January 2011
22 posts
Research, Curriculum, and Practice
I completely agree with you guys and I feel your frustration. I read Holly’s post earlier and I remember when I was in her shoes this summer. The Fast Track program had me going bananas. We were learning how to put together lesson plans and reading so much theory; however, it was hard because we were studying and writing for invisible kids. Now, that I am almost done with this program I can...
Tags
Now that I’ve finally figured out how to contribute to your discussion, could you all tag your contributions so that can attribute them accurately?
—Jill
Best practices
I love that you guys are interrogating “best practices.” How do we know what works? And for what purposes? What does the research tell us about when and how to apply “best practices”? These are all great things for you to be thinking about as you develop your own pedagogical frameworks and attending tool sets (the tools that align with your vision for ELA teaching).
...
Holly:
I feel the need to reiterate how Kate responded to your post about not having any student teaching experience. I also feel like I would’ve benefited from having this class earlier in the program. It makes some of the problems and questions that I had when attempting to design a unit plan for my class make so much more sense. I could see how it would be a little disconcerting to read some of...
RE: Holly (Researching, Papers, Publishing)
Holly-
I can completely understand your frustration with not having any student teaching experience yet…however, I hope you do not think that your enrollment in this class is untimely and may have better served you at the end of your NYU studies! First, I have been longing for this type of curriculum design class since I began one year ago! I can tell you that it DEFINITELY would have...
Writing for Publication
As a novice “researcher” myself, I am intrigued by this idea of writing research journal articles as a means teacher professional development. Even with my limited experience student teaching, my research for the annotated bibliography has thoroughly enriched my understanding of literacy development in urban classroom settings. This type of study is a wonderful way of pursuing areas of education...
Researching, papers, publishing...
I know I’m likely the only one in our class that doesn’t have any sort of teaching/student teaching under her belt. It’s been a bit discouraging reading these research articles and learning about publishing articles for “best practice”, having never truly “practiced” teaching.
Right now all I have to go on is my experience as a student and what I’ve...
Research and Caring
I know its only been a week since we have began reading for this course; however, I am really starting to see how all the reading is connecting to curriculum and research. The Wollman-Bonilla article, “Does Anybody Really Care” gave me insight on what it is that we do as educators. It helped comfirm why I want to teach and what I want to help students get out of education. Caring about...
Researching....
Hey ladies. Hope everyone had a good weekend! I’m just now getting through the readings due for tomorrow and wanted to think a little bit more on what research means for the average educator, especially after reading the Wollman-Bonilla article.
What she explores is much of what we learn in the Steinhardt Teaching and Learning programs. It’s my personal opinion and observation that...
Ethnography
Ed Theatre! I’m extremely familiar with enthography, and have studied under Johnny Saldana, a popular qualitative researcher in the field. He worked with us to create our own ethnographic monologues. It was a great experience and I plan to use it in my classroom— especially when trying to cultivate empathy and understanding.
I’m very familiar with Anna Deavere Smith’s...
Ethnography and Curriculum
As I read the reading for this evenings class I was particularly interested in the article on ethnographic research. As a whole we are all interested in differentiation and language; therefore, I started putting some things together as we began to blog about curriculum. I found ethnography to be useful in differentiation and beneficial as we define understanding. “Ethnography is grounded in...
RE: Holly
Holly,
Thank you for uploading that excerpt for the readings. I agree that it touches upon the quite poignant idea of employing writing activities to facilitate learning, as opposed to being a separate and isolated skill. In particular, I am struck by the message that writing is active, engaging thinking that enables students to process specific content (that which is being written about) while simultaneously forming personal connections with the subject matter or text being written about. I feel too often we, as (prospective) teachers, fall into this expectations trap of assigning writing tasks with the intention of students producing a specific type, style or piece of writing. Instead, this passage indicates that the writing itself is a end, not necessarily the finished product! While it seems so basic and obvious now as I reflect on this idea, I realize how easy it would be to forget the inherent educational benefits of the writing process...
Intended Audience
Holly- I really liked that passage also. I was really interested in the idea of the family dialog journals as a way to sharpen students understanding of audience, especially in light of our curriculum map and one of our goals being the understanding of audience and how that affects narrative structure. I really like the idea of using the concept of intended audience as a way to help students be...
Experimental "Chat" Feature
I am trying out this chat feature to see if it allows more user-frinedly posting and communicating.... : -)
More on curriculum planning
I agree with what you ladies are saying.
I really think backward design is helpful, at least from what I’ve read. It seems really similar to how I’ve been designing lesson plans for Drama Ed. We are first told to develop the “take away” message and then hone in on smaller details later. I guess if we think “desired results” first and the ways to achieve them...
Understanding and Planning for Learning
Kate I completely agree with you. I also find myself a bit troubled and confused when it comes to assessing standards.It is difficult translating the state standards into usable guidelines for lesson and unit planning. This past semester I found myself really struggling with learning objectives and aligning them to assessment. I began to look at assessment as a mere activity rather than a way to...
"Understanding"
I, too, was struck by the notion of assessing understanding as the basis for performance activities and rubrics. However, when they say a rubric must provide concrete answers to what understanding looks like, I could not help but say aloud “Well, what does understanding look like????” It is easy for me to read the text and follow the given examples of what understanding may look like,...
oh...
I guess I should have mentioned that my findings were based on chapters 3-6…
-Holly-
What I’m noticing from the reading is a large emphasis on understanding and its actual meaning. I think it’s important to have a firm grasp on what true understanding is as a teacher; having students simply repeat information mechanically won’t help them to develop practical skills to use across other subjects and pursuits outside of the classroom.
-Holly-