Metacognition TIPR

1. One example I have observed of metacognition in the classroom was in observing a seventh grade English class. The teacher definitely was lacking in teaching all the aspects of this, but she did have some good examples of metacognition. The students were given a worksheet with various examples of passages on it. The students were instructed to use their reading comprehension strategies to determine what kind of essay they should write, and what elements should be included in writing that particular essay. The students were able to use their declarative metacognitive knowledge to determine their strengths and weaknesses in this area. The teacher wanted the students to determine what they knew before they walked into the SAGE test, so she could further evaluate what to teach them, as well as the students being able to understand what they had to improve on before they went to the test. This also helps the students evaluate their own knowledge. Secondly, the students were then faced with the procedural metacognitive knowledge. If they already knew their strengths and weaknesses, they now have to figure out which tool to employ. This stage takes planning to make sure it is done effectively. Finally, the students get to employ their self-regulatory metacognitive knowledge as they have to decide which reading strategy they should use, and then understand which type of writing they will need to complete. This whole exercise was pretty much an exercise in metacognition. The students needed to think about how they thought in stressful situations, like the SAGE. After class, I talked to the teacher, and she said that she is going to use the assignment as a formative assessment to guide her teaching for what comes next. This step is similar to the monitoring step. The teacher can see how the students are doing,what is going well, and what's not going well. After using this monitoring, she can evaluate the student's strengths and weaknesses as a whole.

2. I think the student's needs in this area mostly lie in self-efficacy, and consciously realizing that they are going through these steps. I got the idea that the students were so worried about completing the assignment, that they didn't always make the connections between monitoring and evaluating. The  teacher had great ambitions in creating this assignment, and it has a lot of metacognitive pieces, but the students didn't learn for themselves as well as they could have regarding planning, monitoring, and evaluating. I think that student's realizing these pieces in their own learning would create more connections, and deeper metacognition.

3. In my own lesson, I could combat this by showing student's what it means to be a metacognitive  learner, and how that can help them. If they learn the strategies consciously, they will be able to use these effectively once they leave the classroom. I can expose the students to more strategies, and then teach them about how those strategies can be used. I want to help the students realize the planning strategies are so helpful. I think that this section in particular can lead to deeper learning, and and the students will remember more of the information. If a student knows what they are supposed to learn, and how to learn it, then they will be more effective learners.

Constructivism TIPR

1. In one of the seventh grade literature classes I have been observing, they have been working on one project for about a month and a half. On the first day of the teacher introducing the new project, she held up a lot of different books, while giving one sentence summaries of the literature. She then passed the books around the class, and asked the students to pick which one they might want to read. This is an example of cultivating curiosity in the classroom because she didn't give away every piece of the book. The students will have to explore the books themselves. As the project went on, the students explored the readings themselves, and as a group. This cultivates the collaborative community of the classroom and the learning. The students are constantly being asked to reflect on the reading that they do through various assignments, mini lessons, and group sharing. As the unit progresses, the students ask questions of the novel, and of themselves. They are able to look at questions such as "how does setting work in my book? How does my knowledge of conflict help me understand why the characters are acting the way they are?" and others. Because the students got to pick their own books, and create/film their own book trailer at the end of the unit, there is also a component of autonomy as well as another reflective  piece of how they understand the book in the context. Another piece that I loved for this unit, is the spiral curriculum. The teacher used mini lessons to reinforce learning of previous concepts such as conflict and setting, to go more in depth of the bigger concepts of their own individual books. She also is using the summative assessment of the book trailer to go back to the text and understand what they discussed. This is an example of spiral curriculum.  Finally, the teacher herself was a great example of a facilitator. She taught the mini lessons, and then gave the students time to work on their own, providing them with the materials needed to complete the task.
2. I think the students could stand to have more real world application in their learning. Maybe pick novels all with one specific theme, so they can discuss a current issue that they could relate to. This might help the students explore more into their reading. Another thing that the students could benefit from is more active learning.  The only active piece was really just the book trailer filming. Maybe implementing the mini lessons into a more active  environment, and with more discovery, the whole project will be more meaningful.
3. I can address these needs when I teach my mini lesson through giving more active  work. While still allowing them to have the autonomy  that comes with doing book groups, I think more collaborative and discovery could benefit the students a lot more. Perhaps I could have them share what they are learning regularly with the groups around them.

Growth and Motivation TIPR

1. A growth mindset  requires students to think differently about how they are learning, and when they fail. A specific example of a class where I observed a teacher promoting growth mindset, was a creative writing class. This teacher believes in failure, and getting students to look at failure in a more positive light. When I first walked into her classroom a few weeks ago, her classroom looked pretty unorganized and messy. However, as I watched her teach and chatted with her a little bit after, she told me that she believes in a student-led classroom. A place where students felt safe, and were allowed to work through struggles. The class began with her directing the student's attention to the questions they had put on the board the last class period. She left them to think about the question "what do I want to know more about in creative writing?" The students then put up their responses, and she used those responses to guide her lesson planning.  This is a great example of intrinsic motivation. Since the students don't know these answers, and they didn't all have to put up a question, the ones that sincerely wanted to know were able to pose their question in a non-threatening environment. The teacher motivates her students by the way that her class is set up, she expects them to be able to share what they wrote at the end of the class period. After her mini lesson, the students have time to write on their own. Each student spent the time working quietly after she allowed them five minutes to talk to their neighbors. This was a good mix between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation since she expected the students to produce something, but the students wanted to share their work with each other. She also demonstrated how failure could be beneficial as she put her own work up on the screen and wrote with the students. I  thought this was a good example of growth mindset since the students were able to see how she dealt with writers block, and how many times she edited her work. This allowed the students to see that deleting your work was not a bad thing. I also saw how she developed self-efficacy in her students. After each student read, she asked the rest of the students what they liked about it. This helped the writers see what they were doing well, and continue to develop that in themselves.

2. I think the students might need a little more structure in the class. A lot of them walked in the classroom, immediately grabbed a chrome book, put their headphones in, and didn't look up for the rest of the class period. These students, while they obviously had intrinsic motivation, didn't seem to interact with their peers. One of Maslow's Hierarchy levels shows that students need a sense of belonging. Perhaps these students need more of a positive classroom environment and they would feel like they could interact more with the other students with that. I would like to see what happens with an assessment in this class, or what happens when they finish their story. Currently, the students are in the beginning stages of writing, so I'm not sure how she will handle peer review and such, but it would be very interesting to see how the students react.

3. I think to combat the structure issue, I wouldn't let the students get the chrome books until the lesson is over. This way, the students would be able to focus and interact more during the group work, and then allow them to work individually. I also think doing more to cultivate class culture would be positive, and help develop the environment

Identity TIPR

1. I have seen a couple of Erikson's stages in the classroom. I have seen trust in the classroom as the students have been allowed to bring technology into the classroom and use it to work on a lesson. The teacher let the students use their phones to interact with each other and complete the Kahoot that they had created. This allows the students to develop trust in themselves, their group, and the teacher for allowing them to use technology in the classroom. The group trust develops because each student is given the responsibility to be accountable to themselves and each other. Since you can only use one phone per group, this works rather well on  the teacher's part. Another stage I saw at work while observing is the stage of identity vs. role confusion. The students are able to have their identity be fluid as they learn different ways to actually approach their identities. In the classroom, the teacher used the book Anthem to help them see the world in a different light. She asked the students to look at themselves and their current society in a different light as they worked through the novel. She had the students think about how the society in the novel works with our current society, and how we might change things if we lived in that society. Through this process, the students are able to challenge their own identities and how they work in society. The students are also allowed to ask the question of if they are independent. After they discussed Anthem, the teacher showed a clip from a movie to help them see a similar society in a different concept. The students were then asked to create a venn diagram to compare and contrast the two societies. Since the students were able to work on their own, they were able to feel independent and internalize the information more. On the other hand, Marcia's stages are also at work here. I think that the students are living mostly in identity foreclosure. The students are picking their identities based on the environments that they are in. For example, one student when in the literature class that I observed, is consistently loud, off task, and disruptive. The next class period was his English class.  In this environment, the student was quiet, attentive, and on task. The student switched identities based off his environment. He probably chose his identity way too fast, and was found wearing identity masks, which is part of the definition of identity foreclosure.
2. I think the student's needs in this area lies more in feeling a need for industry. Each student, while they were doing great work in the classroom, were not given very much feedback or pride in their work. In fact, on this specific day I was there, a test they had taken had been returned. There was no feedback on any of the student's test, and required the students to come to her at a separate time in order to understand what they did well or could improve. This left the students feeling unsettled about their grades. I think they could reach a bigger sense of industry which creates pride in their work, if they knew what their teacher thought of them in a way that allowed the students to have that immediate satisfaction. I think that the student's need to know more that it's okay for them to have different identities and understand that they can still get along with their peers, that they don't need to revert to what their peers are doing in order to fit in.
3. I think I could combat this when I teach a mini lesson through giving more feedback to the students. I would allow more autonomy by giving the students time to work, and then giving them feedback after they complete the assignment. This would help the students with their industry.

Information Processing TIPR

1. For this assignment, I observed an eighth grade class learning about the Holocaust. To start off class, the students came in, and pulled out their journals. As the teacher began class, she asked the students to give themselves expectation points. This is a good example of attention. The teacher requires them to pay attention to what they are doing very quickly. This helps the students get their brains working from sensory memory to working memory. For the teacher to have the students check themselves on easy perception things really fast, and then start into the lesson allows the teacher to help them move from stimulus-driven attention to controlled/focused attention. Since they have paid attention to the stimuli in the room, they are able to focus their attention on the lesson that the teacher has prepared. The teacher then engaged her students in elaborative rehearsal throughout the entire lesson. She had her students write down the essential question of the class period in their notebooks, "I can identify conflict and characterization in Act 2 Scene 1 of The Diary of Anne Frank". The teacher asked the students to identify conflict and characterization which they had learned the previous week. This helps the students move those vocabulary words to long-term memory.  The teacher then engaged her students in encoding as she helped them remember the meanings of the vocabulary words and then make connections to practice as they see it in the play. The teacher also paid attention to the wait time that students need when asking questions. She put four questions on the board for the students to look for while they read the scene aloud. This helps with repetition and getting the information into long-term memory. Throughout the reading, she would stop the class and have a student give a summary of what they were learning. Allowing the summaries was another technique she employed towards her goal of repetition  and achieving long-term memory. She would also mention, "you should now be able to answer two out of the four questions on the board". This helps maintain attention. After the reading was done, she had them rate themselves on if they could answer the essential question positively. She then gave them an exit ticket to further question if they could answer the essential question. All of these little things she did throughout her lesson helped develop their working memory and their long-term memory. 
2. I think the student's needs in this area really just lie in attention. The students sometimes had a hard time being able to pay attention to the longer reading that they did. They left their seats once, but other than that, they were in their seats, not talking to anyone around them. Because their class periods are 80 minutes, and it was the last class of the day, they needed some more movement to stay engaged. The teacher often had to stop and remind the students that they need to be quiet and get rid of side conversations. I also think that letting the students know when there was key information up front would help their working memory kick it into gear, as well as allowing them to encode  more effectively.
3. In order to combat some of these things in my mini lesson, I think that I will have to have more hands-on activities. This will help with their attention, visuospatial sketchpad, and encoding skills. Allowing the students to see more visuals would help them not call out so much. I think also asking more questions of the class, and giving a couple more seconds of wait time would help the students realize that I am asking a question instead of continuing on with my lesson.

Piaget TIPR

1.  In a different class that I observed, I found that while Piaget is being introduced, it isn't being implemented in the correct way. When disequalibrium is introduced to the class, in this case, determining the type of sentence. The teacher passed out a worksheet at the beginning of class and asked them to complete the practice exercises on the back. Instead of explaining the worksheet, or the types of sentences, or even doing one on the board with the class, she asked them to read the whole worksheet filled with dense material and then ask different people if they needed help. While she did attempt to hep them find equilibrium  by walking around and answering questions, usually she started out with asking them if they had read the directions, and then told them to read them again. I suppose that you could make the argument that her students were learning how to solve the disequilibrium on their own by using assimilation. They had previously earned how to identify simple and compound sentences. So they were able to use assimilation, by using process of elimination. Each student could look at a sentence and then figure out if the sentence was simple or compound. If it wasn't, then they could learn the new concepts of complex and compound complex in order to assimilate  the information. There is also a little bit of the element of accommodation. Each student was able to learn new work and shift their mindset to understand the new information. Without being able to see all of the sentence types, there wouldn't be room for visually seeing the old and new information that is being accommodated. Perhaps in this instance, the assignment is a great example of Piaget. The next assignment that had been given once they finished the sentence one, was a worksheet about understanding what test prompts are asking you to do. This worksheet, while again, had no instruction, was an excellent idea. The students were able to organize the information they already knew, and figure out how it would relate to them when they are in state testing. They were able to put the information into their own schemas  about state testing, and what you do when you are faced with an essay on a  test. The teacher is gearing her instruction towards the operational stage of formal operation.  The students are being asked to use deductive reasoning when figuring out what type of sentence each one is. They also learn how to classify and compare information.
2. The student's needs lie in needing more help making sense of the disequilibrium that comes from learning.  While the basic pieces of Piaget's theories are being addressed, they aren't able to fully be addressed because there is a missing piece of instruction. The assimilation, accommodation, and adaptation pieces are lacking a little bit because they are left in such disequilibrium.  Perhaps just one example sentence done as a class, or a reminder about some of the tricky material to watch out for, would have been helpful, and helped these processes move along more. I do think that the operational stage that is being addressed here is appropriate for their age and learning. They are being asked to do appropriate tasks for their stage of development.  I also think that play could be implemented more here. They weren't allowed to work as groups, or with a partner. Leaving them to muddle through the assignment for the whole class period in the dark.
3. In my mini lesson, I could implement more of these strategies by giving a better introduction to the concept. I think that letting each student struggle with the material is a good idea, since that way, when they reach equilibrium, it will be more internalized and understood. I also think that showing them some of the connections that they have already learned will help them with the process of accommodation.  They will be able to recognize that they have already learned some information, and now they need to figure out what to do with the new information. I also think that letting the kids play with the material is beneficial. Each student needs to be able to move through the information that they are learning.

Vygotsky TIPR

In the classroom that I have been observing, some great work happens. The learning environment is fun and open, and the kids pretty much understand what is being asked of them. For this blog post, I will be focusing on one specific lesson that I observed. The lesson was an introductory onto their next unit, World War 2. The teacher had the chance to be the MKO as she stood in front of the class to explain the new unit, and why it is important to life.  Because it is an introductory unit, she is the only option for an MKO in this setting. The students didn't know about Terezin, the concentration camp that was being discussed in class that day, and so the students were able to enter into their zones of proximal development. The students were in the space to learn because of the environment that has been set up, and they were able to enter into the expansion of learning. She supplemented the lecture with poetry that had been written by the children of Terezin, and connected that to their previous unit on poetry. The students were able to take what they knew and were familiar with, and move towards the area of learning and the ZPD that they didn't know.
     The second half of the class period moved into play. In order to supplement and scaffold the lecture portion of the class period, the students were assigned to create their own butterfly, just like the children of Terezin. After the students have created them, the teacher will hang them all from the ceiling throughout their unit. The last day of the unit, when the students come into class, she will have removed all the butterflies belonging to the children that didn't survive the Holocaust. This activity develops the ZPD even further as it allows the students to expand their knowledge and internalize it more. Internalizing knowledge is an end result of learning. The students are able to turn the lecture into a more tangible thing which helps them internalize the material more. Scaffolding has occurred throughout this class period as the MKO tells them what Terezin was and how it exists, then leads them through poetry, has them work through an art project, and then shows how it will connect with the rest of the unit. I also liked how the MKO used mediation. Instead of using the time that the students were working on their art to catch up on things, she instead walked around the whole class, checking on students and holding individual meetings on an assessment she had just graded.

     I think the students may have needed a bit more instruction on the connection between how the butterflies will operate throughout reading Anne Frank. She also didn't leave them very much time to finish the project. They had about 10 minutes, but some students really wanted their butterfly to look good, and that wasn't long enough for them. As a result, one student especially, had a very difficult time working. She spent the activity time walking around the classroom, talking to other students, and talking back to the teacher.

     Perhaps to combat the issues presented by this student, working more with developing the learning culture. If she understands what happens when she refuses to work to the other students, than maybe a conversation could happen there. I could implement this when I teach my mini lesson and use collaborative groups instead. Maybe finding something she is good at, making her the MKO, and giving her a little more responsibility would help everyone focus more and find value in the lesson.