Creating High-Performance Learning Environments
This blog post is an analysis on three videos.
- Academic expectations - do you think the teacher holds high-performance expectations for students in each of these scenarios? Why or why not?
- Behavior expectations - do you think behavior expectations are high for students in each scenario? Why or why not?
- Norms and Procedures - what are the norms and procedures in these scenarios that support high student performance?
Video #1
Academic Expectations -
In this video, I could tell that the teacher, Ms. Migdol, was holding all students accountable for their progress as a team. They had to collaborate as a team and complete the objective of building a successful rollercoaster. Each member of the team had their own role and they each had a responsibility that they had to perform. Some students were in charge of measuring, recording, accounting, and organizing. The students all had to work together to complete the task. They were also given limited resources that would then cause them to use a higher level of problem-solving. You could see the way that Ms. Migdol was interacting with her students and level of challenge she gave them that she was holding them to a high-performance expectation. If the students were incorrect in their assessment of what they should do, Ms. Migdol would walk them through their thought process and let them realize on their own what was wrong, and what they should do to fix the problem.
Behavior Expectations -
Although Ms. Migdol never mentioned behavior or disciplined any students in the video, you could sense that the students had an expectation of how they should behave and interact with their classmates. The students all seemed to be engaged in the class and willing to participate in the lesson.
Norms & Procedures -
All the students looked as they knew what was expected of them and participated equally in the lesson. They also had an idea of the flow of the class. They knew that they could not just jump right into racing the marble down the track, they knew that there were steps that had to be taken first in order to complete the objective.
Video #2
Academic Expectations -
In the video, it looked like the teacher had her rhythm and the students knew her format of teaching. Most of the students seemed engaged and participating in her lesson. I felt as though they had done this many times and that it was not something new to them, so the level of expectation the teacher had for them in this particular video might have been on par with what they were doing. In the video, it didn't seem like it was as much of teaching as it was a review. In the required reading, it talked about the way teachers teach and a method they have been using for a couple thousand years. While it does work (Chinese math scores are very high) it is very boring and uninviting to the students. I work with a Chinese woman, and she told me that she never did anything to engage them in class. It was always lecturing and testing. While expectations were high for her there was not any enjoyment in learning.
Behavior Expectations -
There was a child in the back that was looking around and not engaged in the lesson at all. I would assume maybe he didn't know Chinese well enough to keep up or was just generally uninterested in the lesson. The teacher did not seem to notice him much because her time spent teaching was with her back to the students and them all surrounding her. So if some of the students are not engaging or decide to not participate in the lesson they could easily fall through the cracks. In the required reading that we had, the students could feel board with this style of teaching and then in that boredom, they could act out in class.
Norms & Procedures -
As I mentioned above in the academic expectations portion, it looked like the teacher had a rhythm to teaching and the ones that were participating looked like they were learning from her. When working with elementary school children it is important to have a system and order to your class. Children need structure, so it was good that she had a rhythm to her class that helped the students engage with her a little better.
Video #3
Academic Expectations -
During this video, the students were constantly interacting with the teacher through actions and attention getter type chants. When students are engaging in the lesson with actions it is another type of learning other than visual or audio. The teacher seemed to have some sort of academic standard that the students must obtain. She was trying to get them engaging more with the curriculum so that their retention of the subject matter would be increased.
Behavior Expectations -
Since she was constantly chatting with the class and having them respond back to her and with their other classmates it left little time for the students to get bored and start disrupting their neighbors. Most of the class seemed to enjoy it and were participating in the motions & response. I watched another one of her videos and there was a girl that came in late to her class, as that girl was sitting down she reviewed the rules in her chanting/action sort of way. It was clear that she didn’t let it happen and that she stuck to the rules in her class.
Norms & Procedures -
This teacher had to teach her students a lot at the beginning of the year what she wanted from them in terms of teacher-student responses. With this style of teaching, she would not be able to get to many different areas of subject matter since she spends so much time on the actions and partner responses. With this style of teaching, it can be good for the students to remember certain vocabulary words but she will not be able to spend as much time on other areas. So there are definite strong and weak points to this whole brain style of teaching.
Personal Summary -
I really liked the first video. This really looks like a class that i would enjoy learning or teaching in. The interactiveness of the lesson, the hands on learning was really awesome to see. I have never seen or heard of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) learning. It is great to see multiple subject combined into one to reach a certain goal. I liked this more than the other two styles. With the chinese math lesson, the teacher seemed very much engaged in her rhythmic style teaching and much of the class was focused on her. The 21st century style teaching we are trying to get away from teachers lecturing in front of the class with their backs to the board. As for the whole brain style of teaching, my first reaction was i do not like this at all, but as i watch more of it and thought about it i could see some of its benefits. For me as an individual I don’t really see myself participating in this style of learning or teaching. I am usually a little more shy and with all this action and involvement it would make me feel a little out of place and uncomfortable. It does help engage the kinesthetic learners though (which i would say i am - just not in this way).
I would like to teach higher levels of elementary or middle school science, and STEM education would fall perfectly into what i would like to do. I loved the collaboration with their classmates, the individual jobs they had to reach a team goal, and multiple subject matter used to achieve that objective. This was a great video and i could see myself in this role more than the other two videos.
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