Teeth and Gums: PBS LearningMedia

: PBS LearningMedia

Content Standard F: Science in personal and social perspecitves.
Grade(s): 4-6

Objective(s): Personal Health: Individuals have a responsibility for their own health. Students should engage in personal care that include dental hygiene, cleanliness and exercise. These maintain and improve an individual's overall health.

Blog #8

Blog #8

My initial response offered by reflecting upon the question asking what the most important thing I have learned during my field work is the word passion. Passion for a career in teaching is the essential path towards being a remarkable educator, who fosters the “burning zeal” for life-long learning. I have learned by observation, there is an army of challenges a teacher encounters daily. Many of the daily tasks teachers meet I believe are skills an individual can be taught and cultivated through practice. Examples of the skills I’m thinking of would be organization, multi-tasking, collaboration, systems, and methods for best teaching application. I truly feel these are skills good teachers have or learn through time, but inhabiting passion for that which you apply yourself to comes from within. This I sense is what sets the good and the great teachers apart from one another. And passion, it cannot be learned.

As I continue to consider myself a pre-professional in education, I know that in order to achieve teaching in the remarkable, memorable ways I was once taught, I will have to make a personal commitment to myself. The commitment comes in the form of positive self-talk. My logical senses discourage my chosen path to teach because of the financial consequences teaching provides. But my “self-talk” also comes from my heart. It reminds me that I love the role of teaching and leading. The passion I have discovered by teaching inspires my “self-talk” to accept the journey the heart leads.

Blog #7

There are so many classroom rules. In fact, I think the teachers add rules throughout the day. For example, once the teacher sees a behavior or action they don’t want the students to repeatedly doing they say, “Remember! That’s a rule (what the child is doing or not doing); in our class we do not do …” Some of the rules I’ve frequently heard reiterated are to keep the chairs on all four feet, keep your hand to yourself, respect one another, be on time to your seat, self-start, stop talking when the teacher uses a cue word or hand signal, no candy in class, keep money in your pocket, no whistling in class etc.

The eternal list of rules is impressively enforced two specific reward systems. One is the “Star Chart,” the children are given wet erase, written stars on a card as the follow rules and maintain on-task (averaging 4-12 stars daily). When the students Star Chart is filled up, they get to move their dinosaur (school mascot is a raptor) from one cupboard door to another that rewards them with Free Time on Mondays. This Star Chart is allocated from grades K-6 and the product demonstrates the desired behavior from the students.  The other reward system employed by the grade classrooms are “Class Bucks” Each student has a handful of laminated green paper pretend bucks, when they are caught off- task; bucks are taken away or paid to the teacher, and when caught on-task the students are awarded bucks. Each week on “Fun Friday,” the students get to make purchases from the class store with their class bucks.

Cleary, there are copious, measurable benefits from exercising rewards systems. I have observed the students actively participating in learning objectives purely by the use of this extrinsic motivational tool. Adversely, I feel the continuous routine of rewards negatively charges the generation towards an entitled state of mind. I wonder if now-a-day kids have an innate sense to do “Good” for the “Greater Good”, rather than just for the means to the end….

 

 

Bog #6

Strategies for active engagement I have seen in the classrooms are often exemplified by abundant opportunities for group work, instructional “equitable distribution and prompting.” Even though these are foundational strategies for fostering active engagement, I am still looking for teachers to deliver models for physical movement when improving active engagement participation.

It seems as though the group work strategy is the universal default method for active engagement. They use group work during journal entry writing and sharing, while expanding insight in language art lessons of reading and sentence structure awareness. Group work is also exercised during reading buddy sessions, math groups, and lab experiments in the science lessons. The groups are pre-arranged by table seating, the students’ desks are organized in groups of 5 desks and even titled “Group 1, 2, 3 etc.” with rotating group leaders. Sometimes the table’s group leader is the speaker of the group but other times each student gets to speak and represent their individual ideas (which I would identify as “equitable distribution”). Prompting is also another powerful strategy utilized for additional cueing and measurement of the student’s individual level of comprehension.

As far as models for promoting physical movement when cultivating active learning engagement, I have yet to witness this strategy. I feel the lack of applying this method is saddening. In my opinion, I believe the kids are dying for physical movement during their school day. The students get 2 recesses daily, but the duration is a microscopic 10 minutes each (no recesses given during lunch break either). I just don’t see that as enough wiggle time to promote the commitment to increased focus for learning. What are the strategies that provide physical movement during active learning in the classrooms? Maybe, I need to ask the teachers about this method in order to gain the understanding I’m looking for…