Child maltreatment response

Child maltreatment—whether it be through abuse or neglect, is something I am concerned with as a future educator. I know I am obligated to report abuse where I find it, but what I’m worried about is: how will I make that call?

For one thing, I understand that I must take anything a child says to me as at true. I have no real problem accepting this, although when the time comes I fear it will be an anxiety-inducing process.

But what about when the child doesn’t say anything, and it is up to me to look for the signs? What counts as neglect, versus just having parents that are in poverty? Both may result in children going hungry sometimes or not having the proper clothes. I want to make the best choices to protect children, but also to protect the integrity of families who may be facing challenges I can’t imagine. The gravity of this responsibility is not lost on me, but honestly I’m not sure how exactly to deal with it. How much can I help? How much can a poor decision on my part end up hurting a family?

Then, what about children who are abused in ways that don’t leave a mark? This whole aspect of being not only a teacher, but a caregiver in some ways, for my future class just reemphasizes for me the importance of being in touch with the students. I’ll have to attune myself to them so I can notice when things are off. 

Sociocognitive conflict response

One concept I think has a lot of application for my future elementary classroom is that of “sociocognitive conflict,” defined as interactions with age-mates that involve wrestling with contradictory viewpoints. Piaget and Vygotsky, my two favorite characters, both saw the importance of peer interaction in learning and development.

What does this mean for me as a teacher?

I need to give students opportunity to interact with each other, not relying on a routine of whole-group instruction and independent practice. I need to give students different opportunities and contexts (in the whole group, in small groups, just with a partner) to work together and sometimes just to discuss.  Considering my age group, I will probably want to include some explicit instruction for them on how to disagree respectfully, take turns speaking, and contribute to a discussion without talking over one another. Beyond building their understanding of whatever topic they are focusing on, this also gives them social skills that will be useful to them in their maturation in academic and non-academic contexts.

Another thing I must be mindful of in order to promote sociocognitive conflict and give students that learning experience is how much time I give students to be wrong. As a teacher, it will be important for me to overcome my natural instinct to immediately correct misconceptions. I should first let students rely on other students. Again, this may be something I need to explicitly teach depending on my students’ prior experiences in the classroom. I’ll need to learn for myself at what point my intervention is necessary.

Complex cognitive processes response

What seemed most crucial to me about this chapter was the role of the instructor in explicitly tying things into a bigger picture, and heading off misconceptions. This has been a theme in the last few lessons, but specifics from a cognitive perspective were given here. I was thinking about the author’s description of formal discipline, and how my study of Latin did help me, and what might be different about the way I was instructed versus the way that Greek and Latin may have been taught during the Enlightenment as well as to the author. During my study, it was always emphasized how Latin was connected linguistically with the etymologies of English words as well as those in Romance languages. It was always explicitly taught that the rules for grammar and literary devices we studied were connected to those we needed to know in English class. Because of that, I really did make those connections. I don’t think Latin was useful just as an intellectual exercise, but because of the Latin-influenced world I inhabit. On the other hand, I wonder, if the mind-as-muscle theory is totally bunk, why is it always recommended for the elderly to work on puzzles and things to prevent dementia? Is there some kind of specific content area that provides a better “intellectual workout” than others, for that population? I think that what it means is that Latin isn’t better than studying Japanese, and woodworking isn’t more stimulating than pottery, et cetera, which makes sense. But for the few kinds of things that are applicable with general transfer, what best hones those skills? The other thing that I was thinking about was, what kinds of misconceptions/examples of negative transfer have I had that I’ve just never been called out on? Like what kind of situations have I been approaching completely the wrong way because of some similar situation I remember?

Constructivism

So far out of all the theories, I think I like constructivism the best. It makes the most sense to me, and I think it combines the most important and relevant factors from each of the preceding theories.

Something I think it touches on that the other theories miss out on, although the cognitive approach touches on it, is how where exactly a student’s misunderstandings are coming from. I think constructivism offers an explanation for why peer tutoring and cooperative learning can be so powerful in a classroom, beyond the idea of creating a warm and welcoming classroom environment; students can find and correct gaps in their learning or bizarre assumptions that may have gone unchecked during the process of explaining themselves to another student.

I think aside from the social aspect of constructivism, the individual aspect gives credence to a lot of the same things as the social-cognitive model did (under the umbrella of “prior knowledge”) and challenges teachers to meet students at their level and make informal assessments all the time.

One of the things I like best about constructivism is the idea of scaffolding—how with a person more skilled than you helping you out, you can achieve things you never could on your own. We talked about scaffolding a lot in my elementary education class, and it was really amazing to experience it at work as well as think of ways to use it. One of the main focuses is giving students a taste of success with real, challenging material, and how that success will motivate them. This makes me favor constructivist theory even over social-cognitive, which was my next favorite.

Cognitive processes response

a) What are the essential skills and/or learning outcomes you want your students to know and

be able to do that relate to cognitive learning?

Cognitive skills I want my students to have (elementary-level):

·         Relate information to what they already know

·         How to organize information in a way that makes sense

·         How to visualize something in a way that helps you remember it

·         Have a variety of mnemonic techniques available to use (songs, images, keywords)

These skills will help students make more meaningful connections to the material, increasing the likelihood that they will remember what they learn. The most important one, to me, is being able to make connections to what they already know. I have noticed that elementary students can sometimes very easily memorize something or perform a task without seeing the significance of it. It is important to me to activate their background knowledge on topics, not only to draw their interest, but to deepen their understanding of material. This comes to mind especially when thinking about reading. If students are prepped to make connections and think about a topic before approaching a text, they are more likely to understand it.  What I also think is crucial is teaching kids that all these things are skills that can be learned, not just an innate process. I think that would help increase their motivation and self-efficacy, especially if we tracked progress. I’m not sure a purely cognitive view is one I want to adopt, but there are a lot of practically useful things included in the approach.

ELL/immigration response

Teaching ELL students is an increasingly important skill, as the demographics in the country change.
One of the barriers to accommodating for ELL/immigrant children is a bias against them culturally and politically from teachers and community members. Bias against immigrants and a movement toward “English-only” makes school an unwelcoming environment for many learners.

One problem teachers as a group face when dealing with culturally and linguistically diverse students is that teachers tend to be majority white, middle-class women. And unfortunately a lot of teachers don’t feel comfortable with students that have different backgrounds, or, at least, they feel most comfortable with students that are similar to them. As we talked about with gender, this can put boys at a disadvantage in school. For ELL students the implication then is kind of obvious.

Studies have shown that ELL students can do really well in a bilingual setting, but you’ll find in many states that there are actually laws saying that all instruction must be in English (looking at you, Arizona). I feel like the idea of English-only is so antiquated and jingoistic; I’m so concerned that these attitudes seem to be growing. The wave of immigration is increasing. Already in five states the majority of K-12 students are from “minority” backgrounds. If we continue to politicize the education of those students, it’s not just going to have a negative impact on their individual education; it’s going to be negative for the country as a whole. I feel like in a K-12 setting it’s necessary for teachers to be advocates of social justice. There are a lot of reasonable barriers teachers might have in providing the best education to all students, but their politics or biases shouldn’t be among those.

Behaviorism and social-cognitive response

How would you define successful mastery of your lesson objectives from a behavioral view of learning? From a social cognitive view of learning?

From a behaviorist perspective, when learning takes place, you can see a change in behavior.

So, in the classroom, this would be like, after a lesson, students perform a task that they previously could not. A pre-test given before the lesson would have students give incorrect answers, whereas a post test would have them answer correctly. This change in behavior (answering correctly instead of incorrectly) would be the evidence of learning. Or, another example, say you have a dance lesson. Before the lesson, the students would not know the steps to the foxtrot. After the lesson, having students perform the foxtrot would be evidence of their learning.

From a social-cognitive view of learning, a change in behavior may or may not take place. From a social-cognitive perspective, learning is an internal mental process that may or may not be reflected in behavior.

The social-cognitive theory is different from the behaviorist theory, because in the social-cognitive theory, you don’t need to learn everything by doing it yourself; you can learn by observation. Therefore, the learning might take place in your mind, without being reflected in your performance. This makes defining and assessing learning objectives more difficult. The focus, then, in a social-cognitive classroom, is creating an environment where students are likely to have good models and high self-efficacy.