If feel as if Arons has been my observing administrator for the past 22 years. He has repeatedly entered my classroom, sat quietly in the back and tenaciously scribbled into his little yellow pad of paper, nodding and shaking his head. June 20th he hands me my evaluation, Teaching Introductory Physics. The reoccurring observation is the fact my students have no assurance of understanding, regardless of test scores. Which is an absolute joke based upon our current teacher assessments, the fact that I can be a highly effective as a teacher because of high test scores, even though they still don't understand. Even though the content of this material is a bit over my kids, I have confidence in my knowledge of the content to help bridge contextual gaps in their learning. Newton's laws of motion have not been treated with enough context, with that, I know my students didn't get it.
Tuesday, July 02, 2013
SOCS #10 Arons 3.1-3.12
SOCS-I
If feel as if Arons has been my observing administrator for the past 22 years. He has repeatedly entered my classroom, sat quietly in the back and tenaciously scribbled into his little yellow pad of paper, nodding and shaking his head. June 20th he hands me my evaluation, Teaching Introductory Physics. The reoccurring observation is the fact my students have no assurance of understanding, regardless of test scores. Which is an absolute joke based upon our current teacher assessments, the fact that I can be a highly effective as a teacher because of high test scores, even though they still don't understand. Even though the content of this material is a bit over my kids, I have confidence in my knowledge of the content to help bridge contextual gaps in their learning. Newton's laws of motion have not been treated with enough context, with that, I know my students didn't get it.
If feel as if Arons has been my observing administrator for the past 22 years. He has repeatedly entered my classroom, sat quietly in the back and tenaciously scribbled into his little yellow pad of paper, nodding and shaking his head. June 20th he hands me my evaluation, Teaching Introductory Physics. The reoccurring observation is the fact my students have no assurance of understanding, regardless of test scores. Which is an absolute joke based upon our current teacher assessments, the fact that I can be a highly effective as a teacher because of high test scores, even though they still don't understand. Even though the content of this material is a bit over my kids, I have confidence in my knowledge of the content to help bridge contextual gaps in their learning. Newton's laws of motion have not been treated with enough context, with that, I know my students didn't get it.
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Reading Arons is tough for all of us the first couple of times. How does he know so much about my classroom! It is nice, however, to get constructive criticism - administrators aren't always able to do that :)
As for test scores and teacher competence - the classroom is way too diverse of a place to allow for one test to determine the effectiveness of a teacher. No one (not even your administrators) are confused by that. But what choice to they have? Just as we as teachers give one test to all of the kids - which can't really assess all of them meaningfully - our administrators are trying to do the same thing. Sucks.
So your last question; how do I bring this content to my 8th graders? I'm confident that nothing we've done so far (except for some of the equation stuff) would be over the heads of your kids. I know 8th graders could come up with "force is a push or a pull". But finding the context that is the right FLOW "just out of their reach but reachable" is going to be your biggest challenge.
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