Blog 2 - collaboration, problem solving, reflection, and higher level thinking - great ideas!

Stephanie Bradshaw

Blog 2

            What I think matters most in what we’ve discussed this week in class is that there are educational models in other countries as well as in very limited spots in the United States that work.  The end result is educated students that can work collaboratively, problem solve, and use higher level thinking skills.  This is achieved through high quality, highly skilled, highly educated teachers. 

            Our United States system of education has too many entities controlling it - the federal government, state governments, local school boards, district administration.  It is very political.  It is currently based on our capitalist, commercialized culture here in the United States.  Given that, money plays a huge part in education.  Unfortunately, the monetary value expended on education is extremely varied across states, within states, within cities, and even (as Kathy shared) within districts.  When some states are using $20,000 per pupil and others (like Idaho) are using $6800 per pupil, the output of such a discrepancy in funding is exactly what we see – inequity in education.  Top that inequity off with the resegregation that is seen in big cities as well as smaller towns and we have quite the mess on our hands. 

            As a teacher, that can get overwhelming.  I learned one of the best lessons in a beginning teacher support program’s professional development seminar I attended in California my 2^nd year of teaching – Focus on the aspects of teaching that YOU have control over not the many you don’t.

            Given that, as I was reading about Finland, Singapore, and Korea, I immediately started thinking about what aspects I could incorporate into my classroom next fall.  All three very successful educational models of those countries taught their students to problem solve, collaborate with each other, and to be reflective in their learning. 

            These just seem like aspects of great teaching that I’m sure many teachers do in their classroom including my own.  However, I know I can put much more of an emphasis on these three areas and less emphasis on some of the “drill and kill” isolated skills instruction that still happens in my classroom. 

            I got a bit off track last night through an e-mail from our Washington state union that had a tiny blurb about the Smarter Balance testing with a link in the e-mail.  My ever growing curiosity got the best of me and I clicked on that link which led me to a website with sample problems from the Smarter Balance test.  I explored various math and reading sample questions, looked at how they were graded (some through a rubric, others all or nothing when given “multiple choice” type answer options), and read through the performance based samples for grades 3-5. 

I quickly realized that this type of new testing we are heading for involves problem solving and higher level thinking skills.  Thus, if I start incorporating more of that (and collaborative learning) in my classroom and reduce the isolated skills, I will actually be preparing my students more effectively for the type of standardized test they apparently are going to be taking in the near future.  If students are taught how to work together (not compete against each other), how to problem solve (not give up, look on someone else’s paper for the “right answer”, sit back and wait for someone else to come up with “the answer”, or stare blankly at me), how to think critically, infer, synthesize, etc., and how to reflect on their own learning, effort, and attitude in school I think I will be educating students who will succeed on any standardized test as well as in life.

How I will go about increasing these skills in my classroom I’ll have to think more about over the remainder of the summer.  My brain is swirling with ideas for science lessons that don’t involve using the FOSS worksheets and having groups recording in science journals and creating projects or variations on in class experiments together, book clubs during our silent reading time (for a small portion of the silent reading time as I value students getting to choose their own books to read during that time), and “cherry picking” concepts from our reading curriculum but incorporating the learning into more group based learning rather than whole class instruction with independent practice (usually a practice worksheet) for the bulk of our reading time.  Lots of exciting ideas, but also lots of work ahead of me to put any of these ideas into practice effectively with the group of students we’ve been told we’re getting next year (challenging behaviorally).  What the heck…I won’t have an action research project after July 30^th, right?  :-)