Point of View and Perspective

After a recent assignment for my Social Studies and the Arts class, I have a new idea about the perspectives of children. This assignment consisted of me interviewing 2 fourth grade students about their knowledge of geography, history, civics and economics. The types of answers I received were a direct example of the old saying "from the mouths of babes". Did you know that what the president does everyday is attend a lot of boring meetings and writes a lot of papers? Or that our current president is McCain Obama? I sure didn't! But where did they get these ideas? McCain Obama makes me think that when this student was in the second grade during our last election she saw all sorts of advertisements and news items that said both of those names together. I could see that deduction being made. And we see all sorts of pictures of presidents, past and present, sitting a a desk looking at papers. These two observations make sense to me and definitely to an 8 year old. When asked what a judge does, one student told me that she thinks a judges job is to decide where a child goes when parents get a divorce. I would bet that this little girl has seen this first hand. Their answers to these questions were all a matter of perspective. How are they seeing the world at 8?
Sometimes I wish I had the perspective of child. They take almost everything at face value and don't read into every single thing that happens like I am sometimes guilty of doing (ok...more than sometimes). Their point of view as a child molds their learning and needs to also mold my teaching. By broadening their horizons I can help them shed new light on various issues and ideas through the lens of a child.
I think the students that have the hands down advantage on their creative and unique point of view and perspective are those of English Language Learners. They have experience the world in a way that I can not even imagine. Many of them coming to this country at an age that still allows them to have memories of their homeland and typically in a community with other people from the same ethnic background while being exposed to everything "American" in the public schools. These are students we need to draw on for cultural experiences and alternative points of view in our lessons. How are elections done where they come from? What are holidays like? What is the weather like? How is this word pronounced in Spanish/Portuguese/Gujarati/Gaelic/German? These students bring a whole different perspective on the world than most native born Americans can never fully understand. It is important to take advantage of this within the classroom and look at their ESL status as a resource as opposed to something that we must work against.
I believe that as we learn and grow we are able to look at things through multiple points of view. I can observe as a woman, a southerner, a North Carolinian, a Christian, a married woman, a daughter, and now I will be adding to that list an educator. I want to help my students understand how to view things through their own point of view and also appreciate others in a caring learning environment.

What Should They Miss?

I was saddened to hear about a new policy at the elementary school I am currently interning at for the new school year. Most students that receive special services for ESL, learning disabilities, speech and OT are pulled out of the classroom during the day. Some of them are pulled out just once, some for longer periods of time, depending on their personal needs. Up until this year, students were pulled out for special help usually around the time during the day that the subject they needed help in was taking place in the classroom. Since reading, writing and math all take up more than one period each day, students would be pulled during part of one of these sections so they never missed the entire lesson/unit. Well, not anymore. Now, all students must be pulled during the social studies/science block of the day. Every student is pulled in the morning (for the 4th grade) and this is supposed to coincided with the social studies block because the administration has let the teachers know that it is less important than the other subjects and since it is not tested on, students are better served to miss these lessons. This makes me so angry! First of all, I never experienced pull-out this way in elementary school because I attended a magnet school with electives. I was able to spend 2 periods a day in CA with my special ed teacher and never miss a single minute of classroom instruction. Was this the best way? No. I would have loved to take some more fun electives sometimes, but I was able to choose one each semester so that was better than nothing. Would it have been better for me to miss L.A. everyday in my regular classroom since that is the main area where I needed assistance? No. I benefited from spending time the the classroom with my peers. Is there any perfect way to help these students get all of the help they need each day without missing out on something? No. BUT why do they have to miss out on two subjects that could be very successful for them and that could help engage them in something that can lead to success? My teacher is working with the special educators as much as she can to ensure her few students who are being pulled out can still participate in social studies by working to help prepare activities and lessons for her students to work on in their special education classroom, but with this set up, they will miss out on so much. I just wish that administrators and those involved in making decisions like this could understand that students with learning disabilities need to have as many opportunities within the day to feel successful and just like every other student. When a student with a learning disability hears that it is time for reading or math, the subject in which they have a disability, they can easily feel discouraged before the lesson even begins. But, you tell them it is social studies and you just happen to work in reading, writing and math, then you can help students succeed in ways they never felt was possible. This is a great reason to utilize integrated lessons, but it is still excluding students from activities every day that they should not have to miss. I hope that this new policy will encourage teachers to work social studies and science into the other times within their day and that the administration realizes that it is unfair to exclude students from any chances to work with their peers in the classroom.

What is the question?

During school, we are used to being asked questions, but are they the right questions? As I continue my study of Backwards Design as a way to plan instruction, I am realizing how important it is to ask the right questions. I do not mean asking questions like "What is 8+6?" or "Who invented electricity?" I mean deep, thought provoking questions that do not necessarily have right or wrong answers and might not have any answers at all. These are questions like "How do our personal experiences mold the way we look at a piece of art or literature?" or "How is life similar and different for children in North Carolina through history?" These types of questions are considered essential questions and need to be established before you can plan a successful instructional plan.

So my textbook includes the question that many teachers are asking, "If the textbook contains the answers, then what are the questions?" How do we help our students go beyond the surface information that is provided as facts in their books to look at the big picture and transfer that information to relevant questions? I think my first answer to the question posed in my book is who says the textbook contains ALL the answers? Yes, the textbook gives the facts and information needed to formulate some of the answers, but we need to branch out and provide information from as many sources as possible. My second response is that it is not just the responsibility of the teacher to ask all of the questions. As I am formulating the essential questions for my upcoming social studies unit, I am realizing that I want to help my students learn how to ask these types of questions for themselves. If they get used to looking into the information to find out how it relates and what it really tells us, then hopefully as they go through school they can look at the information they are learning through that type of lens. How and why is this information important and how does it fit in with everything else I know? Those should be the true questions.

Priorities

I am currently attempting to tackle the idea of Backward Design as a way of lesson planning. The general idea is that you begin with the outcomes you want (what should the students learn) and then decide what they need to show you to prove they have actually learned what you wanted (essentially, assessment). Not until those things are nailed down do you ever actually come up with the lessons and activities. It is a new way of looking at education for me, and even though it is very different, I am starting to understand the true value.

As I am reading about this style of teaching and planning, the idea of true understanding has come into play. What does it really mean to understand something and how do we prove that in the real world. In the book I am reading, Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, I am beginning to understand how important it is to set your priorities as a teacher. We look at a school calendar and see all of these blank days to fill, but when compared to the actual amount of information to cover, there can never be enough time! Wiggins and McTighe remind us that "teachers can only help students learn a relatively small number of ideas, examples, facts, and skills in the entire field of study; so we need to help them transfer their inherently limited learning to many other settings, issues , and problems" (40). WOW! This is a huge task and really makes me rethink my ideas of learning and understanding. We want to be able to delve deep into ideas and then be able to apply those ideas to many different situations, not just cover as many ideas as time will allow. Think Depth not Width....a river perhaps.

Yes, it is important for my students to be able to label the parts of a life cycle, but it is even more important that they are able to take the whole idea of a life cycle and apply it to other concepts and ideas over time. Am I really teaching them the vocabulary and reading skills, or am I making sure they can take those skills along with them through life and apply them to the newspaper and a job application as well as their fourth grade textbooks.

I have always accepted that my chosen field of profession holds a great deal of responsibility...shaping the lives of children and the future as so many people have said in the past, but now I can really see that the actual information is not as important as each students ability to really understand and apply the learned information to as many different examples and situations as possible. I think that the authors of my textbook have done a great job of explaining how that is added to my list of responsibilities.

An Annual Plan: The Blue Print for My Year

Part of my background prior to coming to education is in the construction industry. I was an estimator and project manager for a construction company for over three years and spent most of my time pouring over blue prints and drawings for various jobs. I learned the benefit to a well detailed plan to help create the architect's vision exactly as they wanted it. The more information provided the easier it is to see the big picture.

I am now learning about multiple ways to plan for instruction and right now we are focusing on an annual plan for Social Studies. As I learn about this planning format and the way it can work hand in hand with unit plans and daily lesson plans, i can see a direct correlation between these plans and the blue prints for a building. These will be my starting points. My annual plan will help me take the North Carolina Standard Course of Study as well as the Wake County Pacing Guide (think of these as the specifications for the products within a set of blue prints) and layout how I will cover all of the information to build my school year.

Organization is a skill that I am constantly working on. It has NEVER been my strong suit, but all of this planning shows me that the more effort I put into these plans the smoother my class will run. Having an annual plan as a building block will help me to stay organized and focused on the end goals for the school year.

Although these plans are going to be very helpful, I can also see some negative points to an annual plan. We have talked throughout my program about using various forms of formative assessment to help gauge when students have actually mastered a topic. Sometimes, topics need to be retaught in a different way to make sure that everyone has understood the information. With an annual plan, you could feel trapped into a specific schedule. I think that it is very important to remember that changes can be made. In construction, this is called a change order. Once you start building the building, some things may need to be tweaked so everything fits together properly. You rework and redraw some of your plans and move on from there to make sure the final product is what you really want. I think that it is important to remember that change orders can be necessary in instruction. If you stay open minded, flexible and focused, the annual plan can be fluid throughout the school year and change with your needs.

As I move through the program, I am learning that I will have so many tools in my tool belt to really help me in the teaching process. I feel like I am adding new helpful ideas each week.

History on Display

Living in Raleigh, I sometimes forget the amazing opportunities I have right in my backyard! We have art, history, parks and so much more and so much of it is free! I have lived here my entire life and have a tendency to forget all of the options. Thanks to one of my current classes, I get the opportunity to reintroduce myself to some of these great opportunities. My most current adventure was to the North Carolina History Museum earlier this week. As a history buff and native North Carolinian, I loved this experience. They have everything from a rendering of Native American woman recreated from her actual skeleton to Dale Earnhardt's race car. They even have a picture of Paul B. Gay stadium from Lee Senior High School (my husbands high school) in the North Carolina Sports Hall of
Fame. I realized during our visit that the museum has something for everyone.

During our visit, my favorite current exhibit is concerning the old fishing boats from eastern North Carolina. This was a photography exhibit mixed with a few artifacts including an actual flat bottomed skiff donated from a fisherman's family. As a person who loves fishing and the coast of North Carolina, this was a really interesting experience. Seeing these old boats as a piece of history as well as art showed a side of North Carolina that I feel many people do not get to see. These old boats, sometimes abandoned, are not junk, they are a piece of eastern North Carolina's history and hopefully it's future.




The one downside to the museum is that most of their exhibits are very temporary which could cause issues for lesson planning around the museum. Currently, the only permanent exhibit is the sport's hall of fame. Coming soon, the museum will have a time line of North Carolina as a permanent exhibit as well, but everything else is temporary. This means that planning is key! If you know you want to expose your students to a specific exhibit that is temporary, you would need to schedule your tour carefully to ensure it is still available. I do think that it is great that past exhibits are available through their website to be used within the classroom, but that is not really the same as walking through the museum and seeing all of the pieces in person.
I am already planning my next trip to the history museum. I feel like you could walk through each exhibit numerous times and see something new each time!

What makes a great social studies lesson?

One of the classes that I am taking right now is about integrating social studies and the arts. Those of you who know me know that I LOVE SOCIAL STUDIES! If I was able to have my choice, I would love to team teach and teach social studies and language arts all day long and share the math and science with someone else. Even though I love the topics in social studies, I am learning that that is not enough. I need to create GREAT social studies lessons. It is early on in my theories course, but I am learning a lot about what is needed for an engaging lesson.
One very important thing is to understand that the diversity in your classroom will determine the various viewpoints within your lesson. Knowing and understanding the various backgrounds of your students will help you create engaging lessons that will bring together the various cultural, religious and family backgrounds and connect each student to the lesson as well as expose students to various ideas and experiences that create a true community. In a great lesson, various viewpoints and ideas are expressed so each student feels part of the lesson.
Another important thing to do in a social studies lesson is to help students feel connected to what they are learning. If you are able to take a social studies lesson and find a way to directly link your students to what is happening in their life they will have an easier time understanding and appreciating what they are learning. An example of this would be teaching students about how children lived during a specific time period. By showing students that children still played and did chores and went to school during the colonial ear will help them connect to what they are studying and hopefully help them appreciate the overall unit about that time.
Another very important part of one of these lessons is to use as many resources as possible. Social studies text books can be overwhelmingly boring. They are large, heavy and typically do not deliver information in a creative way. Just like with so many other subjects, the text book should really just be a supplemental resource intertwined with other books, dramas, art work, videos, letters, diaries and the list could go on. During this time when we have so many resources at our disposal, there is not reason not to utilize as many engaging and unique resources to help every student find something that makes them excited to learn.
This list is in no way encompasses everything that makes a great social studies lesson, but it does have some of the large ideas that can help teachers make social studies a topic that other students love as much as I do.

The North Carolina Art Museum and the power of a Docent

I just had the privilege of visiting the newly renovated and redesigned North Carolina Museum of Art and it was an experience like none other. I absolutely love museums; art museums, history museums, science museums, kids museums; I love all of them. I have been known to spend and entire long weekend in New York doing nothing but going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art four days in a row. But this visit was a new experience for me. Our MAT class went for a tour with a retired teacher and Meredith alumna. It was the coolest and most education trip to a museum that I have ever had. She was able to give us more information on each piece of art, its owner, the history of its trip to be in the museum and the many ways we could use these pieces of art to teach our students. It was a truly remarkable experience to listen to someone who knew so much more about each piece of art than the little plaque on the wall next to it. I have a true appreciation for so many of the pieces in the NCMA collection. I think that the most touching story was about the artist who created the statue Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian. The artist, Michael Richards, was killed on 9/11 in the twin towers. His statue of a Tuskegee airman from WWII being hit by air planes was commissioned by NC for the 2001 First in Flight Celebration, but Michael Richards was killed prior to the celebration beginning in October of 2001. This piece sits in the center of one of the museums open rooms with no large explanation or background story anywhere around for a visitor to simply read. We learned the story of this statue because our amazing docent shared it with us. After experiencing the power of this knowledge, I can not appreciate the art and all of those who study and share their knowledge with the public even more. I hope to be able to return to the NCMA soon and see even more of its amazing collection, but I think that without a docent, I will not be able to fully grasp the true impact of the place. I am really excited to share this experience with students one day, and hopefully the background information and interesting stories will help bring the art to life for them as well.