We invite you to...
Develop both the intellectual framework and a set of practical tools that you can use in your residency and later as a student-teacher and beyond. We will invite you to use an online tool, NowComment, where you explore, annotate, and discuss an array of selected texts on multiliteracies. In this playlist, we ask that you:
- EXPLORE; Use Pat Carini's prompts in the four categories of her "Description of a Child," to describe a potential student in your discipline in ways that affirm their strengths as multimodal learners. Share this with other STEM teachers as a Field Note on NowComment.
- LEARN: Annotate, analyze, and discuss texts, images, and videos that we have selected to help you expand your knowledge of the role that multiliteracies play in bridging between what your students know and can do and what they will need to know and be able to do to be successful in your discipline.
- APPLY: Playtest examples of activities for learning in your discipline. Annotate these activities on NowComment. Reflect on your experience as a learner and consider the implications this has for teaching the youth who you are observing and describing in your field notes.
M is a 6th grade student who is generally mellow and quiet in class. She does not show negative emotions easily but her face brightens when she’s excited or when she understands. She tries very hard and is very methodical in her work, but she relies on memorization of algorithms and gets confused easily because the underlying arithmetic is difficult for her. She learns best with big picture conceptual ideas (to give a context for why she’s learning an algorithm), concrete examples, and manipulatives.
Ideally, I believe it’s imperative to understand the student and from there, refine the lesson to meet those unique needs across several dimensions of learning to maximize the effectiveness of the lesson.
Bianca is a High School Math student who is generally well-behaved in class. However, Math has never been her favorite subject. At the beginning of the school year, the teacher observes that Bianca becomes nervous when it comes to attempting to solve problems. When she is working in a group, she will try to sometimes copy the work of her peers without trying to solve the problems herself. She becomes especially apprehensive when it comes to working by herself and sometimes takes out her frustration on the teacher. The teacher decides to host a parent-teacher conference in an effort to better understand Bianca’s background and what could be causing her erratic behavior. The teacher learns from the parents that Bianca had struggled with Middle School Math. The teacher assumes that this is the cause of Bianca’s Math Anxiety. Math itself is a cumulative subject and a weak foundational understanding of lower-level Math would cause Bianca to have much more difficulty in more advanced Math. It is now the teacher’s duty to help Bianca acquire the prerequisite Math skills necessary to succeed in the class.
By participating in activities and reflecting as a learner, educators can use this experience to further the planning of a lesson. Acting as a learner first, allows educators to find the appropriate activities based on what they know about their students.
the more you observe as a teacher, the better idea you have of what playtest might work for your students and hat does not and in the field of science, it has proven that students prefer hands on and field trips where they can grasp the lesson better rather than just seating and taking notes for a whole class period.
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