Fricke's Winter Writing Blag

"Pedagogy of the Oppressed" was an interesting read that kept reminding of of the stale and intellectually stagnant planet of Camazots from A Wrinkle in Time.  In these classroom environments, it seems that students do not actually learn, but instead memorize and repeat back in words and writing exactly what information was presented to them. Students know exactly what to "cram" to pass classes, but short-term memory only gets them so far and nearly all will be forgotten if they don't apply what they've learned. Learning is less about bouncing back the same information and is more about negotiating meaning of concepts between instructor and student for everyone to come to a greater understanding.We should not have classrooms that are always top-down, instructor focused lessons. Instead, we should be focusing on the students and their individual needs. This is really all about them, so effective teaching needs to involve students in their own education. Ban...

Giving students solely "correct-answer" based tests and assessments creates a grossly misleading picture of how students are actually performing in their class in terms of meeting objectives and understanding class material. It's very easy for a student to receive a study guide from the teacher, their notes, or someone else who has taken the class and simply "cram" for the exam; shoving all the knowledge needed to pass the whole class into the space of a day. Sure, they may pass or do great, but they will retain nearly none of the knowledge and have very little idea of how to apply the knowledge they do retain. This is why assessments need to be presented in different format that require students to apply the knowledge they have learned. In regards to the article, these can take the form of journal or blog responses (much like this one) and formal essay writing, The strength of these assessments is that there is not one right answer, but rather the student is ev...

My largest struggle in terms of teaching lessons is one I never anticipated. That is knowing the material too well. When presenting new texts to students, I can see they can quickly become overwhelmed or become disinterested as they do not understand or feel too challenged by the text itself along with the concepts that it will be introducing. The pre-reading template is an incredibly useful tool. The first and possibly the most important thing I've found to activating a key text is to relate it to the students' personal life in a relevant fashion that generate an active interest in engaging into the material. One such method I've found is, shamelessly enough, that of internet memes. By using humor and something seemingly irrelevant to 'standard' teaching practices, the students are entertained and happy to participate. This can range from using a specific song to any recent and appropriate memetic phenomenon. This establishes the foundation on which the unit will b...

There exists a huge perception gap between what the majority of parents and students think of common core state standards and their reality. These standards are thought be be standardized curriculum, rather than the standards to which teachers are to drive their students to achieve. They are not a method, but instead are rather a goal. To put in place such a method would be to minimize the impact and influence a teacher can have on the classroom, which would be a disservice as teachers are the most important factor in the improvement of adolescent literacy. These standards actually offer a  great deal of freedom in how a teacher can choose to adhere to them, but often times this freedom is not exercised to its full potential. I was very interested to read about Liz Boeser's argumentative unit planning that involved student role-playing, discussion through the use of private forums, presentation through closed YouTube channels, and finally writing an argumentative paper to the schoo...

For my first observed lesson at my practicum site during spring quarter, I attempted to teach, model, and employ a Socratic discussion with juniors all in one 50 minute session. This lesson failed, crunched for time as it was, as students continually spoke out of turn, did not follow up questions or statements with comments before adding their own, and they generally did not follow the guidelines that had been put in place and modeled for them. I really appreciated the ground roles that were listed in this article. I believe that had I employed some of these the discussion would have been much more genial and productive. The most frequently reoccurring error was that when an open-ended question or statement was made by a student, it often went unanswered and either another student would speak over them or someone else would simply utter a new statement. I had a reward system employed for participants who followed the model, but I did not have a system of punishment to negate unwanted ...