Physical and Psychical Space in the Classroom

October 27, 2007 at 11:47 am | In best practices, collaborative groups, education, learning modality, strategies, teachers | Leave a Comment

Lately, this topic has been on my mind.  I would like to examine a “case study” to illustrate how physical space and what I jokingly call psychical space must align in order to produce real learning.

Physical Structure

In this real classroom at my school, a teacher arranges the tables and chairs into groups of six students.  The students face each other.  The table groups are arranged throughout the overall classroom.  The teacher explains that this fosters collaborative group learning.

On the surface, this sounds like a good idea.

Psychical Space

The table groups are arranged in such a way that there is no “carpet space”, a place for the students to come together on the carpet throughout the day to interact as a whole class.  The students are expected to remain at their tables and not interact with students at the neighboring tables.  The teacher has a desk at the front of the class and stays there.  He does not rotate or walk among the students.  Students in the “collaborative” groups are expected to work quietly at their individual work, with very little small group work assigned.  In reality, the students are isolated from each other and from the teacher.  There is no real collaborative learning going on.  (Also, because I’m nitpicky, a third of the students face the back of the class, a third face the sides, and only a third face the front where the teacher is and where instruction takes place.)

Alignment

Almost any physical arrangements in the classroom can work to enhance learning, so long as teacher thinks through what the goals are in the classroom.

This teacher wanted a physical space that fosters collaborative group learning.  To make it work, he needs to arrange his teaching to foster collaborative group learning as well.  He needs to teach students how to work in groups in a focused manner and then have students actually work in groups in a focused manner, not just do quiet individual work sitting in a group.  He needs to collaborate with the students as well by interacting with them, moving among them, having conversations with each group and each student.  To further enhance collaborative group learning, he can change the groups for different activities, have students present to each other, have different groups converse with each other.  While not necessary, I prefer a carpet space where all students can come together and discuss as a whole group in close proximity to each other and with the class.  If the arrangement of the tables don’t have all students facing the “front” of the class, then have instruction take place all over the classroom. 

So, what’s your physical space and psychical space like?

Please leave comments with your reflection or link back from your blog.

Free as in “Free Speech” Educational Software

October 17, 2007 at 11:58 am | In education, free resources, software, technology in education | 2 Comments

If you don’t know about the Free Software Directory, do get acquainted!  These softwares are created by professional developers who believe that software should be free, not making money for already wealthy companies.

There is a list of great educational software there.  I’m testing out gcompris right now and so far, so good!  I’ll let you know more.

Collaborative Unit Openers

October 14, 2007 at 6:47 pm | In Open Court, best practices, education, elementary, learning modality, teachers, unit opener | 1 Comment

For this coming week, I will be participating in Unit Opener Planning Week (and hope you will be too!).  This is primarily geared toward Open Court units, but always take ideas that you like and tweak them to suit your needs!

Okay, here’s my first idea which I heard through a colleague and hope to implement at my school.

Have collaborative unit openers among your grade level. 

Among your grade level, have each teacher create one truly exciting 30 minutes unit opener lesson, rather than plan for an entire day of unit openers. On the day of the unit opener, each teacher will teach the one lesson to each class, rotating from one classroom to the next.  The benefits are many.  Teachers collaborate.  Teachers are only responsible for planning one 30 minutes lesson, but students benefit from 3 or 4 or 5 excellent lessons.  Students get to meet and experience being taught by different teachers, different modalities, different styles.  On a more selfish level, because teachers are teaching someone else’s students and know that other teachers will be teaching your students, you tend to feel competitive and want to create the “best” lesson, pushing your unit openers to a higher level of rigor and fun.

I can’t wait to try this at my school!

Unit Opener Planning Week

October 13, 2007 at 6:52 am | In Open Court, best practices, education, free resources, reading, writing | 1 Comment

Please visit Creating Lifelong Learners by Mathew Needleman this coming week to participate in or get ideas for opening up a learning unit.  This is geared toward Open Court units, but I say, you can always get ideas for your own units and anthologies!  So come along for this exciting collaboration!

I will be participating as well and posting my ideas here on this blog, but there will be many, many teachers and coaches creating excellent ideas all across the web.  Please do consider joining in!

Unit Opener

Friendly Letter – Oral Rehearsal Using a Flow Map

October 3, 2007 at 6:22 pm | In ELD, best practices, elementary, graphic organizers, learning modality, second grade, strategies, thinking maps, writing | 4 Comments

This video was taken by a friend during our writing process about two weeks ago.

This student was absent during the days when we worked on our Flow Map so he had to use the class created Flow Map for his writing.  The other students use their own Flow Map.  In the video, the student is orally rehearsing his writing prior to writing.  He is doing what we call “Pull Out and Talk”.  For a more detailed explanation of our writing process, please visit this previous post.

This was our second major piece of writing in the second grade Open Court unit, Kindness.  The prompt was:  Please write a thank you letter to the elves as if you were the shoemaker.

Why Oral Rehearsal?

Why do I insist that my students orally rehearse before writing?  Almost all of my students are stronger in the oral language than they are in the written language.  I found that they were intimidated by writing and could sit for hours staring at a blank sheet of paper before writing or would write everything in three or four incomplete sentences.  Allowing my students to talk and think aloud reduces the affective filter.  Also, allowing my students to make plenty of mistakes while talking and then fixing their mistakes orally ensures that less mistakes show up on paper.  With oral rehearsal, my students’ writing is stronger and more detailed.

Addition – Two students use Manipulatives and Spiderman Math

October 3, 2007 at 7:37 am | In education, elementary, games, learning modality, math, second grade, strategies | 1 Comment

This video was taken in my class two weeks ago by a friend.  The video shows two students playing a math “game” while independently practicing two digit addition.  Using two dice (or die, I could never tell), one student rolls the “tens” while another student rolls the “ones”.  They do this twice, writing down the two digit addition problem they have created.  Then, they add using manipulatives.  Listen carefully to the boy’s think-aloud.  He actually says he “expands” the number using manipulatives.  Then, the two students add using “Spiderman” math.  Spiderman math is just a fun way of calling addition using expanded form.

Spiderman math is the scaffolding step between using manipulatives and the standard algorithm.  These two students are not quite ready for the standard algorithm yet, but they are more than proficient with manipulatives…they are in the in-between stage, thus they use both manipulatives and Spiderman math.

These students are not ready to regroup, which is the old fashion carry and borrow concept.  The next problem they do which involves regrouping, they become totally confused.  They are able to do the problem using manipulatives, but don’t know what to do even in Spiderman math.  Imagine forcing these students to use the standard algorithm immediately.  They will spend the next two to three years of their lives randomly putting a “1″ on top of their addition problems.  Ask third and fourth grade teachers if this is not true.  Allowing them to first explore addition using manipulatives, then Spiderman before the standard algorithm will help them understand when and why regrouping is necessary.

Other students in the class are at various stages.  Six students can only use manipulatives, and even then, two or three are having difficulty counting.  Two students are able to add two and three digit numbers using mental math quickly and accurately because they can visualize expanding the numbers, mentally grouping the tens and ones together.  And yes, I teach them this because if they can do this, they are truly understanding addition.  They are definitely NOT adding one column of number, then moving to the next to add that column of number, which is what many teachers demonstrate to students, thinking that the shortcut will help the students get the right sum.  Yes, the shortcut will get the students to the correct sum, but it will not help them understand addition and learning how to regroup will become even more difficult.  How do I know that these two students are not simply adding one column, then the next?  I listen to their think alouds.

Our class have not started learning to regroup yet, though most of my students are already able to do it using manipulatives.

I like teaching math like this.  I use games rather than an impersonally generated sheet of problems because the students are more motivated and they have fun.  Given a choice between a sheet of problems and generating your own problems using dice, which would you have more fun with?  Here, I am also tapping into many different modalities.  My tactile students have the dice and manipulatives.  My social students have partners.  Obviously, my verbal student is talking himself through his problems.  My visual students can see the numbers using manipulatives.  What other modalities can I tap into?

Friendly Thank You Letter – Using Thinking Maps

September 25, 2007 at 6:10 pm | In Open Court, elementary, graphic organizers, second grade, strategies, thinking maps, writing | 4 Comments

This is a piece of writing my second grade students work on for two weeks. It helps prepare my students for the Open Court Unit 2 writing assessment. This is the first major writing assignment in Unit 2 for us. I used the writing process that I learned from Write From the Beginning because it explicitly teaches many skills and makes clear the writing process.

You can also read more about writing using Thinking Maps at my previous posts.

The prompt

Please write a thank you letter to Ms. R using the friendly letter format.

Second grade Open Court teachers in LAUSD would recognize the prompt as the unit assessment prompt, modified.

The Rubric

The class rubric is charted and hangs in front of the class through out the entire writing process. I refer to it again and again daily as well as whenever I teach a particular skill that is mentioned in the rubric. Every student knows exactly what needs to be done to get a good grade.

friendly_letter_rubric

The Context

While working in the computer lab one day, the fire drill alarm went off and drove us out of the computer lab. Ms. R invited the students to return after recess to complete the presentations that they were working on. The students felt grateful and excited at the opportunity, and I immediately grabbed at the chance to do a major piece of writing using a shared experience. Also, I couldn’t resist the urge to do some relevant writing with a real-world purpose. Ms. R was very happy to receive these letters.

Pre-write: The Circle Map

We started by brainstorming some things we want to write about using a Circle Map. We did this as a whole group using Think-Pair-Share and small group discussion strategies. Then, the students created their individual Circle Maps. Students were encouraged to “pull out” from the class circle map and to add their own ideas.

studentwriting0007

Continue reading Friendly Thank You Letter – Using Thinking Maps…

Aargh! Scanner!

September 19, 2007 at 10:45 pm | In whining | Leave a Comment

I’m trying to scan in our latest writing sample and my scanner cuts off parts of the paper.  Urgh!  It’s late, I’m just going to try again tomorrow.  I really want to show the second graders’ writing samples. Argh!

Friendly Letter Rubric – More like criteria

September 17, 2007 at 7:22 pm | In Open Court, second grade, writing | 2 Comments

I never did learn the difference between a list of criteria and a rubric.  In any case, this is how I grade my student’s writing. 

My students are very familiar with this format and they know exactly what they need to get a good grade, because it’s charted and reviewed almost daily.  Whenever we have a related lesson, I refer back to this rubric.  For example,we’ve been working on writing in complete sentences.  I refer back to this rubric and remind my students that complete sentences are worth 5 points.  We are very goal oriented in my class.  I will post more on our second grade friendly letter writing assignment in my next post.  For now, I just wanted to share the rubric.

Why a rubric like this?  It is directly connected to writing standards.  For students, it makes explicit what they need to do in their writing.  For teachers, it makes clear what a particular student needs to work on, and through several assignments, you can measure a student’s growth in a particular area.

friendly_letter_rubric

For those of us who work with second grade Open Court in LAUSD, we know that Unit 2’s writing assessment is to write a thank you letter to a friend.  Thus the rubric.  We are very goal oriented, did I mention that?

This rubric is modified from the Write From The Beginning program.

I translate the 20 point system into a 4 point grade like this:

  • 20 points – 4
  • 19-16 points – 3
  • 15-10 points – 2
  • <9 points – 1

Click here to download the PDF.

ABCteach – excellent website with great tools

September 16, 2007 at 3:48 pm | In free resources | Leave a Comment

I regularly use ABCteach for lots of stuff, especially vocabulary and spelling activities.  Do check it out.  :)   Much of the site is free, but the paid subscription is well worth it I think.

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