ASD & Executive Functioning Accommodations - EDU 6644

This lesson begins with a student-centered discovery and inference activity. It relies on inference making as well as student-generated criteria to evaluate which documents reveal a cohesive truth about an historical event. As such, I considered the cognitive demands that such a student-centered activity would have on my students who struggle with executive functioning. I was intentional about the accommodations that I passed out at the start of the lesson (e.g. the prescribed group member roles as well as the timeline agenda). These provide a framework for these students to prioritize their role and content at hand and lessen their focus on the structure or stresses they may have about their role in the activity. Additionally, by circling one or two of the questions ahead of time, my students with executive functioning issues can have ample time to prepare their answer.

The second half of the lesson is the direct instruction that ties the larger narrative together and reveals to students how their inferences and evaluations of the primary source documents were correct and how they were incorrect. The direct instruction is a short 15-minute lecture and includes a visually stimulating and relevant slideshow that features mostly pictures of the four main characters of the story – this is a helpful focus for students’ attention. Additional resource accommodations during the lecture for my executive functioning students is to give them guided notes. These can be in multiple forms and have differentiated purposes and student tasks associated with them. The bullet point notes offer a summary script of everything I am saying during the lecture and offer a visual connections to tether student focus. These guided notes can be differentiated in two ways: include the slide pictures with lines for annotations or simply be a tangible resource for students whose motor skills or cognitive deficits might prevent them from taking notes during lecture.

As a teacher comfortable with lecture and a proclivity to rely on auditory instructions alone, I have learned that I need to consider both hands-on and written directions to supplement everything I am saying. Additionally, I need to reduce the stress of uncertainty have sign posts and agendas accessible for my students which will provide structure and hopefully create and environment with a few less things for their over-active brains to worry about and/or focus on.

In studying exceptional learners with specific focusing and processing deficits this quarter, I have become aware of the reality that “distracted” learners’ brains are often overwhelmed – not because they don’t pay attention to anything but instead because the are paying attention to everything. Their brains struggle to sort and organize and prioritize. I think the guided agendas, notes, printed questions, circling the questions you’d like those students to answer are all four specific strategies that I will continue to use with my students whose executive functioning deficits disrupt their learning.

Growth Mindset and Reinforcing Effort

EDU 6526 Week 3 Reflection

Chapter 2 of the Classroom Instruction that Works explores some of the best practices and the fine line that teachers walk to reinforce effort of their students and bestow praise upon them. Dean et al. write, “reinforcing effort is a process that involves explicitly teaching students about the relationship between effort and achievement and acknowledging students’ efforts when they work hard to achieve” (21).

Some of these key insights shed light on the importance of the language teachers (AND PARENTS!) use and when and how to use it. Also, the frequency, substance, setting and tone of praise are all variables that determine how a student hears it (i.e. how they internalize it) and actually what behaviors the praise acknowledges. Excessive or repeated praise, especially for basic tasks has diminishing marginal return and students begin to tune it out. Additionally, perceived insincerity – as in the case where a teacher’s non-verbal communication does not match the praise – can have the reverse effect.

One of the most conceptually compelling arguments for teachers focusing on praise of effort, what Dean et al. call mastery-goal orientation, is that such a focus empowers and “encourages students to attribute their performance to causes they can control” (22). This is paramount for all types of learners. The consistently high performer whose aptitude and ability we (societally) often glibly refer to as “the smart kid” needs to have their hard work acknowledge and also have the efficacy of each of their specific strategies evaluated. Similarly, the student who is struggling and “slow” needs to also be reminded that their aptitude is not a fixed or static deficiency by contrast to his “smarter” peers. This kind of comparative praise that can be frequently seen/heard in American public schools is a best inaccurate and at worst psychologically diminishing about each type of student’s potential for growth, challenge and persistence.

These principles parallel the important work of growth-mindset. Growth mindset is a concept that emerged from the psychologist Carol Dweck who found that language used around the discussion of achievement and intelligence can greatly impact the motivation and self-efficacy of young people. The best example is our culture’s proclivity to use the phrase “you’re so smart” as praise for anyone who is successful. Dweck argues, and I agree, that this promotes a static understanding of intelligence and capabilities. That is, a person is either smart or they ain’t. If a student doesn’t believe they have the capacity to change their abilities or aptitude, then why would they realistically try anything new, persevere through difficulty or give any real effort at all? I believe that much of the cultural and social ennui that America is experiencing today is the catastrophic result of a static-growth mindset and has entrenched people into an intellectual caste of which most never break free from. This pernicious force is connected and reinforced by also by stereotype threat.

It is our responsibility, as teachers, as we heed the evidence and strategies of Dean et al. to promote students’ connections and self-evaluation of effort and achievement, that we enforce student commitment with language that reminds them firstly that their brains are not done growing and that their intelligence or capabilities are NOT fixed. And more importantly, a student’s achievement is not determined by their initial aptitude at something. We place so much value on our “bright students” those who are making quick connections or are simply those who are the strongest auditory learners – in the case of a students in lecture or discussion who seem to “get it” the fastest.

Students need to be active participants and OWNERS of their OWN learning. Student should get the opportunities in ALL classes, at all ages, to track their effort in relation to their achievement. Teachers must spend more intentional time with students working on linking their understanding of what it means to put for effort with concrete strategies. The teachers who gave rubrics for “effort in test preparation” offered great meta-cognitive learning opportunities. In the “4 Excellent” category students could see three specific strategies for test preparation 1) reread the text and compare it to notes from class; 2) seek help from other students; and 3) create study groups to practice the materials in different modes. These are not strategies that are known innately. Just like the CCSS ELA standards have made us all “literacy” teachers so too should the CCSS College and Career Readiness standards make all teachers focus on study strategies and self-reflection of effort and persistence.

We can help to shape the values and mindset of the next generation of our society. By qualitatively evaluating effort and adopting the language of growth-mindset teachers promote contemplation, patience, persistence, reflection and most importantly that a student should struggle, should be confused, should troubleshoot and is capable in all of these ways throughout their entire life!

Induction & Theory of the Forms

EDU 6526: Week 2

I wonder if induction isn’t the foundation for affirming each our student’s sense of wonder with the world, even if they don’t realize or acknowledge the strategy. Induction places quite a responsibility on the intellectual capacities and motivations of our students as they are entrusted to gather and organize evidence. From there, they begin to recognize emergent patterns and draw conclusions about an evolving (T)truth; perpetually being drawn to what’s next. A mindset that furthers investigation and promotes a curiosity to uncover something new or mysterious about life appears to be the foundation for life-long learning. I hope that my students are compelled to pursue and uncover the mysteries all around them and that school empowers them to feel equipped and eager to embrace such a life.

This reminds me of a potent and pertinent quote from Franciscan friar Richard Rohr who says, “Mystery is not that which is unknowable, it is that which is endlessly knowable.” He is at once, beautifully poetic and right on the button. Our charge as intellectually capable and curious beings is to gather, organize, and scrutinize so that we may inform our thinking and allow the cycle to continue. We are all here, none of us knowing why, given the faculties and powers of observation that we have in order to observe and consider what we can learn and embrace in the time we’ve got.

Although it is slow and certainly not the most efficient strategy for conveying gobs of content (teachers sound just the like entertainment industry we over-emphasize our peddling of content), induction seems like the keystone for life-long learners to cultivate inquisitiveness and deep curiosity.

One example of induction that came to my mind during the reading is one of the primordial and essential contributions to philosophy: Plato’s Theory of the Forms. To understand this theory one must accept Plato’s assumption (which he’d inherited from previous Greek philosophers) that our inherent limitation as humans is our inability to properly or completely perceive the fullest truth and most accurate reality.  Plato argued that there existed an essential metaphysical Form of all objects we can perceive and that only by fully tapping into our mind can we perceive these Form and enter into the most accurate perception of reality. This theory applied to all objects of the known world. There were Forms for the essential human, the fundamental color red and even the perfect chair.

Plato believed that day-to-day human existence was actually an interaction between our senses and the mere shadows that mimic the Forms. That is, Plato believed that our perception was an approximation and but a glimpse of Truth and Reality. Plato asserts and expounds upon this theory throughout one of his most well-regarded works The Allegory of the Cave.

Plato believed that inductive reasoning and the process of investigation and refining the questions we ask about our observable and measurable world get us closer to the Forms and enables us to perceive more clarity despite the shadow world we are bound by. This philosophy undergirds the Socratic Seminar and the Scientific Method both of which were techniques employed and refined by Plato and Aristotle who believed that truth emerges the more we investigate and refine our thinking.

This is a heady notion that a more refined and accurate perception of reality is within the potential of each of our minds and how we choose to explore the world. I imagine that this mystical logic is, at first, not the most accessible explanation to students that they become life-long learners. However, I think when the intellectual time is right, a student’s embrace of inductive investigation will unlock the excitement for exploring all that is endlessly knowable. 

Recognizing Privilege & Acknowledging My Own Culture

EDU 6918 Final Reflection
My experience teaching at an all-black high school in DC was diving into the deep end of a pool of indeterminate depth when it came to exploring my own Dynamics of Difference. I was an outsider and learned a lot about my own privilege and cultural competency during my eight years there. I am indebted to my students, colleagues and the parents who welcomed me into their community. They wanted me to succeed and to be my best. Their belief in me allowed me to be my best for them. Many of my 9th graders from southeast DC had not met many white people. If they had grown up in the neighborhood, they had maybe only one or two white teachers before me.

One dynamic of difference emerged during the Socratic seminar I led in my first few years teaching. A room of only black students were being prompted to talk about racial injustice and challenging, polarizing issues like the death penalty, abortion, and gun control by a young white man, whose privilege allowed him [me] to obfuscate my position or opinion altogether. This caused a rift and led to me negating my own culture and point of view. By deferring to my students' cultural truth and ignoring my own, I thought that was being culturally proficient when in fact, it was just my own version of “colorblindness.” Initially, I believed this pedagogical choice was valuable for cultivating a seminar space for my students to work out their opinions in a dialogically friendly space free from my opinions.

However, one of my students DeShawn, wrote in her course evaluation of our journalism seminar course: “I understand that you didn’t want to preach, but I wish you had shared your opinion more – as a young white man. We don’t get the chance, before college, to talk to many people like you, in this open kind of way and I think that would have helped us to go deeper.” This is my first piece of evidence for inclusion here. It reminds me of my commitment to my students’ beliefs and insights and demonstrates the importance of including my own for both their sake and mine.

What DeShawn taught me was that I wasn’t serving her or any of my students by pretending I didn’t have a culturally informed lens that shaped my opinions. With her encouragement and insistence, I was able to better incorporate my own opinion into conversations of social justice in my remaining years at TMA.

I have also included a screen shot of the cultural proficiency continuum infographic as a reminder of the specific language that I am committed to as I work to be a culturally proficient and engaged social studies teacher.

Additionally, my cultural competency grew through mentorship and collaboration with colleagues. Seeking out mentors, collaborators and most especially feedback has been the bedrock of my professional growth. I can see this strength of mine showing in my collaborative work already with teachers, instructional aids and other tutors working at Cleveland. My interest to dive right into TMA served dual purposes. First, it was my formal training. Secondly, this openness connected and committed me to the community and the work we were doing together.

Without any formal training or credentials, it was requisite that I surround myself with competent and willing mentors. Two teachers, in particular, continue to be key mentors and collaborators in my life. Kena, the science department chair and teaching coach who most formally trained me through the planning and critical feedback process and also Karen, the social studies department chair and the mentor both helped cultivate in me the spark and skills to encourage dialogic seminar with my 11th and 12th grade students and promote critical thinking and discussion about issues of social justice and equality. My collaborative work with Karen also led to our work leading three different professional development workshops and also one teaching fellowship.

Both of these two women were and continue to be sounding boards for growing my cultural competency. They’ve helped me to see that I am never done growing in this regard. They have helped me to be mindful of my privilege and how to better incorporate more perspectives when discussing challenging topics with students and colleagues. I am so fortunate to find that this perspective and focus is such an important component of our SPU MAT program and educational philosophy.

The Constitution & The Future of Public Education

EDU 6120 Week 9

“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” - U.S. Constitution, Amendment 1

For writing this week, I wanted to delve into both the case law and results that have informed the debate about religion in public schools. Specifically, this concerns the first sentence of the first amendment (above), and its two clauses, which have become known as the establishment clause and the free exercise clause. These two, somewhat competing notions, rather succinctly define the relationship between religions and the federal government and have been the basis for much case law that impacts public schools – both in terms of the expression of ideas as well as the utilization of space. Whether it is school prayer, posting of the Ten Commandments, public schools giving old free textbooks to private religious school or providing spaces for student-led Bible studies, the US Supreme Court has used this one monumental sentence of James Madison’s to further define the interwoven and complex relationship of religion and public education. 

Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) was one such important case in which the Court established the Lemon Test. “Under the ‘Lemon’ test, government can assist religion only if (1) the primary purpose of the assistance is secular, (2) the assistance must neither promote nor inhibit religion, and (3) there is no excessive entanglement between church and state” (USCourts.gov). This often serves as three-pronged litmus test to determine if the particular relationship violates the establishment clause.

Then in Lee v. Weisman (1992), the Courts decided that public schools must discontinue clergy-led prayer at school graduation and other required school gatherings. Simultaneously, the Court decided that during non-instructional hours, schools could be used as meeting places for student-led Bible studies as long as an “open forum” exists for all such student groups. This means that YoungLife would have just as much right to meet after school as the YoungSatanists. With this open forum decision, the Court believed this did not respect or favor one religion over another, thus meeting the establishment clause. And moreover, by providing the public space for student-led religious gatherings, the schools were not actively “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

As a social studies teacher, this is fascinating to me because it provides such immediate and tangible examples for students to witness the impacts that both the U.S. Constitution and U.S. Supreme Court have on our everyday lives. Moreover, it can be a helpful exercise to understand the legal challenges of a constructionist reading of the Constitution. Such a lens limits or restricts judicial interpretation of the Constitution and is requires decisions to be based upon the exact words on the page. Considering the potential for discordancy between the establishment and free exercise clauses, this arena is rife for debate.

And, as much as I would like to spend the week writing about this high-minded debate that pits two clauses of one-fifth of the first amendment again each other, we live in such times where the immediacy of change demands our focus. We don’t have the luxury to daydream blissfully in the wheat fields of Constitutional Law. Instead, we must find shelter from changing political storm as the dark clouds of president-elect Trump’s decision-making looms like poison-filled zeppelins over our heads. These are eerie and ominous times we live in, especially considering Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos as the new Secretary of the Department of Education. Trump’s initial proposal was to discontinue the federal DOE, which at this point, I think I’d honestly prefer.

DeVos, a billionaire with no professional experience in schools, has a noteworthy and troubling CV that includes donating to and advocating for the unsuccessful overhaul of the Detroit public schools. Her monies aided an experiment that doubled down on charter schools, which were also deregulated and faced little accountability despite continuing to fail students. As a helpful metric, we can look at the NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) data to compare performance across struggling urban education districts and Detroit ranks lowest in the pack (Washington Post).

Moreover, DeVos, like Trump, supports the idea of school vouchers, which, according to the Washington Post “give families taxpayer dollars to pay for private and religious schools.” Trump and DeVos’ critique of status quo public education is that it is a monopoly that needs to be upended by privatized choice and olde fashioned capitalism. This means public education could resemble a marketplace where students and families take the per pupil allotment (a voucher) and decide what school they would like to attend. The money would follow the student. This could be applied to private schools, home-schooling and even religious schools with the Mueller v. Allen (1983) Supreme Court decision serving as ample precedent. Before even exploring the student and socioeconomic inequity inherent in the voucher system, it is important to consider the irony that “big government reformer” Trump is now encouraging a $20 billion federal system and the massive expansion (in financial power and bureaucratic breadth) to a federal department that only weeks ago he considered terminating.

Yeah, that sounds like smaller government to me. As quoted in the Washington Post American Federation of Teachers, the second largest national education union, President Randi Weingarten said that Trump’s pick [DeVos] “makes it loud and clear that his education policy will focus on privatizing, defunding and destroying public education in America.” This is not hyperbole. With Trump and DeVos’ proposed reformation of public education - a federally managed pseudo-privatized system of “choice” - we’d see the state and local framework for control (as established by the 10th amendment or reserve clause) and re-established with the ESSA reauthorization in December 2015 begin to evaporate.

According to the famed-Internet science blog and publication IFLS, the US National Education Association, the largest national educators union, criticized DeVos’ voucher proposal saying “These schemes do nothing to help our most vulnerable students while they ignore or exacerbate glaring opportunity gaps. She has consistently pushed a corporate agenda to privatize, de-professionalize and impose cookie-cutter solutions to public education." Sadly, these are not DeVos’ only dubious “qualifications” for the job.

I couldn’t help but notice the parallel between my topic and this emerging news. DeVos, if approved, stands to have great influence over the relationship between public education and private, religious schools – a relationship that the Court has slowly and meticulously defined during the last 100 years. I am hopeful that precedent and our country’s commitment to state and local control of the great experiment of public education will win the day. 

Resources & References

Washington Post – Betsy DeVos – Nov 23, 2016   

Washington Post – Trump picks billionaire DeVos – Nov 23, 2016

New York Times – DeVos wrong way to fix OpEd – Nov 25, 2016

IFL Science – DeVos picked – Nov 25, 2016

Dewey's Empowering Ideals

EDU 6120 Week 8

During the foreword of Parker Palmer’s compelling and contemplative The Courage to Teach, he bemoans the current state of American education plagued by standardized testing and false accountability measures. To illuminate his point, he offers an anecdote from education scholar and philosopher John Dewey. Dewey, who grew up on a farm, noted how curious a system his parents used to determine to value of their pigs before sale at the market. He described how his parents tied the hog to one end of a seesaw and added the corresponding number of bricks to the other side until the scale was level. Dewey criticized that standardizing assessments in education used similarly crude an inexact measures. We contend (Dewey argued), that after a prescribed and arbitrary amount of time by one standard measure we determine that student Sally knows 72 bricks worth of English and student Monee knows 83 bricks of English but quizzically neither teacher nor student alike have any real sense what one brick of anything is worth.

This was my introduction to Dewey before our deep dive into his education philosophy and contribution American education. I admired his zeal and critique immediately. As someone myself who has been swept up into new movement of individualized education or at the very least, find myself intrigued by the benefits and creativity of differentiated instruction, multi-modal assessment and more active and actual world relevance and connection in school, I needed the likes of Dewey to help me make sense of what I vehemently disagree with our current state of education. It seems that in Dewey’s My Pedagogic Creed (1897) he too, was advocating for and inspired by a charge to reform education and reframe it as social and moral imperative for democratic life to thrive.

As Dr. Scheuerman forewarned us, many passages of Dewey’s prose are verbose and complex. So many paragraph-long sentences, even this short piece, demanded a re-read. Yet, there are also streaks and bursts of cogent insight and statements of purpose that undoubtedly guide educators still these 120 years hence. For example, his idea about simultaneous psychological and sociological forces acting on each individual student and teacher provide a re-packaging of the nature vs. nurture dialectic and apply in more practical terms. His idea that our psychological education begins from birth and that we are inculcated, unconsciously, with world-shaping notions that are “saturating our consciousness” provides a nice lens to appreciate the individual/social paradigm we each try to make sense of and fit into. Dewey notes that an individual begins compiling and contending with the resources that have shaped social togetherness from their birth and that bestowed unto them is the foundation for each new human to become “an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization.” Wow. These are big statements and ideas that lay the foundation for the transformative potential of education and reinforce the societal onus to provide and uplift compulsory education.

Dewey complemented Tolstoy in that he too believed in the value preparing a student for life right now and not just only education of history or just a speculative education of what might be. He wrote, “To prepare him [a student] for future life means to give him command of himself, it means to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities.” School, Dewey thought, must be a part of the actual, current, and relevant life experience of the child and if not, such things were not educative. School cannot nor should not happen in a vacuum. It should be, Dewey thought, a delicate balance of the social space and the togetherness of society ignited by the passion, intrigue and spark of the individual. Beautiful.

Dewey’s ideas about the psychological and sociological educative realms offer values about the social purposes of education that appeal to my sense of vocation as a teacher and pride I have in pubic education. I appreciated that Dewey contends that “school is primarily a social institution…and education a social process” and that if school lives up to it’s potential and philosophy that such a positive experience can help an individual student to “share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.” These are lofty and noble ideals of individual potential as well as a reminder of the democratic and civic potential and responsibilities inherent in public education.

Lastly, Dewey’s remarks about the practical application and relevance of education can be so useful to educators today as we try to successfully recoil and redefine our own relevance and purpose as we emerge from the NCLB era. Dewey advocates for vocational education and training in the skills of cooking, sewing and manual training as activities of the home and believes school can provide the obvious extension of such skill training. Moreover, Dewey’s conviction about the social, political and moral power and import of public schools serves as a charge to our shared commitment and validates the experiment of compulsory and public education. He wrote, “it is the business of every one interested in education to insist upon the school as the primary and most effective interest of social progress and reform in order that society may be awakened to realize what the school stands for, and aroused to the necessity of endowing the educator with sufficient equipment properly to perform his task.”