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.