoras unit, I demonstrated some of the art that can be done with fractal trees using the Pythagorean theorem to help engage the artistically driven students. I created sets of extension problems for most lessons that were both relevant to the learning goals of the unit and also incorporated learning that was done in other units previously covered. One of the ways I knew these extension questions were effective was that, on several occasions, I had students stay in at lunch to work through them or take them home to complete (I did not assign any homework during my practicum).

As a new teacher, I am becoming better at my classroom awareness; however, it is something that has been a stretch in my practice so far, and a focus for improvement. The importance of multitasking, planning, and broad awareness are some of the characteristics of teaching that I am becoming more familiar with. My multitasking skills have never been something to brag about; in fact, I sometimes pride myself on my ability to ignore others to keep a singular focal point. In the classroom, however, I need to know what I am teaching, how it is being received, how I am positioned in the classroom, who is paying attention, who is responding to open questions, who is in the classroom, who is doing nothing because they forgot a pencil, what time it is, and so on—not only for the sake of learning, but for safety.

During practicum, one of the stretches I’ve been concentrating on is positioning myself in the classroom so that my classroom awareness increases. During lessons, I would often be standing at the chalk board writing out problems or examples while speaking. I might do something like write three problems on the chalkboard in increasing difficulty with the intention that everyone could get through the first, most could get through the first two, and few could get through all three. The distribution in difficulty gave me the time to move around the classroom to check student whiteboards (where they were working through the problems) and sit with students who needed guidance without a bunch of students finishing immediately and becoming bored (this was also an ongoing stretch to execute effectively). When sitting with students, I found it far too easy to forget the rest of the class and singularly focus on the student(s) getting my help. Having a concentrated focus was effective for a specific task, but it meant that I didn’t always notice what the rest of the class was doing during these times. One of the ways I have been working on my classroom awareness is how I go about positioning myself at students’ desks. For example, if a student sits near the front of the classroom, I worked at sitting across from them so that I faced the either the majority of the students or a portion of the room that required more attention. This required me to practice writing and drawing upside down quite a lot. Another issue was the chalkboard where I often led lessons from. The units we covered required me to make a lot of 3-dimenstional drawings, create problems in real-time, and perform all the mathematical calculations in front of an audience. Because of the focus required to smoothly execute my explanations or thought processes in writing, I found myself, on numerous occasions, face-to-face with the chalkboard, talking away to it as the classroom full of students watched the back of my head (or ignored the back of my head, I wouldn’t know).  I have since been working on position myself such that my body and vision is in an intermediate state of facing the classroom and the chalkboard simultaneously so that my awareness is maximized—something that is getting better with practice but is still far from consistent.  

One of my favourite lessons during practicum was when students designed and built staircases out of popsicle sticks and hot glue, using the Pythagorean theorem as a design element as part of the Pythagoras unit. This was the first group project that I had given to students, apart from partnered labs in Grade 11 chemistry, and I found the experience valuable. The planning of the project took a lot of preparation to set up. The materials required were not fully available at the school, so I ended up purchasing most of them myself; furthermore, creating expectations, criteria, and an assessment rubric that both ensured students met the learning intentions while giving them a strong element of choice and freedom in their designs took careful consideration. Once set up however, the lesson planning was complete for roughly three days of teaching and the quality of learning was consistent. The reason this was my favourite lesson was that it was also the first time I had assigned a task and had every single student engaged and working on what they were supposed to without needing redirection. It allowed me the opportunity to comfortably circulate the room and inquire into the different ideas and processes of each group. It was interesting how great it felt to teach students who were doing something that engaged their interests because behavioural management became a trivial task and conversations about learning (projects) were far more accessible across all students.

This project was selected primarily because it was accessible to the diverse range of learners. Every student demonstrated investment in their designs and the complexities and intricacies they chose to include (or not include) were limitless. This student-agency led to creativity and a self-driven propensity to go beyond the minimum requirements of criteria; something nearly every student did. Students were asked to create a blueprint that demonstrated their use of Pythagoras as a design element; this required them to show how right angles can be determined using Pythagorean relationships and display all appropriate calculations. They needed to include sketches and calculations demonstrating right angled triangles in their design, create a physical model with popsicle sticks and glue, and finally a reflection which compared the theoretical model (blueprint) with the physical model (actual staircase). Overall, the reactions and feedback from this project were positive and the work developed demonstrated student creativity and individuality. It was also a valuable learning experience for me as a teacher because it illuminated a lot of problems that I did not account for prior to the experience. Although my planning was thorough and complete, the project required students to attend class and actually work on their projects in the allotted time. There were students who decided to miss days during our projects, another who started with a partner on the first day and was then gone for a week and a half, and finally a group of students who began their project together before deciding on the last day that they absolutely refused to work with each other for another moment and required alternative options. I facilitated the needs of all through adjusting groups, allowing students to borrow and take materials home to finish, extending due dates, and, in one case, providing a written unit test on Pythagoras that acted as an equally weight substitution to the project (the project took the place of a unit test for the rest of the class). Below, I have included the document provided to the students as the project guidelines in addition to some images of student projects.

I was first introduced to the Scratch platform through my reading of Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play by Mitchel Resnick (2017), Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab. In his book, Resnick exemplifies the function and potential of Scratch using techniques like presenting transcribed interviews with Scratch community users and learners who have benefited and grown using the platform. During my readings, I obtained a sense of the learning potential that the Scratch platform offers. It seemed to be an explorative space for people to discover or develop their passions as projects through play and tinkering in a collaborative community of peers with like- or complimentary intentions. A clear benefit of Scratch is that it acts as a powerful introductory tool for those unfamiliar or inexperienced with logical thinking and programming languages and allows them to create algorithmically without first obtaining a prerequisite competence in programming.

Resnick modeled an ADST educational pedagogy of cultivating creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers and Play, where free inquiry was imperative to learning development; however, I could not help but notice some looming constraints with his model when mentally applying it to the school district I live in. First, to effectively use Scratch, there needs to be the technological resources available for students. It astounds me that there aren’t sets of laptops or computers available for all classrooms in 2021—stepping back into the classroom for practicum has been a wake-up call to the disconnection between the emphasis on 21st century learning in the B.Ed program and the restrictive prehistoric state of resources that actually exist in classrooms (sorry, the leap from overhead projectors to document cameras don’t satisfy the needs for modern learning). Second, I find free or guided inquiry based learning theoretically more difficult to implement in senior science classes. My upcoming experiential practicum (EDUC 391) placement is in a technologically dated Chemistry 11 classroom and is somewhat pedagogically constrained by the pace and quantity of content required for students to understand in order to participate in Chemistry 12. Although I can see clear potential benefits of using platforms like Scratch in a Chemistry 11 classroom, I am constantly weighing the time required for students to develop competence in computational thinking through play with respect to the actual chemistry they will get to explore, and what quality of curricular relevance will be achieved during that time. The implementation of Scratch in a cross-curricular or project-based setting is largely feasible. Moreover, the introduction to computational thinking needs to start in primary grades, not begin in senior classes.

Yesterday, I participated in a workshop titled “Coding with Scratch.” It was a great introduction to block-based coding with Scratch, which is a programming language that allows users to develop algorithmic coding designs using block-instructional code. The advantage of block-based coding is that it allows beginners to programming a way of exploring computational thinking through play and design without memorizing a text-based language or being constantly frustrated with syntax errors. One cool and important characteristic of computers is that they always do exactly what you tell them to do, and if it does not work, then the error is in your algorithm and is always exposed.
The pace of the workshop seemed moderate and inclusive for the diversity of attendees. The instructions were guided, but the time allotted to develop the block algorithms were open enough for me to explore the program from several angles. I could perform the same task using multiple methods or alter the task to become more personalized and exploratory. This seems to be at the heart of Scratch—through simple instructions and the opportunity to play, engaged exploration became inevitable and the learning expanded beyond the instructions in a very natural manner. Furthermore, I found the process to be as difficult as it was easy. For example, following the instructions to get the cat and ball to do what was intended was simple; however, having the cat run after the ball and catch it was difficult enough to be engaging. Programming has no limit on complexity or difficulty, thus, it is an incredible learning space for students to stay engaged–with Scratch, even the most inexperienced beginners have the opportunity to design without the steep initial learning curve, while those who are experienced or expert programmers can simply put their skill set towards solving more complex problems.

Personally, I could see myself animating organic chemical reaction mechanisms for demonstrating the geometries and pathways of chemical reactions. To be successful in organic chemistry, students really need to refine their skills on rotating 3-dimensional objects in their heads—animating reaction mechanisms in Scratch may help to facilitate students to visualize and conceptualize such abstractions. Therefore, the next logical step in my professional and personal utilization of Scratch is to try the process out for myself. I will need to pay attention to how much time I spend on designing my ideas, how effective they are with respect to my intentions, what aspects of learning was emergent, and be mindful of what is accessible for technological resources in the average SD57 classroom.

References:

Resnick, M. (2017). Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play (Illustrated). The MIT Press.