Krstovic's Thoughts on Education

It’s been an exciting year for me as a novice blogger.  I can honestly say that blogging has helped me reflect on many issues in education. It is one of my educational hubs – a place where I “dump” my thoughts and free my mind . Thanks to all the people who have visited my blog, read my posts, contributed their comments, and challenged me to think above and beyond. One of the individuals who regularly visits and reads my posts is my friend and colleage, Graham Whisen, whose blog http://ideaconnect.edublogs.org is not only informative but also inspiring for all educators out there. Therefore,  I nominate Graham’s blog for the Edublog Awards in the category of the Best New Blog.

Concept Mapping/Mind Mapping for Information Organization

http://www.thesmartbean.com/magazine/after-school-enrichment/concept-mapping-for-information-organization/

(Retrieved October 4, 2010)

For my own Action Research Concept Map, please follow the link:

http://iiactionresearch.wetpaint.com/page/The+Action+Research+Process+%28Richard+Sagor%2C+2005%29

Teaching ESL has been nothing less than exciting for me in China. Every day I am putting my creative thinking skills to use. I do not have a detailed plan for each day. Now that I think back it was silly of me to even try to come up with a detailed day-by-day plan before I came here. I knew that I would have to plan each day as it comes and to rely on my creativity, students’ energy and my passion for teaching.

In a nutshell: my students have been reading the Robin Hood novel; they have been blogging about various topics using my on-line social network (www.mrkrstovic.ning.com); they have been listening to English conversations and doing practice on-line listening tests from www.myesl.net; they have been writing their own dialogues and presenting them in class; they developed a PowerPoint presentation on a major city and presented it to their peers and students from another ESL class;  they have been listening to lyrics of various English songs, and filling in the missing words from the lyrics; they sang and rehearsed the song “We are the champions” for the school’s English song competition and they won in three categories: best creativity, best costume and best whole-class performance! The students have been doing many cross words to build their vocabulary and they have been engaging in one-on-one conversation with me to practice their speaking skills.

In addition, we have been playing many team tournament games to keep the students motivated and interested in learning. Some of the games include: Simon Says, Murder Wink, This is not a…, this is a …, Seven Up, Competitive Tongue Twisters, Broken sentences, Vocabulary Memory Games and Charades. Games have been an extremely memorable part of my experience as an ESL teacher. Students love learning through play! I have tried to incorporate games every day into my lessons. Some of my favorites have been the vocabulary memory games and the competitive tongue twisters. The competitive tongue twisters force the students to pronounce correctly certain phonetic sounds, such as think and sink, vest and west, thick and sick, write and right, soap and soup, cheek and chick and many others.

What has been especially rewarding for me is the growth that I have seen in many of my students over such a short period of time. There are certain students that have come out of their shells more than others. They started to speak more and use the vocabulary that we have been practicing. The rehearsal of the song “We are the champions” brought an amazing feeling of camaraderie and safety to our classroom community. This was the climax of my teaching here at Huamei-Bond International College. Students learned an important message: “And even though we make mistakes, we are all still champions in our own ways!” “We are the champions” has become our theme song!

With one more week to go, I am already saddened by the thought that I will leave an incredibly talented and even more incredibly united group of students. They are my champions! With them I have experienced a side of teaching that I only thought existed in movies. Teaching is indeed a true act of love!

It’s Saturday evening. I am relaxing after a nice visit with my family and a few drinks over a nice meal.   I decided to start preparing lessons, or at least looking over the curriculum documents, for Level C ESL class, which I will be teaching in Guangzhou, China this summer.  This wonderful opportunity has given me the chance to immerse myself in thoughts about how am I going to teach 25 Chinese students from an upper-middle class city division.  I am looking over the curriculum from the Ontario Ministry of Education, and the first thing that strikes me is how general the expectations are. As a Science/Chemistry teacher over the last five years I have grown accustomed to detailed and specific expectations to cover, and  this is why my science colleagues and I always say that we have a crammed curriculum.  The ESL curriculum may be specific enough to ESL teachers, however, I find it general in the sense that there are no specific content expectations.  Therefore, I feel a sense of pedagogical freedom when it comes to helping my students become more successful with speaking, listening, reading and writing.

As a former ESL student myself I feel that my second language and life experiences will augment the learning experiences that I hope to create for my Chinese students.  As I beging to plan my lessons for 5-hour long classes per day for the next four weeks in July, I reflect on the following questions:

• What do I want these students to know and be able to do at the end of the four weeks?
• What impressions do I want to leave on my students and staff at Huamei International School?
• How will I transfer my professional knowledge and skills so that it will help my ESL students become better at speaking, listening, reading and writing?
• What have  I learned about English literacy so far in my five years as a Science teacher, and how can I make use of this knowledge to help me teach my students more effectively in China?
• How will I make use of the 21^st century technology to help my students learn more English?
• How will my teaching style differ from a “regular” ESL teacher and will I do the job as well? Can I do it better?

I am looking forward to learning from this new experience. I will continue to blog about what I am learning about teaching (and learning) as an ESL teacher in China for the Summer 2010.

I may even go to the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai…Hong Kong will only be about 2 hours away so I will make sure I visit it at least once.

Recently I read an article by Amanda Cooper and Ben Levin about research use in Canadian school districts (Canadian Journal of Education, 2010).  Their study reports that“though many kinds of research use are reported in Canadian districts, the districts appear to have relatively weak processes and systems for finding, sharing and using relevant research.”

This article was the basis of our schools’ PLC discussion last week (PCL = professional learning community).  For almost an hour our learning group discussed some ways that we can make research more relevant, available and appealing to our teachers. We agreed that educators have a limited direct knowledge of current research as we do not typically read research directly.  However, we understand the importance of research and believe that we are making use of it.  Our group is interested in learning more about how we make our school known for its use of relevant research in teaching, because we believe that research-based practices improve student learning and student success.

One important point that the authors of this article make is that ‘belief in teaching as a craft rather than science leads to poor grounding of research to practice.’ Only recently have we started to open the doors of our classrooms to the scrutiny of our colleagues.  As we go more public with what we do in our classrooms we will begin to understand better how our practice affects students’ learning. The science of teaching will become more apparent through analytical discourse with our colleagues, and research may be naturally weaved in our discussions about what makes certain practices more effective than others.  We will also continue to develop a common language and a shared practice, both of which appear to be lacking in teaching profession.

I will end this entry by asking you the question: “What can schools do to make research based practices more relevant, available and appealing?”

A few days ago I was driving to work with a friend of mine, Graham Whisen, and talking about teaching. Being able to share ideas and engage in purposeful professional dialogue with like-minded people has been the cornerstone of my professional development whether it happens in school, on-line or in a car on the way to work. Some of the things that we often talk about are the challenges we face as professionals who constantly strive to improve our teaching practice.

I was mentioning to Graham that I was not as satisfied with they way I am teaching my Grade 12U Chemistry as I am teaching the Grade 11U Chemistry.  One of the reasons is that I am more comfortable with the content of the Grade 11U Chemistry and this often translates into more effective teaching. The other reason (and the main topic of this blog) is that my Grade 11U students spend a lot more time “working” in class rather then passively sitting and listening to my lectures.

One of the realizations that I have come to over the last several years is that our science students need to spend more time in class practicing the new skills as oppose to sitting and listening to our “chalk and talk” lessons.  Think about music, art, drama, physical education and hospitality classes. Do music teachers stand up and play their instrument(s) for an hour while the students listen, or do the students spend majority of their class time practicing their favorite instruments? Do art teachers spend an hour demonstrating different techniques or do the students spend more time drawing, painting or sketching? What are the students doing majority of the time in gym class? What is the physical education teacher doing? I think we would all agree that majority of the time students are playing and rehearsing the skills of whatever sport, while the gym teacher may be demonstrating, coaching and supervising the players. Why should it be any different in classes like science, math or social science? Our students should also be spending majority of their class time rehearsing the newly learned skills. They should have adequate time to master one skill before learning new one.

Some of us might say: “But we have a crammed curriculum, and we have to cover a lot of content.” There has always been a race to cover the curriculum; however, I have come to another realization: effective teaching requires the knowledge of the most essential or “need-to-know” curriculum expectations.  Rather than teaching more, teach less, but teach it better!

I welcome your thoughts/comments to this blog.

Over the last two weeks I attended two mentorship training workshops at my school. Usually I find workshops boring unless they are geared towards things that I am passionate about. I guess this is true for most of us.  But the mentorship workshops were different; they were engaging, reflective and useful.

So you might ask, what was so engaging, reflective and useful about these workshops?

For one, the content of the workshop was engaging. Learning about the different stances in mentorship (consultant, collaborator and coach) through interactive role-playing added further to the engagement of the workshop. Being reminded of the effective listening skills and paraphrasing is something that I can use not only in my professional life, but also in my personal relationships.

While sitting through the two workshops and absorbing the content I could not help but to reflect on my role as a mentor, especially during the second workshop during which I re-learned that listening attentively and paraphrasing are probably the two most important skills that I an effective mentor needs to acquire (over time). I also reflected on the various roles that I play as a mentor. I realized that my consulting role dominates over the other two stances: collaborating and coaching. Furthermore, I often fail to paraphrase, re-state the issues or question the values, beliefs or goals of my mentee when it comes to students’ learning.

Finally, the workshop were useful! After the first workshop our mentees observed us in the classroom. We had a post-observation conversation in which I was able to immediately apply what I learned from the first workshop. I was consciously placing myself in the role of a coach by questioning my mentee instead of jumping into the conuslting stance . After the second workshop, I had the opportunity to observe my mentee in two of his classes, and again, I applied what I learned about effective listening and paraphrasing.

To summarise: the training that I received at the two mentorship workshops were refreshing as I was able to see immediately the relevance of the various skills to different mentor-mentee contexts.  Most importantly, all the mentors applied the skills that same day which further consolidated the learning experience.

More professional training should be done using this same model.

Image Credits:

http://inspirationoflyric.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/theme_mentoring.jpg

Last week I analyzed my weekly lesson plans from the Grade 9 Applied Science and week by week I added up the amount of time that I spent on each major category of action.

The major categories of action in my Grade 9 Applied Science consisted of the following:

• Community circle/Think-Pair-Share
• Place mats and Graffiti
• Paired-Learning Investigations
• Reflection Journaling
• Demo/Didactic Lessons
• Individual Student Work Time

As part of the Teacher Learning and Leadership Program (TLLP) project I had to further analyze my data. To aid my analysis I developed “Time Use Graphs” showing the amount of time that students were engaged with each major category of action.

This was a great exercise that offered a lot of insight into what I actually did with these students over the course of 17 weeks.  In order for teachers to do this exercise correctly it is absolutely necessary that teachers keep an accurate yet brief record of what they did each day in their classes along with an estimated amount of time that students spent on various actions.

Here are some interesting results from my SNC1PO class:

• students spent 54% of the time with various “intelligent” instructional tactics and strategies (community circle/TPS, place-mats/graffiti and paired-learning investigations)

• Only 13% of the time was spent in direct instruction/demo lessons, which suggests that my teaching was more student-centred than teacher-centred.

• About 26% of the time students worked with a partner on various inquiry bases activities

• About 15 – 20 % of the allocated course time was lost due to the school schedule, announcements, interruptions, student lates, snow days and buy-out-events.

Please feel free to comment on this exercise. The next step in the analysis is to look at what changes occurred in students’ performance in priority achievement targets and to compare that to the actual time that students spent with various “intelligent” instructional tactics and strategies.

Over the last several years I have been using cooperative learning strategies to help my students achieve success with the science curriculum. I introduced “Tutorial Groups” strategy  in my senior chemistry classes. TGs are heterogeneous groups composed of four students of mixed genders and academic abilities that work together on various activities.  Even though I spent a lot of time thinking about how to create that “perfect” cooperative learning environment, I still felt that the spirit of community was missing in my classes.

Not too long ago I was inspired to try out a new strategy after talking with Dr. Barrie Bennett. Dr. Bennett is a big fan of the community circle!  Jeanne Gibbs wrote about the community circle in her book “Reaching All by Creating Tribes Learning Communities.” I decided that I would try the community circle with my Grade 9 Applied Science class. After one semester of regular community circle exercises the results were impressive! Twelve out of the eighteen students said that their favourite part of the Grade 9 Science was the community circle. One at-risk boy, who was repeating the Grade 9 Science course, said: “It makes my heart feel good every time we get in the community circle!”

I finally learned that the special spirit of community does not just happen by having my students work in their small cooperative learning groups. To create the feeling of community I needed to create the feeling of inclusiveness. I also needed to teach the Grade 9 Applied students to listen to each other, paraphrase each other’s responses and respect each other’s differences. All of this was necessary for my students to learn to cooperate with each other. Jean Gibbs suggests that the community circle begins by practicing the set of positive Tribes agreements:

• Attentive listening
• Appreciation/no put-downs
• Right to pass/Participate
• Mutual respect

It is absolutely essential that students are taught collaborative social skills through inclusion strategies.

“People are not ready to work together on curricula unless inclusion and trust have been developed within their learning groups (Gibbs, J).”

One of my favourite inclusion strategies is the Name Game. It’s very simple. Students say their names and also repeat the names of all of their peers. It’s also a great memory game. It keeps students thinking about everyone’s names as we play the Name Game.

Recently I learned about another great inclusion strategy called Bumper Sicker. It starts by giving the students a long strip of paper and a marker with which to create a bumper sticker that he/she would enjoy displaying on his or her car/bicycle. Each student would share their bumper sticker with the community.

Am I Napoleon? is another great inclusion activity. Each member of the community is given an index card, a pin and a pencil. They each write the name of their famous person on the index card and pin the card onto the back of anther student, without letting that student know the name on the card. The objective of the game is for the students to mingle and ask “yes” or “no” questions until everyone has identified his or her famous name.

Another great inclusion activity that I tried with my students is the Goal Setting. I ask the students to think of their goals, then turn to their partner and share their goals. After the students have had the chance to share their goals with one other person, I ask them to share it with everyone in the community circle. Students who do not want to share have the right to pass.

I am also a big fan of “snowballing” in the community circle. When I taught the Space Unit, I asked my students to generate at least three questions that they had about Space. They wrote their questions on a piece of paper. When everyone was ready, we “snowballed” the questions and tossed them in the centre of the community circle. Then, students randomly picked up someone else’s piece of paper, and first with a partner they read the questions before turning to the whole group to share the three Space questions. I answered some of the questions, while leaving others unanswered.

Every Monday I would get the students in the community circle. On Mondays I would ask the students to share with the group something they did on the weekend. Then I would ask them an academic question to see if they can remember what they learned last week. I would use the Think/Pair/Share tactic first, then we would share the information with the whole group.

Sometimes I would ask “question-of-the-day”. For example: “I feel happy when…, I feel sad when…or My favourite T.V. show is….” Students would respond, and those who wish to pass, would have the right to pass.

I ended my last SNC1PO class with the community circle ( Are you surprised?). For the final strategy I played the Strengths Game. I instructed the students to think of a strength or something they admired or liked about three of their peers.  They would look at their peers and tell them something nice. The peer receiving the complement would say “Thank you.” One boy broke the ice by deciding that he would tell something nice about everyone in the class.  Soon after that everyone in the community had something nice to say. ” I really like how you help others.” ” Jenny (not her real name) always dresses nicely.” “David (not his real name) is a great soccer player and he gets good marks in Science.”  I had the last turn, and like the boy who started the game, I spoke about everyone in the class praising their individual strengths.

I learned that the community circle was strongly influenced by my personal style. The more engaging I was with my students the more engaged they were with each other and with me. I can honestly say that the Grade 9 Applied class was one of my best teaching experiences!

I read somewhere that 90% of what is taught in traditional ways is forgotten in 90 days. Whether this is true or not, I am convinced that student-centred teaching using cooperative learning tactics and strategies such as the community circle is the way to go if we want to teach students how to learn, collaborate, communicate and contribute positively to our society.