October 19th Exit Slip

Today in class, Jessica and I collected articles to potentially use as resources for our inquiry project. Our inquiry project is about the Flipped Classroom and different students' perceptions on it when it is implemented.

November 16th: Inquiry Project Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography Link:

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/10g6YLX74vxZY1w9hcutvwepEAsjoIFZ4ZAdOAooc4dE/edit

October 19th Entrance Slip

Option 2:

1) What are your "student bird" and "teacher bird" thoughts about assigning percentages or letter grades in the assessment of student work? What do the grades indicate? How are they arrived at? Whose purposes do they serve? What are positive and negative aspects to giving grades? to be assigned grades by an instructor?

As a current student in the Bachelor of Education program, and as someone who just finished my Bachelor of Mathematics in April, I'm finding the jump from grading and marks being so important to a pass/fail system very relieving. I am someone who puts a lot of pressure on myself to receive good marks, but I found with percent grades I would always get frustrated and wonder why I got for example 79% instead of 80%. I'm finding that I'm able to express myself more in this program now with pass/fail since I'm not as worried about my specific grades. I'm worrying less about having the exact answer that my profs are looking for and now am doing things the way that I enjoy the best or the way that I learn the best so I'm really enjoying the switch.

As a teacher, I find assigning percentages very difficult. Similarly to from my student perspective, I would struggle to explain to a student why they got 79% and not 80%. I find that giving letter grades easier for me to justify, since I can make criteria that a student much reach for me to justify giving them the specific letter grade. 

2) What are some of the unintended side effects of grading? How do grades and marks in themselves format the social relations and learning situations in a classroom, a school, a district?

I think that an unintended side effect of grading is how we perceive students and how they perceive each other. We may have an expectation of certain students to either do good or do bad depending on what we have seen from them on previous tests and projects or from what other teachers tell us about our experiences with them. This also causes students who usually do well a higher amount of pressure to receive a certain percentage which can lead to more stress in their lives.

3) Could you imagine teaching math and/or science without giving grades? How could a teacher encourage learning without having an emphasis on grading?

I think that teaching math without giving any grades would be difficult. I especially think this is difficult for students in grades 11 and 12 who are looking to pursue academics because of the expectations of universities. Students in those cases will always be looking for a better percent grade so they're more likely to get into the school of their choice. However, I think it is possible in other cases. I think that having the proficiency scale is very good to encourage learning without the grade emphasis because it helps students see in what areas they can work on the most and what they are excelling on.

October 19th Homework - Inquiry Project

Here is my Inquiry Project:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12a1Anpy_tj9MwvLpGt_wIXwVTlegmHishNuIUmayo2M/edit?usp=sharing

October 5 Entrance Slip - Dancing Teachers Into Being With a Garden

I think that there are pros and cons to the grid as a teacher candidate. Using grids can hopefully help with organization of the classroom as well as the structure of it. Having that organization can help students to feel more like there is a direction they are being led towards which can make students more comfortable. Having the structure can hopefully make them feel like if they are struggling with a concept or question there will be support and a process of doing things. On the other hand, I am worried that having this structure can make students feel restricted or that they do not have any creative liberty when that is not the case. Students are also kept in a school all day and may start to resent the grid structure.

The picture of the gridded flax plants and then the following picture of the grids falling apart really struck me. People always attempt to make things in grids, and newer generations will be tempted to go away from this. Sticking with the same plan does not work for everyone, so there must be allowance for bending or changing if needed.

"Considering multisensory awareness creates a problematic for a binary way of working in outdoor education." I feel like this stuck to me as you never know whether students will be too overstimulated when outdoors. I do however think that just staying inside because of this worry is staying within what is 'safe' rather than testing other things.

September 28 Exit Slip - The Formatting Power of Math

     Today in class, we spoke about two different topics. The first was in helping raise new generations of young people how do we: 

- help them do well for themselves and do good in the world

- how to support students and ourselves with the anxieties of our times?

- how to avoid chasing the "hot issue of the day"?

I had brought up that the issues in our world today are so global, and there are so many that it can really stress students out. They are constantly receiving information through their technology and social medias that it can be very overwhelming as a new teenager learning to become their own person. The amount of opinions online can sway them very easily. I suggested bringing students to a more local place to help ground them. Lisa mentioned that in the reading, there was the class of students that as part of their homework was to use a local issue that had happened, do research on it, and give ideas to help. This can help students feel as though they are important and that they can make a difference as long as they are doing small things to help their community. 

    The second topic that we spoke on was the "formatting power" of math, physics, stories, and implicit stories and assumptions. Some ideas that Lisa, Christine, and I brought up included recreational math, creating more choices in problems, the assumption of having to memorize things in math, exactness, and that math is universal. Adding recreational math can help students find the fun in math instead of it feeling like a chore. This can include sudoku, and other problems of the sort. Making math problems that are a choose your own story format can make students feel like they have a choice in math instead of there being only one correct way of solving problems, and can lead them to learning how to apply new ideas. 

September 28 Entrance Slip - Climate Crisis

     I believe that as educators, we must set our students up for success in the real world. I think that preparing students for academia will not set them up correctly. We must show them examples that will be more applicable to their lives so that in the future they can look back at our lessons and use them if needed. 

    I think that we as people are able to change the way our subjects were traditionally were taught to us. Teaching math in the usual way of lecturing students and assessing them with tests is not very beneficial for most students. Finding more integrated ways of teaching students is important to reach everyone's learning styles in the classroom. This might include different assessment methods like formative assessments, exit slips, and different project types, or teaching a flipped classroom. If we don't change the way we teach subjects then students will continue to struggle unless they learn by reading textbooks or listening to lectures.

    I find that climate change is a very pressing issue in today's society. It feels like people do not speak about it enough and that we are not doing enough to help prevent it from worsening.