I am a proud Gen Xer. I grew up an 80s kid, graduated high school in the early 1990s, and was raised by Baby Boomers. My earliest ‘classroom experience’ includes Picture Pages and Welcome Back Cotter.
I went back to school in 2008 to become a teacher. I finally found a permanent home at Steel-High where I have my own crew of Sweathogs.
Each year, I attend another PD on the ‘latest, greatest’ teaching pedagogy. Presenters and authors have a negative attitude towards education ‘back then’ inferring that my teachers and their pedagogy were inferior. I find these attitudes insulting. I had some really great teachers. When I entered college, I was very prepared for the writing and reading demands in front of me. It was reassuring to read Dr. Bonnie Botel-Sheppard’s words in the Introduction of The Plainer Truths, that “engaging strategies and enduring concepts reflect the influences of important thinkers that span foundational educational research from the 1960s” (14).
When evaluating modern pedagogy practices, it is important to understand past practices. There are two methods for collecting data to assess pedagogy practices: qualitative and quantitative. The text references Ron Heifetz's discussion of technical problems and adaptive problems. Quantitative measures numbers and statistics, such as state tests. Qualitative analysis incorporates observation and experience to answer how and why. When I did my MEd capstone project, I used qualitative analysis to examine student choice in the classroom. My project focused on student choice as it relates to class assignments including both technological and traditional assignments. My qualitative data showed that “82% of the subjects agree that having the option to choose increases their interest in the assignment.” Additionally, this connects to the Human lens of learning. If students are to draw a connection “between skill and will” (34), student choice as a modern pedagogy practice is a step in that direction.
Before moving on from the Human lens, I want to touch on an activity from class that I used in my classroom. I have actually been using the Mood Scale activity for several years now. I have a collection including cats, sheep, Patrick, and Squidward. Most recently I used the squirrel scale since it featured a pumpkin in one of the options. It was our Exit Ticket the day before our first unit test. I use a calendar page to collect Exit Ticket answers to keep students from opting out. The squirrel scale brought smiles from my students, even those who chose the sploot squirrel, and
gave me insight into how they were all feeling that day.
Exit Tickets were a lesson plan feature that I frequently struggled with in my first four years at Steel-High. I would run out of time (classes were 42 minutes long) or I would forget. The sticky note method never worked well. But having to use the BDA lesson plan format got me to take the Exit Ticket more seriously, to see it for the mini-assessment that it is. I looked into other tools, for example, Padlet, which our school subscribes to. I can create a column for each day of the week and a new Padlet for each week. Students are logged in, so I know who created each post. The other tool is the calendar page mentioned in the previous paragraph. It has space for five days a week for five weeks. Each box has lines for those students who need lines. Using the calendar also cuts down on paper consumption, which is a concern of mine, while allowing me to provide feedback to my students.
Teachers may not have used Exit Tickets or choice boards back in the early 1990s, but I think they would have given the pedagogy. I do remember being able to choose which middle-grade novel I read in both seventh-grade and which classic novel I read in twelfth-grade from a provided list. I still remember reading Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell. I remember answering free-response questions in eighth-grade US History, though my teacher did not call them that. And I was pretty good at writing a five-paragraph essay with a thesis by tenth-grade. I incorporate these enduring concepts in my twenty-first-century lesson plans.
Source:
Botel, M., & Paparo, L. (2016). The Plainer Truths of Teaching, Learning and Literacy.
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