Introduction
DEMOGRAPHICS
I currently teach Marine Biology and Algebra 2 at a small, private, college preparatory high school in Encinitas, California—a community of San Diego—that serves two hundred students. Ninety percent of my students are members of either middle or upper class families with ten percent of my students living at or below the poverty line. Tuition is currently $23,000 per year. Roughly twenty percent of our students receive some form of academic or financial scholarship. The majority of our students are caucasian with approximately twenty percent being Asian American or Asian, ten percent being Latino, and ten percent being black or African American. Roughly fifteen percent of my students qualify for an individualized education program (I.E.P.), half of whom fall somewhere on the autism spectrum. Eighty-five percent of our teachers are caucasian and fifteen percent are Latino. Science and math classes at our school are capped at sixteen students.
CLASSROOM PHILOSOPHY
Our school supports relationship-driven education and champions students demonstrating compassion, perseverance, accountability, resourcefulness, intellectual curiosity, and self-advocacy. Twice a year, our teachers and students leave campus for one week to engage in expeditionary learning during which time we volunteer in the community, interact with experts in the field, engage in school exchanges, and explore different cultures and customs. Additionally, our school has a strong international program that brings students from all over the world to our campus, often living with school families for a year or more.
In my classroom formative assessments support critical analysis while I use Socratic dialogue to facilitate the two-way direction of knowledge (i.e. a non-didactical approach). While Socratic dialogue can engender deeper learning, it also relies heavily upon a highly engaged teacher who can accurately assess a student’s rationale and relay meaningful questions to the student so as to bring up new notions, conflict, and eventually resolution. However, my experience with Socratic dialogue has led me to agree with Pekarsky (1994) who contends that “only some individuals will be willing to enter into dialogue with the Socratic teacher and of these, only some (and these only under certain circumstances) will be prepared to be guided by Socratic questioning to the recognition that something is seriously out of order with their fundamental beliefs; and of the latter, only some will sustain this recognition and use it in intellectually productive ways once they have left the conversational or classroom environment in which this insight first dawned” (p. 132). Therefore, my growth areas include expanding my course curricula to better address the needs of diverse learners and scaffolding opportunities for my students to work collaboratively and independently on projects that prioritize Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, & Math (S.T.E.A.M.) to communicate meaning, reflect upon hierarchies of importance, understand the application of course curricula, and extend learning beyond the confines of the classroom.
WHAT DRIVES MY TEACHING
A huge draw towards teaching is the idea of play—the purest form of exploration. Some of the most wonderful dimensions of teaching are the opportunities to nurture growth, self-advocacy, a sense of ‘agency’ (MacLeod, 1987) and efficacy, teamwork and a love of learning. According to Elkind (2008), “as adults have increasingly thwarted self-initiated play and games, we have lost important markers of the stages in a child’s development... we run the risk of pushing them into certain activities before they are ready, or stunting the development of important intellectual, social, or emotional skills” (p. 3). As teachers, we must strive to co-create learning environments that fill our students with a sense of wonder. Meditating on the value of process through play has helped me identify my 'omoi' (Inoue, 2012): my set of ethics that guide my professional work. I want to develop project-based learning opportunities infused with formative assessments so my students can experience a deeper learning arc and a more critical connection to content. My 'omoi' further informs me that I want to champion process as much as product, growth through feedback and creativity through engineering projects that cater to a broad range of learners. I hope to support my students as they modify their initial ideas, enrich their understanding of mathematical and scientific concepts, and value their interdisciplinary and global significance. In an effort to demonstrate greater mindfulness in my own practice, I want to garner methodological and ‘epistemological flexibility’ (Inoue, 2015) as an educator.
NEEDS ASSESSMENT
The needs assessments for this curriculum research project are drawn from various Likert-scale surveys, student interviews, and mixed methods assessments that I collected over the 2015-2016 academic year. The questions and conversations constellate around identifying how my classroom of diverse learners responds to various Universal Design for Learning (U.D.L.) core concepts and where my unconscious biases have hindered learning and growth. The observations that follow indicate that my students express a need for the promotion of U.D.L. using representation, action & expression, and engagement.
To this end, my first line of inquiry was to determine if students valued the process of revising work via formative assessments. Results from a survey of this topic are displayed immediately below. This survey was administered to thirty-eight students ranging from ninth grade through twelfth grade. I chose to collect data across different classes since my classes are capped at sixteen students.
Questions 1-4; N = 38
DEMOGRAPHICS
I currently teach Marine Biology and Algebra 2 at a small, private, college preparatory high school in Encinitas, California—a community of San Diego—that serves two hundred students. Ninety percent of my students are members of either middle or upper class families with ten percent of my students living at or below the poverty line. Tuition is currently $23,000 per year. Roughly twenty percent of our students receive some form of academic or financial scholarship. The majority of our students are caucasian with approximately twenty percent being Asian American or Asian, ten percent being Latino, and ten percent being black or African American. Roughly fifteen percent of my students qualify for an individualized education program (I.E.P.), half of whom fall somewhere on the autism spectrum. Eighty-five percent of our teachers are caucasian and fifteen percent are Latino. Science and math classes at our school are capped at sixteen students.
CLASSROOM PHILOSOPHY
Our school supports relationship-driven education and champions students demonstrating compassion, perseverance, accountability, resourcefulness, intellectual curiosity, and self-advocacy. Twice a year, our teachers and students leave campus for one week to engage in expeditionary learning during which time we volunteer in the community, interact with experts in the field, engage in school exchanges, and explore different cultures and customs. Additionally, our school has a strong international program that brings students from all over the world to our campus, often living with school families for a year or more.
In my classroom formative assessments support critical analysis while I use Socratic dialogue to facilitate the two-way direction of knowledge (i.e. a non-didactical approach). While Socratic dialogue can engender deeper learning, it also relies heavily upon a highly engaged teacher who can accurately assess a student’s rationale and relay meaningful questions to the student so as to bring up new notions, conflict, and eventually resolution. However, my experience with Socratic dialogue has led me to agree with Pekarsky (1994) who contends that “only some individuals will be willing to enter into dialogue with the Socratic teacher and of these, only some (and these only under certain circumstances) will be prepared to be guided by Socratic questioning to the recognition that something is seriously out of order with their fundamental beliefs; and of the latter, only some will sustain this recognition and use it in intellectually productive ways once they have left the conversational or classroom environment in which this insight first dawned” (p. 132). Therefore, my growth areas include expanding my course curricula to better address the needs of diverse learners and scaffolding opportunities for my students to work collaboratively and independently on projects that prioritize Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, & Math (S.T.E.A.M.) to communicate meaning, reflect upon hierarchies of importance, understand the application of course curricula, and extend learning beyond the confines of the classroom.
WHAT DRIVES MY TEACHING
A huge draw towards teaching is the idea of play—the purest form of exploration. Some of the most wonderful dimensions of teaching are the opportunities to nurture growth, self-advocacy, a sense of ‘agency’ (MacLeod, 1987) and efficacy, teamwork and a love of learning. According to Elkind (2008), “as adults have increasingly thwarted self-initiated play and games, we have lost important markers of the stages in a child’s development... we run the risk of pushing them into certain activities before they are ready, or stunting the development of important intellectual, social, or emotional skills” (p. 3). As teachers, we must strive to co-create learning environments that fill our students with a sense of wonder. Meditating on the value of process through play has helped me identify my 'omoi' (Inoue, 2012): my set of ethics that guide my professional work. I want to develop project-based learning opportunities infused with formative assessments so my students can experience a deeper learning arc and a more critical connection to content. My 'omoi' further informs me that I want to champion process as much as product, growth through feedback and creativity through engineering projects that cater to a broad range of learners. I hope to support my students as they modify their initial ideas, enrich their understanding of mathematical and scientific concepts, and value their interdisciplinary and global significance. In an effort to demonstrate greater mindfulness in my own practice, I want to garner methodological and ‘epistemological flexibility’ (Inoue, 2015) as an educator.
NEEDS ASSESSMENT
The needs assessments for this curriculum research project are drawn from various Likert-scale surveys, student interviews, and mixed methods assessments that I collected over the 2015-2016 academic year. The questions and conversations constellate around identifying how my classroom of diverse learners responds to various Universal Design for Learning (U.D.L.) core concepts and where my unconscious biases have hindered learning and growth. The observations that follow indicate that my students express a need for the promotion of U.D.L. using representation, action & expression, and engagement.
To this end, my first line of inquiry was to determine if students valued the process of revising work via formative assessments. Results from a survey of this topic are displayed immediately below. This survey was administered to thirty-eight students ranging from ninth grade through twelfth grade. I chose to collect data across different classes since my classes are capped at sixteen students.
Questions 1-4; N = 38
87% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that revising work increases their understanding of content. 50% either agreed or strongly agreed that revision to work teaches them about their thought process with 37% of students reporting neutrally. Less than 11% refuted exerting great effort into revisions and over 75% agreed or strongly agreed that their class grade accurately reflects their effort in revising formative assessments. Tentatively speaking, my students seem to be reporting that formative assessments are helping them understand content. Unfortunately, the reliability of this questionnaire cannot be determined as Cronbach’s alpha cannot be employed across dissimilar questions (Inoue, 2015).
The data, although lacking external validity due to respondents being in small private school classrooms, suggests that implementing formative assessments seems to have increased student comprehension. Students report that they have put ‘great effort’ into revising formative assessments and that their overall grade in the course positively correlates with their effort on formative assessments. Analysis further suggests a weak correlation between revisions and metacognition.
Qualitative analysis of student feedback triangulated from interviews, focus groups, and field notes suggests that data in high school often feels “pre-packaged,” that students are eager to collect and interpret data they can recognize as meaningful, and that data garners further meaning when it is disseminated to a larger community via student work. During the interviews and focus group discussions, I was able to codify seven general sentiments:
Furthermore, in the midst of a lesson plan involving a model-eliciting activity (M.E.A.) I administered two anonymous questionnaires, a non-punitive student self-evaluation, pre-model-eliciting activity assessments, and five one-on-one interviews that reveal five themes (See Appendix A for raw data):
A corollary to the interview above includes the letter I invited my students to write to me at the beginning of the school year in which I discovered that a surprisingly high percentage of my students expressed an interest in hands-on learning and a disdain for rote learning. This was further supported by a student inventory survey (See Appendix B) administered in the third quarter of the 2015-2016 school year in which the following themes emerged:
See > Do > Hear: 6
Hear > Do > See: 0
Hear > See > Do: 3
Do > See > Hear: 7
Do > Hear > See: 4
2. Students’ favorite and least favorite subjects in elementary and high school are widely varied. However, 73% of students contend that who they have as their teacher is more important than the subject in deciding their favorite class.
3. Much to my surprise, twice as many students prefer sitting at the front of the classroom as compared to in the back of the classroom.
The curriculum package that follows is intended to promote student engagement in the classroom. The proposed curriculum package embraces the tenets of Universal Design for Learning (U.D.L.) and Social Constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978) by collecting and analyzing raw data, revising iterative work, presenting projects to the community for external validation, incorporating formal critiques, and connecting to students’ personal interests. It seems to me that the nexus of my students’ needs, my professional goals, and our school’s core values[1] is project-based learning and the engineering design process as guided by the universal design for learning framework.
RESEARCH QUESTION
What are the effects of the universal design for learning tenets (i.e. representation, action & expression, and engagement) on members of a high school Algebra II class?
SUB-QUESTIONS
1. How does the introduction of an engineering design process lesson designed with diverse learners in mind affect their engagement in the classroom?
2. What are the effects of collecting and interpreting real data on members of an Algebra II classroom?
3. What are the effects on students’ perceptions of meaning when lesson plans incorporate formal critiques, multiple forms of expression, and connections to students’ personal interests?
References
Elkind, D. (2008, March 1). Can We Play? Retrieved May 29, 2016, from
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/can_we_play
Inoue, N. (2015). Beyond actions: Psychology of action research for mindful educational
improvement. Educational Psychology.
Inoue, N. (2012). Mirrors of the mind: Introduction to Mindful Ways of Thinking
Education. New York, New York: Peter Lang.
MacLeod, J. (1987). Ain’t no making it. Leveled Aspirations in a Low Income
Neighborhood. Westview Press: Colorado.
Pekarsky, D. (1994). Socratic Teaching: A critical assessment. Journal of Moral
Education, 23(2), 119-134. doi:10.1080/0305724940230202
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological
processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[1] compassion, perseverance, accountability, resourcefulness, intellectual curiosity, and self-advocacy
The data, although lacking external validity due to respondents being in small private school classrooms, suggests that implementing formative assessments seems to have increased student comprehension. Students report that they have put ‘great effort’ into revising formative assessments and that their overall grade in the course positively correlates with their effort on formative assessments. Analysis further suggests a weak correlation between revisions and metacognition.
Qualitative analysis of student feedback triangulated from interviews, focus groups, and field notes suggests that data in high school often feels “pre-packaged,” that students are eager to collect and interpret data they can recognize as meaningful, and that data garners further meaning when it is disseminated to a larger community via student work. During the interviews and focus group discussions, I was able to codify seven general sentiments:
- My students’ work in previous high school classes has rarely felt relatable to work in the ‘outside world.’
- Interpreting fabricated or ‘massaged’ data has rarely inspired my students.
- Analyzing raw data may prove difficult for members of the class especially in light of the possibility that the data may be inconclusive or ambiguous.
- There is anticipation amongst my students that interpreting raw data will be a meaningful and useful experience.
- Actively collecting the data later interpreted in class may contribute to further meaning-making as opposed to simply interpreting that data in class.
- Students think that knowledge constructed as a class should be disseminated to the larger community.
- Data that is collected locally may inspire students to draw connections between its local and global meaning.
Furthermore, in the midst of a lesson plan involving a model-eliciting activity (M.E.A.) I administered two anonymous questionnaires, a non-punitive student self-evaluation, pre-model-eliciting activity assessments, and five one-on-one interviews that reveal five themes (See Appendix A for raw data):
- My students think the open-ended nature of model-eliciting activities will encourage creativity and artistry.
- Members of the class enjoy interpreting real data in order to construct meaning and draw their own conclusions.
- Often, the open-ended nature of my directions tends to engender either increased student participation or heightens stress for different learners.
- Co-developing a learning module with the students may be beneficial to student learning.
- Students express a desire for more features and time to engage in peer-review and brainstorming.
A corollary to the interview above includes the letter I invited my students to write to me at the beginning of the school year in which I discovered that a surprisingly high percentage of my students expressed an interest in hands-on learning and a disdain for rote learning. This was further supported by a student inventory survey (See Appendix B) administered in the third quarter of the 2015-2016 school year in which the following themes emerged:
- There seem to be an equal number of learners who gravitate towards visual and tactile learning. The particular hierarchies vis-à-vis learning style are as follows:
See > Do > Hear: 6
Hear > Do > See: 0
Hear > See > Do: 3
Do > See > Hear: 7
Do > Hear > See: 4
2. Students’ favorite and least favorite subjects in elementary and high school are widely varied. However, 73% of students contend that who they have as their teacher is more important than the subject in deciding their favorite class.
3. Much to my surprise, twice as many students prefer sitting at the front of the classroom as compared to in the back of the classroom.
The curriculum package that follows is intended to promote student engagement in the classroom. The proposed curriculum package embraces the tenets of Universal Design for Learning (U.D.L.) and Social Constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978) by collecting and analyzing raw data, revising iterative work, presenting projects to the community for external validation, incorporating formal critiques, and connecting to students’ personal interests. It seems to me that the nexus of my students’ needs, my professional goals, and our school’s core values[1] is project-based learning and the engineering design process as guided by the universal design for learning framework.
RESEARCH QUESTION
What are the effects of the universal design for learning tenets (i.e. representation, action & expression, and engagement) on members of a high school Algebra II class?
SUB-QUESTIONS
1. How does the introduction of an engineering design process lesson designed with diverse learners in mind affect their engagement in the classroom?
2. What are the effects of collecting and interpreting real data on members of an Algebra II classroom?
3. What are the effects on students’ perceptions of meaning when lesson plans incorporate formal critiques, multiple forms of expression, and connections to students’ personal interests?
References
Elkind, D. (2008, March 1). Can We Play? Retrieved May 29, 2016, from
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/can_we_play
Inoue, N. (2015). Beyond actions: Psychology of action research for mindful educational
improvement. Educational Psychology.
Inoue, N. (2012). Mirrors of the mind: Introduction to Mindful Ways of Thinking
Education. New York, New York: Peter Lang.
MacLeod, J. (1987). Ain’t no making it. Leveled Aspirations in a Low Income
Neighborhood. Westview Press: Colorado.
Pekarsky, D. (1994). Socratic Teaching: A critical assessment. Journal of Moral
Education, 23(2), 119-134. doi:10.1080/0305724940230202
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological
processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[1] compassion, perseverance, accountability, resourcefulness, intellectual curiosity, and self-advocacy