Chapter 8: MMM

This chapter was all about designing effective assessments and how to go about doing that. Wormeli gives some ideas of how to make sure that you have designed good assessments for your students. When the assessment is good, it should clearly outline goals. It should prove to be challenging enough to make them work hard but not so hard that you avoid making the student upset or stressed. You should give options for assessments so that students have a say in what they want to do. You should be able to link other content areas in so that the student can see how one interacts with the others and you should make different formats when creating assessment instead of always asking students to write an essay. The other part of the chapter that many teachers are probably happy about was that Wormeli says to make sure that your assessments are easy to grade. If they are too time consuming or too difficult to grade then your assessment has missed the mark. It is important to always remember to use a rubric, it makes your life easier and it makes the student’s life easier.
I liked this chapter because it gave some great ideas for different assessments such as to use menus, journals, debates, games, or time lines to see if your students have learned the materials. I really like the idea of doing different types of assessments and within those assessments using different topics. The easiest way to describe it would be if you gave an essay to the students to make sure that there are different essay topics. I know that from personal experience, I really like when a teacher gives some choice especially in a history class. It is easier to write a history essay when you are actually interested in the topic. I can also attest that clear instructions and directions are vital to the success of the students. If you do not make things clear or the directions are hard to follow, many students will either refuse to do the assignment, do it poorly, or the wrong way. To be a good assessment, it must be hard enough so that it takes time to accomplish but not so difficult that you get frustrated with the whole concept. I also think assessment should be fun because it makes the students happy along with making it easier on you to grade them.

Chapter 7: MMM

This chapter was all about differentiated instruction and how to implement it into your classroom. This is probably the most difficult aspect of teaching because you will have students with learning and/or physical disabilities, students who are general education students, and those who are considered to be gifted and talented. What makes it that much more difficult is that these students will all be in the same classroom trying to learn. Obviously, a teacher is not going to give the same amount of work to a student that has severe mental disability than a student considered gifted and talented. The objective is not to give the same amount of work, but to make sure that you get these students to the same level so that they all can understand the major concepts of the unit. Wormeli gives a list of characteristics that a teacher using differentiation should possess. These include being a risk taker, being empathetic, organized, flexible, resourceful, and having a good sense of humor. Those are all characteristics of good teachers regardless, so that means that you are more than halfway there if you want to be able to differentiate your classroom.
I have said this many times before, but I believe that differentiation is the hardest thing to do as a teacher. I think what makes it so difficult is that there really is no answer to how to do it. There are so many different types of students, and they all learn in different ways so there is no one method or plan that you could follow in order to differentiate. I do think there are things that you must avoid in order to be successful and that is to make sure that you do not give the gifted and talented students more work for the sake of doing more. As the teacher you also need to make sure that you do not give less work to the students with learning disabilities as well. I think that it should be about the type of learning and not about the amount of learning. I almost feel like differentiated instruction is a very abstract term because you would have to know each one of your students to be able to tailor lessons, but while in a college education class you do not have that ability so you end up learning about something that you do not fully understand which is what makes differentiation so difficult to understand sometimes.

Chapter 6: MMM

This chapter was all about making sure that both students and teachers are held accountable for high standards. The first few pages talk about how to make sure that the students are held accountable. Some of the suggestions were: when assigning a project, give examples of good work so students know what is expected; avoid giving extra credit, but instead allow students to go back and make corrections on their work; to use a rubric that outlines everything that the student needs to do to get a good grade; and another good idea is to display their work public because they will be more apt to work harder. Not only do students need to be accountable, the teachers need to be also. Some suggestions for doing so were: make sure that you help your students be life long learners, do not simply teach for the test; make sure that everything you teach is relevant; if you cannot tell a student or parent why you are covering a particular topic, then you should remove the topic all together. To be better teachers we must give formative assessments to students to track progress, place the student first, and think outside the box.
I liked this chapter because it talks about holding everyone accountable and not just the teachers. Obviously, the teacher should be held responsible if he or she is doing a terrible job, but if the students are not doing the work then they need to be held responsible also. I completely agree that we must put the students first and make sure that we are not teaching them so that they can pass a test but instead teach them so that they can learn and function in society. The last big step to an effective teaching environment is to make sure that you collaborate with your teaching colleagues and make sure that each one of you works together to help the students learn.

Chapter 3: MMM

This was a very interesting chapter on how to take what we know about brain research and turn it into learning for the students. There were a couple very fascinating parts of the chapter, one of which was the discussion on how to keep students engaged. Wormeli has the suggestion which he follows in his own classroom; to ask a question and give time to answer, and once the student answers you then ask another student whether he or she agrees. Once that student has answered, you call on a third student to give an opinion; this is aimed at making sure that all of the students are learning and not just zoning out after the teacher calls on someone to answer the question. The chapter also talks about the importance of drinking water during the day to make the brain stronger. If you are well hydrated, then the neurons in your brain flow faster, and you get better results and quicker response time. The last part of the chapter that was interesting was the list of activities that a teacher can do so that students can practice how to reason; one of the big problems today is that students have a hard time being able to reason anything out for themselves because they are asked just to spit out answers. We should teach them meaningful information but at the same time teach them how to reason and be able to do things on their own.
I liked how the chapter was set up because it looked at learning from a scientific background which is huge considering many teachers, except those in science, know little about the human brain. This is a very important time for a young adult because he or she is starting to find out who they are and what they want to do with their lives. It is also a time with a lot of experimentation, not all of it good, which can cause a lot of problems for your students. I thought it was interesting to find out, and slightly sad, that students now do not see how giving a person an answer to a test or coping down homework is considered to be cheating. It appears that we have a moral flaw in our society, and more and more people are unaware of how their actions are morally wrong or detrimental to themselves or others. I am not saying that we should preach to students, but I do think that we need to set good examples and try and show students what the types of behaviors are that show good morals.

Chapter 13: MMM

This chapter was quite interesting because it talked about how the importance of having an outdoor activity is to the health of your class. Wormeli talks about different camping trips that he took students on and the benefits that they shared. In general, he said that there are two major events that take place as a result of his camping trips. The first is that students come back and are much more proud of and thankful for the things that they have at home such as food, heat, and electricity. He said that the second big change is that students are much more apt to do things for themselves and be autonomous – which is an important part of becoming more mature. One final thing that was important from the chapter is that Wormeli talks about how the camping trips end up making students more comfortable with each other and with the teachers. He feels like the students are more likely to open up to the teachers and to each other after spending time in the wilderness and needing to rely on one another.
I am not so sure how I feel about going on a camping trip with a bunch of middle school students. I would love to be able to do something like this with my students, and intend on seeing how far my school administration will let me go, but to me I feel that this is an incident waiting to happen. With things such as injury, arguments, or some kind of misconduct taking place. We live in such a politically correct world, and we are so afraid that something terrible is going to happen that we try to shy away from it. For instance, teachers have to be very careful around their students for fear of anything being taken out of context. I personally cannot see many schools approving this, but maybe I am wrong. On a positive note, I did like his ideas for the Civil War re-enactment and the slave journey idea. I think that those would be fun activities that would also teach students history at the same time.

Chapter 4: MMM

This chapter can be summed up using one term, bodily-kinesthetic. The entire chapter is about helping students participate in active learning. As the name implies, active learning deals with movement and activity, which for middle school students is a necessity. At this age, the middle school student's body is changing rapidly and causing difficulties with some motor functions and sitting for long periods of time. Wormeli suggests that you get students moving about every 10 to 15 minutes so that oxygen can get into their brains, to stimulate learning, and to relieve pressure on the students’ aching joints. The other important thing to remember about middle school students is that they are very concrete thinkers, and have a hard time thinking abstractly. The chapter gives an example of a student who learned best when he did hands on work; so the teacher decided to take the class outside to measure and work with trees, the topic of the class. This little exercise greatly helped the student learn the material.
I thought that the chapter was interesting and gave some great ideas to get kids moving, but more importantly stressed the need to do so. Some of the things that stood out to me was to have the students stand up while talking about the materials just covered in class. I also liked the idea of having students get up to bring their papers to the teacher or making them put it in a basket on the other side of the room. My freshman year of high school, my history teacher had us do a lot of moving around. We also passed papers in a basket which required us to get up and move around a bit. I would be more than willing to try these approaches along with mixing in other ideas such as having students perform skits or re-enactments. On the other hand, I do think that you cannot really do this with every class because there are some classes were movement like this might distract them and prevent them from working. Taking a chance and having students be more bodily-kinesthetic is worth a shot, and I am willing to try anything that might help my students do better in school.

Chapter 3: TP2000

This chapter discusses three important elements of any successful middle school: assessment, curriculum, and standards. Every state, with the exception of Iowa has created standards to match the federal standards for education. Strong standards are important if you are building lessons and curriculum through backwards design, and also can be a helpful guide for new, or even veteran teachers, when planning curriculum. The chapter goes over a list of guidelines to keep in mind when creating standards such as being clear, accurate, brief, feasible, flexible and assessable. The chapter goes on to show how state standards should be a basis for essential questions, which should be the basis for your curriculum. The last portion of the reading focuses on assessment. Although not an extremely in-depth overview, it does offer the advice to vary your assessment, make it authentic, and valuable.

Superman Reflection

I thought the movie was great! It had been something discussed in a prior class with Dr. Grace, and was something I was looking forward to renting myself. This documentary really gave me a good idea about how public education is structured in our country. I never really knew that teachers unions were the problem, but through watching Waiting for Superman, it was clearly explained just how true it was. I can safely say that I did not really appreciate my public education as a child. I never really knew what some inner city and lower class neighborhoods had to do just to put their child in a good school. I was naive to the fact of how staggering the number of failing schools in America is, and how behind we are when stacked up against nations like China. The United States is slowly becoming less valuable because the education system is not working for us anymore. Where many other nations have adapted the ever-changing educational structure of schools, the United States has not kept up. Watching this film made we want to go and teach in a school like in the documentary and help be an example of what and engaging and effective teacher is.