Response

There were many ideas throughout the readings that sparked discussions within our group. It was interesting to see the commonalities of quotes that we chose . "Give young learners clear feedback that they are mostly wrong, thus reinforcing the notion that the task of learning to read and write is incredibly complex." was a quote I took from Cambourne’s article. This quote was interesting to me because it contradicts what I have experienced throughout my five year teaching career. I feel, as a teacher, that there seems to be a number of unwritten rules that we should follow, such as; not marking papers with a red pen, avoiding marking answers wrong on tests instead of leaving it blank, and now avoiding the word "but" when giving feedback because it is a negative word as discussed recently with our administration. There are two extremes being presented here and my opinion falls somewhere in the middle. I believe we need to be mindful of the language and methods we choose. The students at our school understand already how difficult language is because, for the most part, English is their second language. I think if we marked all the errors on their papers, they would become frustrated and lose interest in writing and reading quite quickly. We work on small goals with each paper which seems to be working well so far.
Another quote that was interesting to me was the article by Murray, where he says, "Too many of our education courses are taught by methods and attitudes that contradict what is being taught." I related a great deal to this. Recently we had a Professional Development day that was constructed into two parts. The first part, which took up most of the morning was on Differentiated Instruction, where we took part in a number of activities. Included in our activities were facts on retaining knowledge and what methods create a higher retainment of knowledge. When you teach someone else, the retention level of the person teaching is 80%. The method with the least amount of retention was by lecture with a rate of 5% of knowledge retained. Humourously, part two of our PD was a two hour lecture on In School Support Protocol. I could not believe, after we learned about how much knowledge we retain through different methods we were sitting through a lecture on the Friday before Labour Day. This quote made me remember how frustrated I was on that particular day. I have taken a number of workshops and classes to help in my lifelong learning as a teacher and I have realized you just have to do the best you can. I used to take workshops thinking I had to leave and adopt all the learning philosophies of what I was just taught. It is very difficult to implement a complete idea that is not your own. Now I take bits and pieces of what have been given and relate it back to my own students, and apply it in a way that is meaningful to them, because we know our students better than anyone.
The final quote that I enjoyed was by Belenky, "So long as teachers hide the imperfect process of their thinking allowing their students to glimpse only the polished product, students will remain convinced that only Einstein or a professor could think up a theory". The reason this quote resonated with me was because I feel that we need to show students that we are not perfect in anything we do the first time. We have to show them the entire process that it took to get to that end point as well as the final product. This allows students to build confidence in their own tasks and understand that polished work demands time, care, revision of ideas, and effort. So many times, I have seen students give up so quickly because the task is difficult and they can not envision the polished product. They have to be taught to see the little steps in between as milestones and treat them as successes as well.
All the articles this week brought up good points and were full of useful information these were just a few of the quotes that I could relate to.