Saturday, March 30, 2019

Student Reactions to Doing Online Work during Snow Days.

For many teachers who put in many hours gathering artifacts, analyzing data and composing responses, it is a shame that all of that work is only seen (and only can be seen) by a tiny group of people. Here is my attempt to break out of that mold. 


Standard 3 of the Effectiveness Project reads, 
"The teacher effectively engages students in learning by using a variety of instructional strategies in order to meet individual learning needs."

Examples:Annotated photographs of class activitiesHandouts of sample workVideo/audio samples of instructional units

    1. What did you learn about your professional practice?
    For our Art of Succeeding project, which was centered around genetics since successful genetic traits are the ones that continue. All students researched their family history using ancestryclassroom.com, then wrote a story about a decision or event from their families’ history which led to their success. Students examined character traits like growth mindset, grit, and infinite thinking which provide the launching point for the spirit of success. They developed a leadership style horoscope, examined a variety of popular movies, books and TV shows and categorized their leadership style. Some students examined financial success while others decided to take on the task of determining the success of digital learning days by surveying Neenah Joint School District parents, teachers and students about their reactions to the days.
    For those students who chose to analyze data, they received over 1,000 responses to their survey. From the responses we learned that the majority (64.2%) of students feel they can learn as much or more via digital format as they do in a classroom. This can inform our professional practice in that occasionally including a blended element will be beneficial because some students feel they learn more in that fashion.
    If one definition of the purpose of school is as practice for the rest of students’ lives, and the future of education for everyone is going to include some percentage of blended (or all online) learning in the same grain as LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, Udacity, or edX. By using blended tactics we give our students an opportunity to practice learning in this format in a safe environment, where they can work out the details of some of the most difficult tasks in life: knowing oneself and when one works most efficiently, time and task management, and self motivation.  


    2. How did you use your learning to grow as a professional or enhance your students' growth?
     To enhance student growth, we will want to provide a wide variety of blended learning experiences for all of our classes, but according to question 7 of the survey of high school students, there is room for growth in having online availability during any digital assignments because only 60.2% of students got feedback about digital learning day work. With no previous announcement or expectation of having online office hours, during one three hour online office hour session, I interacted with 10% of the Arete students averaging 5 emails sent to each. If students know about the availability ahead of time, they would have a greater chance of receiving timely feedback on their learning, which may also boost the numbers of students who feel like they learned more in comparison with a day in the classroom.


Sunday, March 17, 2019

Limitations to Thinking

There are at least three activities which sap our energy and make it hard to make difficult decisions. Our brains remain incapable of concentrating on more than one thing at a time. Even though people may think they can operate by multi-tasking, instead it leads to alternating attention and not providing the person with a coherent, streamlined method of thinking. The second limiting factor is that humans short-term memory can only hold 7 items (+-2). Combining multi-tasking with trying to remember a large number it items leads to doing tasks at a level lower than can be expected or what one is capable of. The final limiting element is will power. Because of the research by Roy Baumeister, it is now believed that willpower is like a muscle. When it is overworked, it becomes tired and gets sloppy.


Over use of will power leads to poor control of self and environment, including decision making. Baumeister writes that "results suggest that a broad assessment of actions make use of the same resource. Acts of self-control, responsible decision making, and active choice seem to interfere with other tasks that follow soon after." Baumeister's findings suggest even if we are excited by the work we are doing or are in a time crunch, we should give ourselves break time to recharge our attention and ability to think clearly. The break allows the brain to process information and make new, unique connections between ideas and prepare it to receive new information.

Instead of just "pushing through" or forcing ourselves to take notes, read or write, we need to find a way to make us feel like doing any activity which truly moves our work closer to completion. I doubt that rewarding ourselves truly works, since doing something with the idea of a reward makes us realize that it is something we don't want to do. What is something that people want to do and how can that be used to keep themselves engaged? How can they flip the idea from having to do something to getting to do it? The other element is that it will have to be able to be done without much mental gymnastics, because people generally won't spend the energy trying to come up with those connections. It will have to be something easy, but effective to do.