Mondays are when I have my practicum so needless to say being in any environment with adolescents you’re going to have discourse. Today I notice Relevance in the classroom. Today the class worked on a worksheet on Participial and Gerund phrases, the students were supposed to underline the phrase and label whether or not it was a participial phrase or a gerund phrase during this exercise one of the students asked the teacher what ignorance meant, the teacher answered simply that, that question wasn’t relevant to the topic of the assignment and that at the end of class he could look it up in the dictionary. This was interesting because this student normally doesn’t ask questions but is often a disturbance in the class room. He will just randomly start talking to other students from across the room. He was not only asking irrelevant questions but he wasn’t participating in working on his worksheet. Every Monday in Mrs. D’s class she has the students BEST which is a grammar note book, she puts 3 sentences on the board and calls on students to come up and make the corrections, after the student makes the corrections she asks the students why they made the corrections they did, they then try to explain why they corrected what they did.
Ex: The Baseball team (one, won) the trophy (to, too, two) years in a row.
The students would use Discourse Markers when trying to explain why they chose what they did. This is a great way to show and explain to the other students how and why the student chose the words they did. Every student gets a chance at coming up to the board to correct and explain why throughout the year.
Turn- Taking is something that didn’t work well in class today. After the students finished their worksheet individually they then worked with the other students at their table as a group to discuses and go over their answers, then the Mrs. D handed out small whiteboards to each group to play a game. Mrs. D then read the sentences out lout one at a time and each group had to put down what type of phrase was in each sentence, then she would have the groups write down if the phrase was a participial phrase what was the phrase describing in the sentence and if it was a gerund phrase what was the phrase being used as the subject, direct object, indirect object, predicate nominative, ex.…this was hard for the 3rd period class to do. There were out bursts along with inappropriate language being used if their group didn’t get the question right.
I haven’t really noticed a pattern when it come to discourse in the class room, there are few students who ask questions, but when questions are asked Mrs. D does her best to explain to the student. After she explains to the student she then asks if she answered the question and if not will try her best to put it into language that the student will understand then will ask the entire class if they have any questions about what she just explained. In 3rd period more than half of the class is on IEP’s and I have noticed that not many students in there ask questions at all, a lot of students don’t even participate in their work. Mrs. D isn’t going to give the students the answers, but she does her best to get those students involved in what is going on in the class room or she will have the resource teacher pull them out for more one on one time.
I have noticed how hard it is to try and give each student independent one on one time, but Mrs. D tries her best to accommodate each student.
As far as gender is concerned I would think that females would ask more questions, but I have noticed that when questions are being asked they are mostly from boys, boys. But when it comes to answering questions it is a mixture between girls and boys. I have also noticed the some of the students that other students pick on are more hesitant to answer questions. But for the most part a lot of the IEP students which seem to be a majority of males do not participate at all and are less likely to ask questions.
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Does Mrs. D normally do activities similar to the whiteboard activity you described? Or does she base most of her class periods on individual and group work after instruction? I think it is interesting how she works with students who have questions or who come across problems in their activities.
ReplyDeleteMy practicum is completely the opposite concerning when questions are asked. If a student asks a question the teacher will try to involve the entire class in the answer instead of focusing on that particular student. He will restate the question to the class, offer an answer and ask the class if they understand or if they have anything to add.
Do you think that specifically answering a single student is more efficient and helpful or would you rather address the question to the entire class to create a shared learning experience?
Mandy! I’m super sad that I missed your practicum! It sounds so interesting! Do you totally agree with how your practicum teacher handled the student who asked the question about ignorance? It seemed that she would take the opportunity to teach him about the definition. In the spirit of asking a question on your blog, I wondered what you thought about this and if you agreed or disagreed? You mention that the student often is a disruption; did this play a factor in his question not being answered?
ReplyDeleteI really do appreciate your practicum teachers asking the students if her answer to their questions helped them. What a great way to make sure that a student understands a question.
Fanny-Jo and Katie, You both kinda asked the same question so I'm just going to jump in and try to answer both of them in this one section.Fanny-Jo first, Well that was my first experience with the whiteboard activity,I have never seen her use them before. She mostly focuses on the students working individually, then coming together and working as collaborative groups. I don't think that answering students individually helps the class as a whole, I would think that it would be more beneficial for the students if Mrs.D would then repeat the question to the entire class to see if another student could answer the question, I mean how many times have we heard teachers tell us to ask questions cause more than likely other students have the same question but are afraid to ask it!
ReplyDeleteNow Katie, it's ok about the practicum. I know how stressful things can be this time a year especially with us being seniors and all! I would have agreed with Mrs. D if she would have enforced the student to go look up the question and then had him read it out loud to the class so the class would also gain some knowledge about the word. I also feel that the teacher was trying to get that student who is often a disturbance during class and who is absent a lot to do something constructive, I would like to think that Mrs. D was thinking that if she had the boy look it up himself it would give him the proper motivation to learn! But I could be way off! But I do understand that students are responsible for their learning and how are they supposed to learn if the teacher is always quick to give the right answer without giving the student the opportunity to find the answer themselves.
Mandy,
ReplyDeleteI know I am posting this question a bit late, and so if you don't get around to answering I totally understand. I am curious to how the teacher approaches the students who are not motivated. How does she use discourse to motivate, what tools or methods does she apply in order to ensure that she has done all that she can as a teacher to motivate these students. I see that you said most of them have IEP's which indicates a learning disability of some type... how does she make sure that each students is receiving the right kind of motivation in order for the goals in the IEP be met? Does she pull students aside for personal conferences? Does she find that regular classroom motivators do not work with students who have IEP...or learning disadvantages? Just curious on what techniques teacher use to motivate..I see that this is a very large problem that teachers must constantly overcome.