Oct 17 - Inquiry Question

Ever since we started talking about retesting and how they shape the learning of students in EDCP 441B, I have been curious to know more about it. I am looking forward to seeing retests play out in real life during my practicum. This will be my inquiry question for this class.
 

Oct 17 - Exit Slip

 Today's class was our last class in the garden as the coming months will be very cold. We started the class by writing a mathematical thank you letter to an entity of our choice in the garden.While I do not want to share my letter, I can write here my thoughts that inspired the letter. I look at everything in nature and I am reminded of fibonacci/hemachandra numbers and the golden ratio. I look at how perfect nature is and I wonder what makes nature so perfect when it is wild and unkempt too. This made me think of the beauty standards us humans are victims of and if leaves and flowers think we are not so smart for adhering to those standards because we too are perfect as we are.

During the second part of the class, Madison and I did some work with body measurements. We found some rope in the shed and verified our own and our classmates' correlation between wingspan and height. We were quite amazed to find that wingspan is almost the same as height with a margin of error of only 2-3 inches. We also learned how to measure using our palms. My palm is 6.5 inches and knowing this, I can measure things in my day to day life using this fact!

October 10 - Exit Slip

I enjoyed today's debate activity and found it to be very insightful. My group (Mark, Madison, Brandon and myself) were arguing for there to be a grading system in the classrooms and it was interesting to talk about how the proficiency scale, though an improved way of evaluating students, is still a grading system and that led our group to the realization that it is not the grades that are the problem, it is they kind of perception of grades that parents, students, teachers and different stakeholders have. I do believe that grades, if used holistically, can communicate student progress very effectively in a way that all the stakeholders understand.

Our collective summary of the points raised by all members can be found on Madison's blog as she was kind and resourceful enough to keep a track of it all.

October 10 - Entrance Slip

 The article "Refocusing out efforts: A shift from grading to an emphasis on learning" by John Sarte and Sherri Hughes uses a lot of previously conducted research as well as their own study to argue that "if teachers avoid using grades as an extrinsic motivator and focus on engaging the students in learning, they will promote intrinsic motivation in students to improve their feelings of success in the course". I agree with this because not only is it a compelling argument backed up by a lot of research, I have also seen the results of this first hand. My students in the past have performed significantly better when they were told to just explore and have fun with a certain topic and that they were not going to be graded. What I found surprising at the time, though, was that they still wanted to know how they were performing. Having done the B.Ed. program for a little over a month, I can now connect this to the student's desire for formative feedback and intrinsic motivation to learn. 

In our EDCP 441B class, we have been talking about various effective ways we can do this, and create authentic assessments for our students that truly reflect their learning. A big part of this is engineering and reverse engineering the learning map - the criteria that goes on the proficiency scale. The proficiency scale is a really big and revolutionary thing to happen in recent years. We can now move away from assigning percent grades (or letter grades) to students, which will motivate students to learn and still provide transparent and honest feedback. However, I have also been hearing about cases where some teachers that have been in this profession for a while are not so far along the unlearning process as they should be. This is, at best, having no affect on students' motivation and at worst, confusing and frustrating for students because they are not getting clear feedback from their teachers. This is something that I found myself constantly thinking of when reading this article - How effectively are the new systems being implemented? How are teachers going to be held accountable for doing it right rather than treating the new scale as another A-B-C-D scale?

October 3 - Exit Slip (Poetry + Discussion on spirituality/Science)

Poetry in the Garden

 During today's class, I did not connect with the task of writing poetry int he garden. I found drawing much easier a couple of weeks ago. I appreciated my classmates' poems - they were very true to their personalities as well. I wrote a Hemachandra/Fibonacci comical poem playing around with the number of words instead of syllables, and I loved how everyone laughed at it! Here is the poem:

Ma'am
Hello!
How are you?
I'm well, thanks for asking.
So this is about your cars extended warranty...

Discussion on Spirituality and Science

I resonate a lot with the values that spirituality and coming from a STEM background, it is very interesting to me to talk about the two in the same context. During class, I talked about how my dad used to teach me that god is in everything and I realize that now that I did not clarify to my classmates that as an adult, I view this as thinking of "things" as "beings" much like what Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer says in her book. It was brought up that religious talks in the classroom might not be the best thing to do, and I agree. Though, I do hope we can talk about respecting nature and treating all beings with care in our classrooms.