CRAFT and Rubrics: Strong chapter 6

Strong argued that the way many writing assignments are assigned today in schools is as busywork, and that over time writing assignments are making students hate writing.  Strong also argued that the way writing assignments were written, as well as the stress put on multiple choice assessments, functioned to "construct thinking, not expand it." (95)  When I was in high school, I remember how almost all of my assessments for one history teacher were multiple choice assessments and short answer questions. When there was a writing assignment, it seemed to be all about regurgitating what the teacher wanted to hear. The point of class was to memorize names and dates, but no stress was put on how to synthesize or evaluate the significance of the names and dates.

Another history teacher of mine was quite the opposite, and instead relied on many different projects as well as writing assignments where we could choose the topic, as long as it was related to a certain era or theme in our unit. I strongly feel as though the aim of writing assignments and history or in any discipline should be to expand thinking rather than construct it.  The beauty of writing assignments is that students can come to conclusions about things themselves rather than being told what to think.
Another issue raised by Strong is how many writing assignments lack a "context" for students to think about.  The RAFT model of writing assignments (role, audience, format, topic) can be greatly improved by adding a contextual part to the equation.  This will eliminate a lot of guess work for students and answer the question of "Why am I doing this?"
Strong also suggests that teachers provide students with a rubric for their writing assignments.  Rather than having students stress about whether or not they are "doing this right,"  they will instead be focusing more on the content of their paper.  Additionally, students should be taught how to research.  This reminded me of the idea of teaching students to symbolically read.  Students know how to google, but they don't necessarily know how to research.  After skirting by through high school without being taught research skills, they go to college and get in trouble for plagiarizing wikipedia. I think that by teaching students how to research and by telling them exactly what we are looking for and how we are grading them for writing assignments, students will gain extra knowledge not only on the topic of the assignment, but also on how to research and think critically.  These are skills that can carry across disciplines and into the world.

Scavenger Hunt

 

8) There is a post office in town on Dexter Street.

10) There used to be a movie theater in town called the Belleview theater, but it closed down some time ago.

12) There are some parks.  Jenks Park and Cogswell Tower is probably the biggest and most well known park in Central Falls, but there are also some smaller ones scattered in the city.

14) The Central Falls News is the name of the local newspaper.

15) I found the monument to the Saylesville Massacre. The monument was erected in 2010 on Labor Day by the Rhode Island Labor History Society and Working Rhode Island to commemorate "those who were injured, wounded or gave their lives for the American Working Class during the General Textile Strike" in 1934.  It was difficult to find because of the snow and I had to walk through very deep snow to get to it, but I'm glad I found it.  It made me think about how rich Central Falls history is despite its small size, and more importantly, it made me think about the face of the Central Falls population then and now.  It has traditionally been a working class city, and to think that non-unionized laborers were fired upon by the national guard for striking is an important lesson to teach about and learn from.  Nearby this monument are bullet holes from the massacre on gravestones.

18) 82% of Central Falls residents are Catholic.  10% are mainstream Protestants and 8% are "other" according to citydata.com.  From its history as a French city and its current Hispanic demographics, it is not surprising that driving around I saw Catholic cathedrals with Spanish signs in front. Interestingly, I also saw a Mormon Church.  

 

This is the LDS Church

21) Lorenzo De Nevers was a prominent painter who painted presidents like FDR and Eisenhower, as well as many other important figures in the world.  He was born in Canada but lived in Central Falls most of his life. 

24)Max Surkont, Jim Siwi, Charley Bassett and Roland Hemond were professional baseball players from Central Falls. 

26) Caroline Cogswell built Cogswell Tower in 1904.

29) In the cemetery on Lonsdale ave, you can see bullet holes in headstones from when the National Guard fired on textile strikers in what was called the Saylesville Massacre. There is a memorial with benches and a plaque nearby some of the damaged stones.  A little tricky to find in the snow, but very worthwhile to see up close.

30)

I found a few really beautiful old homes to show the former prosperity of Central Falls.  Some were more well maintained than others.  

From this scavenger hunt I learned that Central Falls is more than a tiny city with a bad reputation.  It has a rich history that people don't talk about, and I was so surprised to see all of the life and evidence of its glory days.  I think as a teacher it is important to capitalize on its legacy as a working class city, and to talk about how important the working class is, especially when you think about the impact of strikes and labor reforms.  Especially as from the perspective of a history teacher, I think that it is so important to know about the community you are teaching in to bring to the forefront of your lessons that important things happened just outside the classroom door. I think that knowing about your classroom's community benefits the teacher as well as the student.  

UbD Chapter 1, Module A and Module F

This reading was about the thinking behind "backwards" curricular design and essential questions.  Backwards design made a lot of sense to me while I was reading it, because it suggests that the major questions, objectives, goals or standards should be presented at the beginning of a lesson, and that instruction should work backwards from there.  It made sense to me because I thought it was an explicit way of helping students guide students in their studies and guide teachers in their teaching.
I think that backwards design would be very useful in teaching history by projecting the end before discussing the means to illustrate the role of causation. While it seems obvious, backwards design came about as an alternative to teaching straight from the text in a linear fashion.  The textbook is supposed to be a resource, and not a syllabus (page 9).  Teaching in a linear way does not help students understand broader concepts and be able to answer essential questions, but rather it functions as as means of knowledge acquisition.  I do feel that there is a difference between acquisition and understanding.  If a student is able to recite the dates of the various events leading up the the American Revolution such as the Tea Act, the Stamp Act, the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre, the student clearly acquired a lot of knowledge on the subject.  But can the student answer the essential question "Why did the colonists want Independence from Britain?" To be able to answer this question requires understanding of broader concepts, and backwards design would argue that understanding best comes from a circular form of teaching.  Start with a goal, work towards the goal, and reach the goal.

With backwards design and understanding by design comes this idea of essential questions.  These are questions designed to do more than just elicit a quick answer from the student, but to be able to keep important questions alive and make meaning.  Essential questions are meant to reinforce the broader concepts and "big ideas" of the content.  In a way, essential questions are like symbolic reading while basic questions are like phonics.  As discussed in the article by Wilhelm, students need to be taught to read on a symbolic level after they learn to read phonically. This will help students be able to see broader contexts and meanings outside of the way that words sound, and be able to interpret text.  Like symbolic reading, essential questions take the bare content and allow students to be able to think critically about deeper meanings.
I remember when I was in high school I was taught in a backwards-design way with essential questions how to symbolically read.  My 10th grade English teacher wrote "words have meaning" on the board, and we all just rolled our eyes and said "we know."  My teacher went on to say that we were all taught that words have definitions, and that the entire point of her class was to teach us that words have meaning.  After our main goal was defined (that we will be able to understand that words have meaning), she handed out paper back versions of "The Scarlet Letter."  We spent the next 3 days going over the first paragraph through class discussions, exercises and lectures.  This is stage 2 in backwards design, where our teacher was collecting the evidence needed to see if we were capable of reading the deeper meaning in the words.  I remember her saying "the rose bush is more than a rose bush!" After the class was able to demonstrate to her that we understood the symbolism, and she was confident we could read the symbolism behind the words, we were assigned to read the rest of the book.  Stage 3 involved our teacher holding class discussions and other various learning events (like having a girl in class wear a sign that said "slut" in front of the class to talk about what it was like for Hester to have to wear the A) as we were reading the book, and she did this to guide us in our symbolic reading and help us master the skills.  I never knew at the time that this was a teaching style called "backwards design," but looking back it definitely was. Our final paper assignment for that year was to answer the question "How do words have meaning?" I know it was an effective teaching strategy because I can remember that entire unit so clearly, and it has been 10 years since I took that class.

Daniel's and Zemelman Chapters 1 & 2

Reading chapter 1 of "Subjects Matter" brought back a lot of memories of high-school classes when the fictional "Mr. C" felt as though he was "pulling teeth"when teaching directly from the textbook.  Students really don't retain information they read in textbooks because of a variety of reasons.  For one thing, students can rarely apply the information in the textbooks to their own lives and experiences.  This makes it difficult for students to be able to apply the information in different ways and different perspectives, which can inhibit comprehension.  Textbook reading in this sense is more likened to memorization of the text rather than comprehension.  It is no wonder, then, that students test poorly on content found only in their assigned textbook.  Another problem with the use of textbooks in schools is that the content in the texts oftentimes do not correspond with students' other courses and texts.  Once the bell rings, biology class is over and forgotten about and a new subject starts.
In light of the obvious problems associated with the ways that textbooks are used now,  the author makes a few suggestions as to how to better engage students with course readings.  Some examples include giving students a little freedom by allowing them to choose a book to read.  Another is to assign books that are actually read by adults today and are relevant with the student's lives and or current events.  One more strategy to enhance student engagement and comprehension of course material is to coordinate course readings and units with other disciplines.  For example, the "Fast Food" project cited in the text used a course book relevant to current events and students' lives (Fast Food Nation), allowed students some personal freedom (by supplementing course readings with findings on the PETA website, science magazines, etc.), and took an interdisciplinary approach (with the students learning about diseases and nutrition in science class, and critical reading and writing in English). My high school in Worcester, MA, had a similar approach one year when we had to build model bridges for our engineering class by using different formulas about angles and tension in math, learning about different building materials and their composition in science, learning about the history of different bridge construction projects in history, and writing a formal report in English.  It really allowed students to make broader connections with subjects and texts by seeing where subjects overlap and how they are relevant to one another.
The problem exists in curriculum, where many times teachers are limited to what they can teach and what texts to use.  The author suggests holistic approaches as mentioned above to be supplementary to the classic textbook style teaching. Additionally, try to connect textbook readings to things students may find more interesting.
Chapter two outlined the cognitive elements to reading and decoding text using examples.  To help students understand a text, a teacher must first recognize that text is not a message, but rather building blocks that need to be decoded and built upon a student's prior knowledge.  A student must have a schema on which to build new knowledge found in texts, otherwise they will not understand what they are reading.  One way to help students is to have pre-reading activities that include defining key terms and building up a little bit of background information before having students read a text. Additionally, by helping students develop some reading skills of their own, such as visualizing, hypothesizing, and evaluating text, students will be able to better digest and comprehend the information within a text.