Stefanie Asks Questions

6 Weeks Ago Understanding and respecting consent is one of the fundamental necessities for human interaction. And yet, we have a societal tendency to undermine or ignore children's boundaries both inside and outside the classroom. Sometimes, when the child's safety is a concern, an adult must intervene. But how much do we ignore student consent in order to accomplish our goals? My interest in this area is finding out how these actions impact students' ability to learn. Moreover, how to we healthily and helpfully incorporate non-coercive practice into the classroom?  How do we balance student comfort and the learning goals? Of the three topics I've been considering, the role of consent in our lives is something I return to again and again. It seems bizarre to me that something so fundamentally expected in adulthood is so frequently ignored in our interactions with children. My mind buzzes with questions and contradictions. How do we teach our students about consent in a...

1) What are your "student bird" and "teacher bird" thoughts about assigning percentages or letter grades in the assessment of student work? What do the grades indicate? How are they arrived at? Whose purposes do they serve? What are positive and negative aspects to giving grades? to be assigned grades by an instructor? 2) What are some of the unintended side effects of grading? How do grades and marks in themselves format the social relations and learning situations in a classroom, a school, a district? 3) Could you imagine teaching math and/or science without giving grades? How could a teacher encourage learning without having an emphasis on grading? Is this the right question? Completion vs. performance assessment relatedness and connectedness perceived competence feeling of autonomy (this is literally the ABCs that we talked about in EPSE) deemphasize tests and grades acknowledge how external control through marks impacts motivati...

It often occurs me just how weird it is that western culture makes such a deliberate, harsh division between what is Natural and what is Human. Of course, we have a bunch of dead white guys to thank for this (Descartes, Hobbes and Aquinas to name a few). [Hu]man's supremacy over the natural world went more or less uncontested by the western hegemony for a significant amount of time. Placing the natural (the garden) into an intellectual space is therefore a revolutionary counter-cultural practice. Beyond all of the physiological benefits we know green spaces provide, gardens in schools represent a paradigm shift in the way we think about our world. I personally believe that this is a critical movement towards environmental responsibility that we must continue. One of the things that struck me about the reading was the number of times students listed "slowing down" as a benefit to the gardening space. The students we will teach have all grown up in a world where time is ...

Everything is really complicated when it comes to brains. It seems so intuitive that praising a good student is a good thing and that reprimanding a bad student is a necessary part of learning. But as we've learned, that's not always the case. Looking back to last week, I think that building up "practical wisdom" is a key part of developing a good teacher sense of praise in the classroom. Praise and criticism are still important for motivation and development, but they must be enacted in thoughtful and deliberate ways. As we've been discussing in our EPSE classes, there are forms of praise that enforce a fixed mindset, and forms that promote a growth mindset. To this end, we must be careful as teachers to comment on behaviours rather than people, progress rather than product; effort rather than result. These practices bolster student's developing intrinsic motivations and help them gain confidence and a sense of autonomy over their own learning. I also think t...

"Recognition is inextricably intertwined with selfhood and personal identity" "the practical active knowledge that animates teaching is something that belongs phenomenologically more closely to the whole embodied being of the person as well as to the social and physical world in which this person lives" "our actions are sedimented into habituations , routines, kinesthetic memories ... [and] are sensitive to the contigencies , novelties and expectancies of our world." I'd like to unpack these quotations with reference to the Heideggerian term Befindlichkeit  that Manen mentions and to the Greek term phronesis that he alludes to when talking about 'practical wisdom.' Central to both of these concepts is the idea of situatedness/embodiment/being-in-the-world. For Manen, and for me, this idea of temporal, spatial and individual existence is the critical piece, oft underemphasized by students, of teaching education. It reminds me of th...

At the end of this past class, I found myself with lots and lots of questions. Here are some of the big ones I've been thinking about since then: How does this model clash with the concept of Obchenie? This class came on the heels of our discussion of the interrelational nature of teaching/learning as it was understood by Vygotsky. He saw the social nature of education as a crucial aspect of the act of learning. At first glance, it seems that flipping the classroom would take away from the social nature of learning by making instruction one-sided. But after listening to Khan speak, it became clear that putting the stand and deliver model aside actually creates much more time for direct, one-on-one interaction in the learning environment. And not just between teacher and student, but between peers, a practice that is known to positively impact students of all abilities and levels. My concern with this model is that introducing new topics in an environment outside of teacher contr...

The idea of wholeheartedness in this article really speaks to me. Living in a society so caught up in effectiveness and time-management, it can be difficult to see the value of taking extra time to meet the needs of our students at the margins . Societal values of getting the most reward from the least effort run seem contrary to these extra steps. This balancing act of limited time, resources and energy is ubiquitous and eternal. We will never be able to reach every student or accomplish every goal. But, in my experience, the practice of reflection makes me better prepared not only to make these tough choices but also to intuit and predict the possible outcomes . The more I make  observations, think critically about myself and my practice, and implement changes, the better I become at observing, thinking critically and implementing change. On a more fundamental level, being wholehearted resonates with my personal values and my identity. I am the kind of person who becomes e...