BLOG 792 Epistemologies, Good Teaching, my NTKs
When I watched Dr. Johnson’s A Theory Of Knowledge, the first answer I put for his question, “What do you know about good teaching?” was that the teacher has a big effect on student learning. He asks, “How do you know this?” and my first thought was “Hattie’s effect size list”. I also thought about pgs. 40-50 in The Flat World and Education which gives a lot of evidence to support the claim that having a qualified teacher is key to quality education. I reflected on my personal experience being a student. For decades I have been learning and I have had some really incredible teachers that made the learning such a worthwhile experience. I had years with teachers that caused me to love going to school and to enjoy learning new things. Sometimes I had teachers that were so creative that it made the class pure fun. Other years I had teachers that were experts at challenging students and I remember feeling my brain struggle to grasp a new idea and the very satisfying feeling when you knew you got it. In high school I remember having a few teacher’s that didn't seem very interested in their own subject. It is hard to teach something that you don’t have passion for. I don’t remember learning very much from those teachers. For years I have asked my students to tell me about their favorite teachers in my “Get to Know You” survey at the start of the year. There is a pattern to the names I read about each year and the reasons why these teachers are the “favorites” usually centers around these descriptive words: nice, funny, made learning fun, and patient. For my ARP I am exploring how affinity groups within a classroom can create a connectedness between students and teachers that could positively affect social-emotional learning and support academic engagement. I teach 163 students, 3 periods of 8th graders and 2 periods of 7th. Of the 8th graders, 46 of them I had last year when we were in teams at Redwood. My first NTK is if being in a team configuration with a core of 4 teachers sharing 160 kids created a sense of connectedness for students. We are not in teams this year unfortunately. After reading James Gee’s book, Good Video Game + Good Learning, I wondered if the idea of having students in affinity groups could be used to create the connectedness between students that teaming did in the past. Another NTK is what types of affinity groups would students be interested in. I have begun to gather some of this information via surveys and I can see already that a big NTK for me will be how to organize this data. Some of the answers are quantitative data with number scales, but other parts of the survey are qualitative, written explanations by students. In order to discover the patterns in the data I will need a good method for organizing it.
4 Comments
Janine Burt
2/1/2021 02:42:45 pm
Hi Betsy, your comments reminded me about my own school experiences. I remember most when I went on interesting field trips or I when we had special performances, etc. And I also have really fond memories of teachers that made connections with me which was not easy because I was super shy. I had great experiences in elementary and some in high school, but I can't think of one teacher in middle school that I felt close to or that even really knew me. That's why it's so encouraging to me that you (and I assume some others on your team) are working so hard to build relationships with your students.
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Susan Craig
2/2/2021 07:51:26 am
Hi Betsy,
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Kimberlee
2/2/2021 04:30:22 pm
Hi Betsy!
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Amy Bardwell
2/2/2021 07:00:14 pm
Hi Betsy: You are students are very lucky to have you, you are such a compassionate wonderful person. the fact you are an advocate for their social emotional learning during such a new world of virtual distance learning. Thank you for your thoughts!
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AuthorHello! Welcome to my blog! This will be a fun place to share thoughts about teaching and learning. I am a middle school science teacher at Redwood. When I'm not teaching, I'm hanging out at home with my family or enjoying nature somewhere in the valley. Archives
March 2021
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