More Updates

Hello Everyone,

I have some good news to report. Since I last posted, I have done a lot of student centered work. And I have worked some with my community adviser. Some problems have arisen, however we are making great progress.

Just as a quick reminder, student centered lessons are formed around the student(who knew). A generic example of a lesson I have made is a basic worksheet made form the textbook. The worksheet will have questions that are clearly answered in the textbook. The students work with each other and by themselves to answer the questions. They have only themselves, and a book. Mr. Bayer and I only answer questions regarding the way to answer the question, never the question itself. A student might ask, "What does this question want me to say?" and as a teacher, I can tell them "this question is asking about the economic affects of the war, look in the section labelled Economic Effects." The student is their own teacher during this lesson, they have to think about the question, analyze it, and then find the answer in the text. Ideally, once they complete the worksheet, they will have learned the lesson. This method is difficult because the students knowledge is completely defendant on the students effort.

So far, I have made two worksheets for Mr. Bayer's students. And so far, the data supports the idea that the students are learning from themselves, to a point. I still give them a baseline quiz before they learn anything about the topic, and then I give them a post-quiz after the worksheet. The students have almost all improved their grades; however, the improvements are very small, approximately 1-3 points higher than the pre-quiz.

I have discovered several problems with this method. As said before, the students who generally give more effort in class do better, and those who merely did the worksheet to get it done with did poorly. In terms of teacher centered, every student at least hears the same information from the teacher, the note taking does create some variation still between the higher achievers and those who give less effort, however the space between is smaller. The data indicates that with less supervision over the lesson, students give less effort. Another problem I have found is ensuring that the lesson the students learn from the worksheet is the lesson that will help them understand the quiz questions.

Yesterday I had the chance to observe Mr. Coaloa teach his class at NAU. It was very exciting to see a college-level student centered lesson. It was notably different from Mr. Bayer's lectures. I got a lot of good ideas on how to proceed with the students in the future with more student-centered lesson plans.

We are busy lesson planning and quiz writing here, which is very very difficult. Grading worksheets is also difficult(I just found that out) Apparently giving the students a three-page worksheet actually means giving yourself 75 worksheets to grade. But nonetheless, we are making serious headway with our data collection. Till next time!