Yessssssss, I can teach.

At times, my job is so amazing that it gives me goose bumps. One of those times is when I am able to witness that magical moment when a student teacher realizes she can teach. I wrote about this last year when one of my student teachers was so overcome by the moment that she stopped, smiled, and told the students how good they were being while I observed her. I think this happens to all successful student teachers; that moment when they finally know they can teach; but we're not often there to witness it. So the next best thing is to hear about it which I did this week from my colleague Prof. Valerie Bang-Jensen who is supervising Laken Ferreira in her student teaching experience. Valerie sent me, with Laken's permission, this wonderful excerpt from Laken's journal.


"As I was setting up in the morning I was surprised by how much I missed the class after not seeing them for 4 days. The students flooded in and had lots of stories to tell me about their snow day and the weekend. I hadn’t really realized how much my students valued routine and consistency. Our morning meeting and mother echo time was by far the best hour that I have ever taught. Everything went so smoothly. I counted down to morning meeting and made sure all students were a part of morning meeting by having the students who came in late do their nametags for the sticker box. During morning meeting I had a moment. Dani told me that Professor Whiteford spoke with her last semester about a moment that all student teachers have when they realize that they can teach and are a teacher. Instead of calling on students individually to share, I had everyone turn to an elbow partner to talk to about what they were looking forward to today. After about 45 seconds I brought everyone back by counting down from 5 and was amazed by how attentive everyone was. Within 3 seconds everyone was turned to me with his or her eyes on me and mouths shut. As I stared back at my 20 students present that day, I had the moment Dani described" (Laken Ferreira 2013).


Isn't that wonderful; you can just feel the joy of teaching; that sense of 'yes, I really can do this'. Well done, Laken.

Being a Student - Becoming a Teacher

The transformative learning theory of Jack Mezirow has always seemed to me to be  the most compelling piece of adult learning theory upon which to base one's approach to teacher education. I must admit, though, that I have always seen its application as being more appropriate for my graduate students where, for many of them, the process of becoming a teacher is a significant change in their lives in the context of what they are currently doing.

Recently, however, I have begun to see where this theory applies to undergraduate students as they make their way through the four years of undergraduate education. I have always perceived, and treated, the undergraduate students I work with as adults so it seems logical to apply a theory of adult learning to their passage from being a student to becoming a teacher.

One of the primary tenets of tranformative learning is the idea that  it consists of "critical self-reflection and disorienting dilemmas to make cognitive adjustments to reframing one's world". There is a clear distinction between first year students who are exploring the teaching profession through introductory classes and those who are set to graduate having completed their student teaching experience; at least with those who have been successful. It's not just the fact that they are four years older but something far more complex and meaningful. At some point, for most around the middle to the end of their junior year, they no longer seem to be students attending classes. They have become pre-service teachers learning how to become teachers. Their levels of motivation and curiosity change; they begin to take ownership of their learning. The field experiences they have become sources of self reflection and disorientation from which they construct new outlooks on who they are and what they can do. They become "authors" of themselves as described in the introduction to transformative learning from the website linked above;

"Transformative Learning is a theory of deep learning that goes beyond just content knowledge acquisition, or learning equations, memorizing tax codes or learning historical facts and data.   It is a desirable process for adults to learn to think for themselves, through true emancipation from sometimes mindless or unquestioning acceptance of what we have to come to know through our life experience, especially those things that our culture, religions, and personalities may predispose us towards, without our active engagement and questioning of how we know what we know." 

"For us as adults to truly take ownership of our social roles, and our personal roles, being able to develop this self-authorship goes a long way towards helping our society and world to become a better place through our greater understanding and awareness of the world and issues beyond us, and can help us to improve our role in our lives and those of others."

Isn't that neat!

Why Wasn't I Taught That Way?

I love this picture because the sheer joy of learning is illustrated by both students; in a uniquely individual way by each student. Sometimes in my classes the sheer joy of learning or discovery is frequently met with the phrase "Why wasn't I taught this way?". This most frequently happens when we are exploring fractions or decimals as we did this last Monday night in my grad. math ed. class. Sometimes it's the simplest of ideas such as being able to count fractional parts like anything else or suddenly realizing how easy it is to find 1/2 of 2/5 if you just visualize 2/5 as two fifth pieces and take half of them.

The funny thing is is that students have been saying this in my math classes for 30 years. So why weren't they taught that way?  I have to assume that I am not the only math teacher educator advocating for a conceptual approach to teaching math? Every college math ed. text I receive for review stresses the importance of helping children understand what they are learning; every conference presentation I attend stresses the same thing as do the math coaches I work with. The bridges amth prgram used on many schools throught the country also focusses on this worthwhile goal. It's been this way for thirty years at least.

I find it hard to believe that elementary school teachers are just not putting into practice all the things they learn through pre-service and in-service activities. Perhaps it is the students who do not remember learning the material in such a way. Perhaps the experiences they have in high school overshadow the things they learned in elementary school? Perhaps they just don't remember learning it this way when they were in elementary school. Too many students have these aha moments to say it is just isolated students who did not have good math teachers.

The classic example form Monday night wa the use of base-ten-blocks to teach decimals, something I have been doing seemingly all my life, yet none of the students had experienced such a thing. It is indeed, a mystery of monumental proportions.

     

"Because It Is" says Mr Gove

There's a story I tell in my math ed classes about my daughter when she was in middle school. One day, after supper, she drew a 45 degree angle on a piece of paper and asked me "Dad, why is this 45 degrees here" pointing close to the origin of the angle, "and 45 degrees here as well ?" ponting to the angle rays some 6 inches from the origin. "Look how much further it is between the rays" she said incredulously. Never missing the chance for an instant math lesson we spent the next 15 minutes discussing how angles are measures of rotation about a point, using our arms to demonstrate, and no matter how far away from that point you go the number of degrees is always the same. She seemed wonderfully satisfied with this newfound understanding and so I ventured to ask what the teacher had said when she asked. "Because it is" she said; the teacher said because it is.

In our rush to cover 'everything' there is often little time to develop genuine understanding of the math we teach and, in this case, I think I'm being generous to my daughter's teacher. I don't think she understood the concept of rotation herself and so could not answer the question meaningfully. All too often though, especially in math, we want children to remember things, for later, without fully understanding them. This seems to be what Mr Gove, the current Education Secretary in the UK seems to want teachers in that country to do. "A mountain of data" his critics say, to be memorized by rote. Facts to be learned without any sense of what they mean or when they should be used. Things are so bleak that the teachers' union has passed a lack of confidence vote in the Education Secretary and HM Inspector of Schools chief.

Their goal is to have an education system that is "robust and rigorous", words that always seem to mean lots of fact retention and memorization especially in math. "Back to the basics" yet again; a basic lack of understanding. I call it the "Because It Is" curriculum.

Cell Phones, Mobiles and Maths

In my math ed. class last Tuesday I asked my students to use the calculator function on their cell phones. In fact, I asked them to do this several times; it was even written on the class handout as directions for completing a series of activities. The topic of the class was how to teach decimals, or decimal fractions as I like to call them, in the elementary school classroom. We went over a number of  activities using Base Ten Blocks in which we constructed different decimals using different parts of the base ten blocks to represent the one, or whole to which the decimals referred. We modeled 365, then 36.5, then 3.65, then .365 to show the relative sizes of each number. We then started to compute with decimals which is when we need the calculator function of the cell phones. Since every student had one it was much easier to use them than passing out calculators.

This made me start thinking about what type of resources are available for using cell phones in the classroom. So I started "Googling" and discovered some interesting trends. The first thing I discovered was cellphonometry that appears to have been very popular some 4 to 5 years ago judging by the dates on the blogs and websites describing this phenomenon.  Interestingly, there are still cautionary discussions about the use of  cell phones and mobiles in the classroom while other schools are conducting pilot studies. There are also tips on how to use cell phones as educational tools. If you expand your search to include the British term 'mobiles' you'll find even more resources such as this  40 Ways to use your Mobile.

In fact, with all the apps available now and the fact that many cell phones are mini-computers some college professors such as professor Shadrick Paris at Ohio University are using cell phones as part of their
teaching strategy. It's neat that professor Paris says "I'm all about cell phones. If a student is using it for the wrong reasons they're just missing out on class". Teaching and learning are indeed based on trust.

The Apostrophe's fate

I'm not a linguist nor am I a perfectionist or a nit-picker but I do believe in protecting the Queen's English, as we used to say. When I was a fourth grade teacher many years ago I remember spending many hours teaching the value and virtues of correct grammar so that one's meaning could be precisely communicated. One of the main topics of the fourth grade curriculum was the apostrophe and I remember going over carefully all the instances for using the apostrophe as well as those when one should not use it. According to this Googled resource there are an unfortunate 13 rules identified for using or not using the apostrophe. I wonder if they chose 13 on purpose?

The apostrophe has landed on my radar screen because of this interesting discussion going on in the county of Devon in England where they have decided, for now, to ban the use of the apostrophe on road signs. The Chairman of the local County Council thought apostrophes caused confusion! (Perhaps he was confused about when to use one). This was met with a swift rebuttal from Mary de Vere Taylor from Ashburton who said the thought of apostrophes being removed made her "shudder"."It's almost as though somebody with a giant eraser is literally trying to erase punctuation from our consciousness," she told BBC News. She said there was something "terribly British and terribly reassuring" about well-written and well-punctuated writing. "Some may say I should get a life and get out more, but if I got out more and saw place names with no apostrophes where there should be, I shudder to think how I'd react," she added. (From BBC News March 15). Clearly, all this shuddering is not a good thing!

The retention of grammatical rules in "public" places is an interesting issue in these times of "private" social media where the conventions of the English language are constantly under attack.  

Tommy Sands' incredible Concert

His voice, his words, his tunes. It's hard to tell which is more compelling. Perhaps it's the way all three seem to go together so well; a sort of synergy of emotion and music; synesthesia for sure. His song "There Were Roses" has been my favorite song to sing with my band since it first appeared around 1985. He sung it last Tuesday and even though he has changed the names of the two main characters the song still has to be the best song for peace ever written. "An eye for an eye 'til everyone is blind".

The concert opened with the incredible Irish dancing of the McFadden Academy of Dance which concluded with the most remarkable a capella Irish dance, something I've never seen before. Tommy then took the stage with his son Fionan and entertained us with songs, stories and videos. One video in particular was of an old country bus driving along the Ryan Road that figures in many of his songs. There was also a video of him singing in Sarajevo with  Vedran Smailovic, the great cellist and  peace activist from Sarajevo. And here is probably the best version ever of Pete Seeger's, Where Have All The Flowers Gone.

But it was his stories of growing up on a small farm in Ireland and his experiences during "Thc Troubles" that made his message and his songs so inspiring.