CI 414/504 Fall 2024 Coppola

Since we had to read two texts this week from a variety, the ones that I chose were: Mathematics, the Common Core, and Language & Appendix (Moschkovich, 2012)  Language Demands and Opportunities in Relation to Next Generation Science Standards for English Language Learners: What Teachers Need to Know (Quinn, Lee, & Valdes, 2012) For simplicity, I will refer to the text by following acronyms: MCCLA and LDORNGSSELL. Overall, the readings' content as a whole focuses on strategies that teachers should think about and use in their classrooms, specifically when there are English Language Learners (ELLs). One of the main points mentioned in both  MCCLA and LDORNGSSELL is that instructions / learning should encourage reasoning and understanding of disciplinary language rather than accuracy of spoken language.  Now, this goes back to what we have been discussing in class as language is not just spoken language but the ways that someone of a certain discipline reads, writes...

 I would like to start this post by praising the researchers behind this study. In their consecutive summers of work, they continued to increase the length of their summer institutes, allowing teachers to take more time to apply what they were learning and create things to be used in the classroom. One of my biggest issues with the professional development structure at my school (and this practice is not extraordinary) is the lack of time to process what they want us to learn. They give us an hour, to two hours, of professional development, and then move on. We do not get the time to digest the material or think about how it can be used in our classrooms. Schools want to check the professional development box and think we are like robots. If we have the information we can just change things on the fly, not thinking of the planning, grading, student-parent communication, etc. that we already have on our plate. I do not use textbooks in my history classroom, we as a department select...

 An Educators Influence While I read through Baldwin's A Talk to Teachers and Smith's James Baldwin’s Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil I was drawing connections back to my own experiences and thought about my teachers. Some were unfortunately not really memorable while others I think of as a great influence on my education and outside of the classroom. They were teachers who truly cared for how would turn out in the future. So it leads to the question of what goes into making a great teacher and mentor versus another who simply follows the system for the salary and paycheck (as it is also their livelihood they need to worry about). Teachers who try and integrate real world applications and knowledge into the lesson plans are what I think makes up a part of being a good teacher and mentor. Smiths states "I realized that rigorous lessons were not mutually exclusive from culturally and politically relevant ones." He recognized that there is more to teaching than...

       For this weeks blog post, I read "Modeling as a Multidimensional Cultural Space" the reading begins with a discussion on areas of education being safe spaces, the mortality rate of youth in America, and the percent of students that drop out from high school. Within the reading it talks about schools who teach the most at risk students within the mortality rates (Minority/Impoverished) are the least physically/intellectually/social safe spaces. It also discusses the way teachers teach students, I think its really interesting because it talks about teaching students with histories of academic underachievement, and what changes must be put into the way we teach to help them.      One quote that really stood out to me was "The problem, however, is not whether basic skills or instruction oriented toward problem solving is better or worse for students with histories of academic underachievement. Rather there are more foundational questions: What routi...

I found Baldwin's "A Talk to Teachers" to be an inspirational read, and more importantly, highly relevant to today’s world. His concluding sentence, "If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy," left me speechless. It felt as if he had peered into a crystal ball, foreseeing the political and social turmoil we face today. Baldwin reminds us that teachers have the power to cultivate change through our students—the future leaders waiting in the desks of our classrooms. As Smith noted in his commentary on Baldwin's text, "...while Baldwin’s words have always felt relevant, this year they feel particularly so." Over the past eight years, students have lived through some of the most unique school experiences we've ever seen: the Covid-19 pandemic, the BLM movement, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the boom of social media, and the rise of gun violence all affecting students in profound ways. I think bac...

In “A Talk to Teachers” by James Baldwin, a quote that stood out to me the most was, “The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.” Baldwin asserted that education should help students understand the world and that once they know, they have the power to change society. Students who learn about systemic racism, oppression, and inequality, have the power to be the generation that can make the world a better place. In the article “James Baldwin’s Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil,” by Clint Smith, the author discusses James Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers” essay and uses the same quote I just mentioned. Smith interpreted this quote as, “A teacher, Baldwin believed, should push students to understand that the world was molded by people who came before and that it can be remolded into something new.” I agree with this interpretation because we have a very important role as teachers in...

Hey everyone! This week's reading on knowledge was a nice continuation of what we read last week on comprehension: Buehl went into great detail about the various types of knowledge and how underrated prior knowledge is for a student's ability to understand the material that's being presented to them. "Knowledge begets comprehension begets knowledge." It's apparent that our role as educators is to build bridges between our students' prior knowledge and the knowledge we seek to impart to them in order for our students to truly achieve comprehension. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about my own experiences with science courses from high school and college, and one experience that stood out to me was the time I burned M&Ms using potassium chlorate in high school. (In this video, they used skittles instead, but the reaction looks the exact same - https://youtube.com/shorts/NP7HYFXY2Uc?si=ex8u-0PpEIVLo6i9)  The main takeaways from this reaction are:  1)...

          Marzano’s study with the various students and their exposure to out-of-school academic knowledge and processing ability was fascinating to me and makes for a great topic of discussion for us. Students 1, 2 & 3 are the ones who tend to excel based on their out of school experiences, having been exposed to several out-of-school activities which are enriching and provide more bridges to knowledge in the classroom. Student 4 is conscious enough to realize that their school doesn’t do a great job of connecting their out-of-school realities and that students 1 and 2 essentially put in less effort because of the exposure they’ve received outside of the classroom, leaving them less likely to attend college than student 6, showing us how detrimental unattended knowledge gaps can be to students like number 4, who possess an incredible amount of out-of-school experience.            Student 5’s case was a little puzzling...

    Chapter 3 of Buehl's Developing Readers in Academic Disciplines focuses on the teacher's role as the bridge between the author's messaging and the students' understanding. Particularly with the first fundamental comprehension process mentioned in chapter 2: "Making connections to prior knowledge". This is often the first thing teachers have to scaffold in order to get anywhere with a disciplinary text. For me this was one of those "well... duh" moments but after meditating on it a little longer, I saw my own academic knowledge gaps interfere with comprehension from some of the activities in class.When we were trying to read Vygotsky's Internalization of Higher Psychological Functions , I struggled to make sense of what he was trying to get at. However, because I recognized enough to grasp at what he was getting at, I had a half-understanding. The same could NOT be said with some of the strategy presentations in class. Not because of the strat...

  I enjoyed reading the section of Buehl Chapter 2 dedicated to Mathematics.  I would like to touch on one of Buehl's claims, which is that reading does not mean always processing written words. The author references reading human faces or paintings as examples of non-written texts. In math I would say there are a lot of reading and literacy skills that aren't treated as such because they don't take the form of traditional text reading.  I also see a connection from a line out of our in person reading last week for the math group “Teachers Subject Matter Knowledge Profound Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics” which says elementary students from the united states treat an equal sign as a “do something symbol” writing  3+3(4) = 12 = 15. T his demonstrates a misunderstanding of equality because 3+3(4) is not 12 and 12 is not 15. One of the American teachers interviewed did not think this was wrong because they did the calculations correctly and found the right answ...

Buehl explains “how experts think within a discipline, how they question, examine, organize, and represent knowledge through language” (p.46). I would like to point out how Buehl emphasizes the power language holds. This reminds me of my IB “Theory of Knowledge” class where one of the themes was language and knowledge. We would question how much someone can know or share if they don’t have the language to express themselves. This relationship lies heavily as well on another individual’s interpretation- how they receive the information/message and to some extent, how we make sense of the world. This can be applied to vast topics and subjects such as math and history. Within each topic/subject, there’s a large amount of terminology used that is essential to our understanding. As Buehl explains, within each classroom there are discourse communities(p.51) where teachers should support and mentor students to develop literacy skills. If students are feeling uneasy and are avoiding complex te...

      On the surface Hair Love may seem like a nice simple short film about a father doing his daughters hair so that she can see her mother with a nice hairstyle. But I can see how this short film can also be interpreted in a way relevant to us as students, and educators. Within this short film we see the father who could be described as a student of hairstyling, as he learns throughout the short film to accept his mistakes and learn from them, and I find this to be one of the most important moments in the short film. His being able to accept his mistakes, own up to them, and then get help from someone more knowledgeable than him allowed him to do what he originally had wanted to achieve.       Being able to face one's mistakes head one is a blessing not many people can say they are privy to. Unfortunately I believe that we live during a time where people think that being wrong means that you're stupid, rather than not understanding or simply not...