Final Make That Serves as an Introduction

As my final project for my ED677 Connected Learning class I created a survey that I will ask my new students to take at the beginning of each school year.

“Teacher” is not yet my official occupation.  I will finish my Masters in Education in July of this year, but my wife and I are moving to Texas soon after. This move is an exciting change for both of us, but it will preclude me from doing the full semester of student teaching required to complete my secondary math certification.  I recently finished my stage 3 fieldwork placement, which consisted of spending 10 full days shadowing, assisting, and even teaching two lessons for a local math teacher.  These choices and experiences inspired my final make.

The survey I created is intended for high school students, as the math classes I was a part of were composed of 10th, 11th, and 12th graders.  I was thinking about shared purpose and equity, and I decided to further explore the question I highlighted during our “Practitioner Knowledge and Networked Inquiry” week:

How do I encourage students who have mastery of a topic to spend time helping out those who are struggling?

This is a question of motivation and engagement, which are two topics I believe I will spend the rest of my teaching career deciphering.  The goal of my survey is to get my students thinking about their classroom as a community.  I don’t want them to think that they cannot work independently, but I  want them to support each other in their learning inquiries.  That is shared purpose to me.  I want them to understand that it is okay to make mistakes and that we can learn something by making them.  I want them to not be ashamed to ask for help when they might need it, even if they are not asking me directly.  This is my definition of peer-supported learning.  Because of this, many of the survey questions deal with delineations between individual  and group achievement.

I do not wish to be the only source of knowledge in the classroom.  I prefer to be thought of as “the guide alongside” rather than “the sage upon the stage”. (Thank you, Ned Wolff, for those titles!)  Academically oriented learning will necessitate my learners figuring out how to arrive at solutions without my direct aid.  The survey questions that mention technology were brought up because I want my students to learn that it is okay to seek out knowledge elsewhere.  Their prime sources other than myself and their classmates will most likely be online ones.  When information can be retrieved from multiple sources it creates an openly-networked environment.

Students that ask questions are proving to me that they are listening to and thinking about what they are learning.  Questions will be encouraged and also highlighted as learning moments.  When these questions create a dialogue among learners it shows that their thoughts and learning are being interest-driven.   One of the survey topics I touch upon is that of questions as learning tools and gateways to intelligent discussion.  My ultimate goal will be to inspire my learners to want to know more.

As their teacher I will want all of my students to learn, succeed, and be able to supply creative solutions to problems.  Part of the value of math knowledge is being able to draw upon that knowledge as a tool for problem solving.  In this way the abstract methods that they learn for completing math exercises can be refocused towards production-centered learning.  This production-centered learning can take the form of robotics competitions, bridge-building contests, or even simply determining the costs associated with a project.  Real-life applications will be mentioned and reinforced, transforming the abstract into the concrete.

These are all lofty goals, so after creating my survey I had to ask myself, “Did I accomplish what I set out to do?”  I believe so.  My purpose for having my new learners complete the survey is to not only get a feel for their learning styles but also to encourage thinking about the other students in the classroom.  I want them to be aware that I want them all to succeed, not just those who are the easiest to teach.  Those students who already do well in class might consider helping others when they experience a sense of camaraderie or shared purpose in doing so.  I didn’t want anyone to feel judged by his or her result, so I did my best to label the 3 resulting groupings as merely different from each other (as opposed to one being better than another).  To this end I will also provide my learners with a link to the survey results, which can be found here.  Seeing how their answers compare to their classmates’ answers might inspire conversations or even reconsideration of personal attitudes.  Overall I am please with my creation, and I intended to use it as a open door to discussions with my students about the particulars of Connected Learning.

Thanks for reading,

Eric L

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