Jane
Addams- Applicable Education
Social
acceptance and application of education in the social world is an interesting
concept. So often the social aspect of
school is overlooked or forgotten by people outside of the educational field
and sometimes even for people inside the field. School is such an important step in the lives
of all people because it requires interaction whether passive or active with
others and it applies to life outside the classroom. No one likes to waste their time so to have a
social interaction while in school, we want to be able to use it and apply it
outside of school. We need a sense of
purpose for our education and typically it is a collective purpose with peers
and classmates. I had a class two years
ago that drove me up the wall because they could not understand one another nor
did they want to take the time to learn how to interact so I took time during
the day to provide team building activities.
Within the first two weeks of taking 10 minutes daily to do social
activities, my students started interact with each other during class and our
discussion became deeper and more extended.
The class started to feel more comfortable together and so they could
deepen their education and I started to notice them talking at recess about
what happened during class or asking each other for help. They applied their social “training” into
their educational life and their everyday life.
Montessori-
Exploratory Education for Personalized Natural Education
Natural
development is such a difficult idea to institute into the classroom because of
teacher’s feeling that they need to control their classroom to maintain a
positive, safe environment and learning community. I have always felt that students should be
able to practice their social skills and learn to resolve their own problems
without much interference from me. If I
have to constantly be the referee students will never learn how to talk to one
another but if I teach them processes to solve possible issues that could come
up in the future, then they have a base for learning social cues and resolutions. I teach 6th grade and the amount
of social interaction is astounding which gives a lot of opportunity for
students to practice good habits. I like
to model good behavior socially and academically for my students and I like to have
my students understand when I think an action is good or bad but I do not
believe in a whole lot of extrinsic rewards or punishments. I know my students and my students understand
my emotions because I explain them to my students so they can begin to
understand acceptable responses to actions.
By no means am I always correct but I try to show my students that it is
okay to feel the spectrum of emotions but how frequent and intense those
emotions are in response to others needs to be reflected and analyzed for
appropriateness.
Exploratory
Education is always a wonderful concept but not an easy plan to implement. I
would love for my students to discover their potential and their natural
abilities and how they can be developed but I have a lack of experience planning
for this kind of curriculum. Just like
with free play/ adventure playgrounds with detached equipment and lack of adult
supervision as well as the Japanese preschool model, we need to trust our
students to explore and improve themselves through experience. Teachers should help guide but not direct
with absolute control. The mind needs to
flex and expand and it can only be done with a teacher allowing opportunity and
room for exploration.
Culture
and Curriculum- Reflection for Expansion Education
School is
like “a surrogate home” in the sense that a community is built among a group of
students that are different, diverse and varied. They become their own learning coalition and
bring different perspectives, background and lessons along with them to advance
the curriculum they are learning. The
curriculum students learn should be a reflection of the culture of not only the
class but of the country and an introduction to other societies around the
world. School is a chance to explore
culture in a safe zone (hopefully) where multiple voices can be heard and
considered while absorbing different ideas and synthesizing it into a student’s
own experiences in personal life.
Culture and Curriculum are like the chicken and the egg concept for education. Which do you consider first? In my opinion, they reflect one another but
it is up to the teacher and the school to make sure they are syncing the two
large subjects into one cohesive unit.
When I taught
in Utah many of my students had similar demographic stats sheets and they all
held their lack of travel as a common theme.
I felt, as a person who grew up in a very ethnically and religiously
diverse area, that it was my job to introduce my students to different
cultures, ways of thinking and new types of approaching people from other
areas. I taught Ancient Civilizations
and linked it into modern globalization and societal factors and the students
loved the discussions we held. Very
often we would have a very tangent filled tap root with many side discussions
about culture and how it related to my students, me and to others they
knew. I loved working to help link
culture into my curriculum but it made me think about how important it is for
teachers to feel the same importance for sharing culture in a safe space to
discuss and dissect how students felt and understood other cultures and people.
Sarah,
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to read about your classroom experiences because you have worked with an age-level of students quite a bit older than mine. You referenced a class of students with whom you worked that had trouble relating to one another and working cohesively as classmates until you instituted daily team-building and social skills activities. Why do you think those students struggled so much to relate to one another? Ostensibly, those students had, by and large, grown up with one another, and many of them had probably attended school together from Kindergarten through sixth grade. It seems likely, then, that while they may not all have similar personalities that they would be more proficient in interacting positively with each other.
I teach third grade, and as an elementary teacher, it is fascinating to me to read about the experiences of teachers in middle and high schools to see how the groups of children I see progress and mature as they grow up. Very often, I see that, even within the same district, there is a disconnect between the elementary and middle schools, as well as the middle and high schools. How does this disconnect impact the work teachers do toward the interest of social and cultural development of students? Though it is certainly the case in all schools or all districts, there seems to be gap, too, between the focus of education in elementary schools and the focus in middle and high schools. Elementary schools, while focused on both student social/cultural development and academics, are generally more attentive to the social development of children (likely because of their young age) than are middle and high schools. On the other hand, middle and high schools, again while focused on both academic and social development, are more attentive to strengthening the intellect of the young adults they serve than they are to social development and cultural instruction. Is this dichotomy an effective approach toward educating the "whole child?" If not, what steps need to be taken in order to facilitate an educational approach that provides for strong social, cultural, and academic development from Kindergarten through twelfth grade? In addition, what responsibility does/should the home have in supporting or supplementing the work of the school? Or, should it be the school playing the supporting role to the home in the realm of a child's social and cultural development?
Taking on a slightly different focus and moving into the ideas Maria Montessori puts forth about education, what challenges do you perceive exist to the implementation of exploration or the idea of natural education in secondary schools? Such ideas are often framed in the context of working with younger students, such as within an elementary school, and yet, there seems to be a real possibility for middle and high school students to have true choice and leadership of their own natural education with teachers acting more as facilitators. However, though students in middle and high schools are able to select the classes they wish to take, once they walk into the classroom, students are often met with a prescribed syllabus of a long list of course readings and written responses to be completed before the end of the semester or the end of the year. How could those courses be modified to further provide students the opportunity to direct their own learning, and still be held accountable to meeting the required standards?
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this week's readings. I really enjoyed thinking about education from a different perspective!
Lauren
Hi Sarah,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your post! You have some great insights here and raise a lot of important points! I thought Lauren also brought up some really good points and distinctions, so the two of you have something really cool here.
Regarding the first part of your post. I think it is so cool that you are emotionally honest with your students. That you all are allowed to have your feelings, but that you are also teaching them to stop and analyze the patterns of their emotions. What sets you off? Why do you think that is? What can you do about it? These are hugely important life skills to develop.
In regards to the question of free play and Montessori in older grades. I know the barriers are many these days--mostly, students are required to attend, teachers are required to keep control and there is a dictated curriculum. All of this makes the Montessori approach almost impossible.
That said, I do think it would be possible to fill a sixth grade room with interesting materials and create zones or stations where certain activities are allowed (reading, building, discussing, etc.). Then turn kids loose for a week. Or for two hours a day. Really give them time, so that they can't just goof their way through it. I'm just wondering if we could ever reach a spot where 99% of the kids in a class would spend those hours doing something they valued. What an opportunity for a teacher to learn about their students if we could ever create the classroom environment where that happened even some of the time!
I love what you wrote about Culture and Curriculum as the chicken and the egg and the need to sync the two. How insightful! I bet Utah was a particularly interesting place in that regard. It sounds like your students were wonderfully open to exploring their place in the world--the ideal. So comfortable in your own skin that you are open to learn about others. Both seem extremely important to me as a teacher--the comfort and the openness.
Take care!
Kyle