Strategy Lesson (Multicolumn Notes) Reflection

Overall, I think that my Strategy Lesson presentation went really well! I think my PowerPoint was informative, yet not super long and boring. I know what it’s like to have to sit and watch a super boring PowerPoint, so I tried to throw in a few pop culture references and gifs here and there to keep everyone's attention.

Even Kylo Ren liked my presentation!

The most challenging part about my Strategy Lesson was trying to explain the many different variations of the strategy. The text defines multicolumn notes as being a 2-column system (one for summarizing, then one for reflecting), yet it also said that most teachers use 3 columns. On top of that, teachers have so many different ways to label and organize their multicolumn notes. But I think I ended up covering many of the variations pretty well, and made sure to mention ideas for each content area.

Me, when I realized I forgot to do the last column lol

Also, I think I demonstrated the multicolumn notes strategy pretty well. After spending hours trying to find a grade-level appropriate text for the strategy, I settled on a passage about the Water Cycle. I felt really confident that the multicolumn notes would be an effective during-reading strategy for this text, and it seemed to work out really well in class. If there’s anything I could improve on from my demonstration/modeling, I would have asked my classmates to show their notes from the reading under the document camera (like I did) so that we could have seen how everyone fills them out differently. Also, I made the mistake of skipping the “Reflections/Questions” Column during my modeling, so I had to improvise and do the questions and reflections at the end of the presentation instead. Next time, I would do them as I read like I was supposed to!



291

Emily 

Synthesis 2

From the past few chapter of Subjects Matter, the topics that have stood out the most to me are student choice and building a classroom community. While things like textbooks, teaching/learning strategies, and content are all important things to we teachers, sometimes we neglect to think about the things that are important to our students. If everything single thing within our classroom is decided (dare I say dictated) by me, my students are likely going to have little interest and motivation to learn. By not allowing students to make any choices or work collaboratively with their peers, I’m silencing their pursuits of knowledge. As a teacher, my goal should be to give my students as many opportunities as I can to let them to express their choices, creativity, personality, and feelings. This can be as simple as letting students chose what book to read in their book clubs to allowing students to sit wherever they please during class.

Kathleen Ralf, teacher of Humanities & English at Frankfurt International School and also the Global Online Academy, details how to allow more student choice in the classroom in her Edutopia article, “5 Tips for Giving Students Choice That Leads to Student Voice.” Ralf believes students want to show us who they are and what they care about, we’ve just got to give them the freedom and support to do so. Ralf outlines 5 tips to help teachers promote this learning environment: scaffolding various types of projects throughout the semester; making the rubric and the requirements for the project explicit, yet open; give encouragement and support along the way; adjust, bend, and let it flow; and lastly, share their work with the world. I couldn’t agree more with her perspectives, and I truly think that if teachers could give away just little amounts of their control, their students would thrive in the newfound power and responsibility.

Lastly, I also found a super interesting video from Edutopia that discusses the effects of the classroom design and environment on student’s success and interest. The school in this video decided to encourage students to work collaboratively by making classrooms more open and comfortable. I absolutely love this concept. And it's clear that students love it too. 

            


361 (wow, sorry about that...)

Emily

Book Pitch : An Abundance of Katherines

Lexile Level : 890

Pages : 272

Grade Level : 6-8

Content Area : Math 
Awards : 2007 Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book, received recognition as one of American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adults.

The book that I'd really like for you guys to chose for our book club is An Abundance of Katherines by John Green. Some of you may recognize the brilliant author, John Green, as he is also the author of the wildly popular novels Paper Towns and The Fault In Our Stars. In this other novel of his, a math-child-prodigy named Colin Singleton has a thing for girls named Katherine. The problem is, Katherines don't seem to have a thing for Colin. He's been dumped by 19 girls all sharing the name 'Katherine', spelled exactly the same way. Crazy, right? He thinks so too! So Colin decides to form "the Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability," which is a theorem that will be able to predict the future of all of his relationships, transform him into a true genius, and finally win himself a girl! Love, friendship, and (apparently) a dead Astro-Hungarian archduke all add up to create this heart-warming story about reinventing oneself. This novel also incorporates several mathematical concepts and embodies the answer to the question: "when is math ever going to be relevant in real-life?" As a math-lover, this novel just seems really intriguing to me, and I would really love to read it within a book club. 

I think middle school students would also really enjoy this humorous novel, but to really test that, I actually asked some middle school students that I know for their opinons. I gave them a brief synopsis as well as read the first page to them.. and then they gave me their *honest* opinions about the book:




So please consider choosing my novel, An Abundance of Katherines by John Green... I promise you won't regret your choice! ;)

Emily 

Subjects Matter Chapter 9 Response

Chapter nine was dedicated to outlining how to hold the perfect Book Club. Book clubs can be a more entertaining way to get your students reading content-relevant texts of their choice. They’re also pretty cool in that they incorporate both collaborative learning and individual reading.

I’ve been in quite a few book clubs thought my school career, all of which took place in my language arts classes. I distinctly remember enjoying the book clubs that we had in my AP English class in my senior year. Because of the AP test, our goal for the class was to have as many classic novels and their main ideas, motifs, themes, etc. in our repertoires to be able to write about on the test. I recall our first clubs (there were only two clubs due to the small class) forming from our choice between reading either Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte or Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin. I’ll be honest here: neither of those was particularly appealing to me. But most of my friends chose Pride and Prejudice so I joined in. Each week, we’d have to read a few chapters or so and use sticky notes to mark imagery, foreshadowing, or other literary elements. Then, we’d hang out and discuss with our group members about what we read. I distinctly recall how my group, of all girls, would discuss the cute moments between Elizabeth and Darcy, and also our frustrations with Lydia’s immaturity. We’d also spend a long time trying to decipher some of the odd, old rhetoric.  

Darcy and Elizabeth are #goals for sure 

My only beef with book clubs is that I don’t understand how they could work in a non-language arts classroom. They could probably work in a social studies classroom, but I just don’t see how I’d be able to fit a book club in or make a book club relevant to my math or science classrooms. I'm hoping that our upcoming book clubs using content-area texts will help me figure that out. 

314

Emily 

Textbook Activity : Emily and Cierra

For our textbook activity, Cierra and I decided to make a flipped-classroom video for review over a specific unit and concept (Unit 5-5 : Adding Fractions).

Subjects Matter Chapter 8 Response

This chapter focused on the importance and practicality of classroom reading workshops and minilessons within any of our content areas. What grabbed my attention the most out of this chapter was reading about how web tools can be used for sharing, publishing, and responding to class readings (p.232). I found this topic to be very ironic; after I read about how to use technology to allow students to respond to class readings, I then turned around and performed this discipline of responding to what I read in this chapter on a class-made web blog. Talk about inception…

INCEPTION

Just like this section mentions, technology can be such a valuable tool in your lesson plans for minilessons and workshops. There are multiple cool websites available for students to use to facilitate discussions, make presentations (paperless!), as well as store their reading assignments in case the teacher doesn’t wish to print out articles all the time. I’ve actually seen a lot of these websites in practice at the middle school I’ve been observing in this semester. At Hilsman Middle School, each student has a personal laptop—from the One-to-One program—and their teachers take full advantage of them. Students use Edmodo to complete assignments and communicate with their teachers, as well as use Google Classroom for day-to-day and homework and class activities. With Google Classroom, they have the ability to collaborate with their peers on documents and projects, and the possibilities are endless when it comes to the different medias that can be used within the program. What’s great about these different technology platforms are that they’re much more interesting than writing a paper about what you read. With technology, students can make their responses and discussions really unique and incorporate all sorts of media to demonstrate what they learned and if they enjoyed it.

                    


So shout out to Mr. Robinson for practicing what this book preaches by having us blog our responses to our course readings!  

324

Emily 

Think Aloud Reflection

Me, doing my Think Aloud. 

Yesterday, I presented my Think Aloud to the class…and I believe that my presentation went fairly well! I was really nervous about presenting, but once I got up there and got going, I became much more comfortable. I chose to do a math worksheet, since math is my primary emphasis. After looking through several worksheets found from the GPS’s recommended resources, I settled on a 7^th grade proportion problem about building shelves of a bookcase. The worksheet involved a good amount of reading and interpreting, which I thought would be perfect for a Think Aloud.

Me, when I first saw this worksheet.

The only problem with my worksheet was its organization. It gave dimensions for objects, but didn’t clearly specify what was the length, width, or height. To solve this, I tried to explain to the class that we’d have to draw the objects in 3-D and attempt to makes sense of the dimensions by logic. The 9 inches matched, so they must both the length (from the wall); 1 inch must the height of the plank of wood, etc. Then, on the backside of the worksheet, it was a mess. The actual problem, which was a table, was located at the bottom of the page. But above it was poorly organized different pieces that fell into the table (i.e. lines on a graph, descriptions, and equations). To address this confusing organization, I made sure to tell the class “wow, ok this backside it a little confusing. Let’s make sense of it.”

Overall, I think I did pretty well. I received a lot of encouraging feedback! My favorite comment was that someone liked how I personified things (i.e. I call each line on the graph “him”). If there’s one thing I could improve on, it would be that this sort of worksheet was almost too long for a Think Aloud. Especially in a real classroom setting, I couldn’t think aloud this whole worksheet; the students would get bored and impatient!

323

Emily