During
Promising Practices, I attended workshop IB: Idea to Implementation: Challenges
and Opportunities of Building an Outdoor Classroom to Broaden Participation in
STEM and workshop IIE: Comedy in the Classroom.
Workshop
IB focused heavily on creative ways to use the new resource of an outdoor
classroom in culturally responsive and relevant ways. The outdoor classroom was built here at RIC
next to the two beehives. The structure
was created to hold the seats, which all contain interesting bee facts on them,
and provide a place to teach or engage in experiments. The classroom does not just have to be used
for activities related to the bees; we discussed how weather investigations
could be performed there as well. We
talked about how a responsive pedagogy expects academic achievement from all
students, maintains the students’ cultural backgrounds, and understands,
recognizes, and critiques social inequities, and how the outdoor classroom could
be used to achieve these goals. Part of
our discussion included how the outdoor classroom could be used to give
students who are used to living in a very urban environment a hands-on
experience with things in nature. This
would help to give the children an experience that children from suburban or
rural families might take for granted.
We also talked about how the outdoor classroom could be used to raise
student motivation, thinking, engagement, and help the students link topics to
real world scenarios, whether it be doing a geometrical analysis of the
beehives, or thinking up new ways the school could use its honey.
The
second workshop on comedy in the classroom was not really what I expected it to
be. It was geared towards creating a
relaxing environment for students in the very early grades. Everything that we were shown would certainly
work and improve a first or second grade classroom, but I do not think it would
translate well to a high school class.
The
keynote speaker, Dr. Christopher Emdin, gave a very interesting and passionate
speech. I particularly agreed with him
on the need to change our styles of teaching and assessing. We need to move away from so much direct
instruction and start experiment with indirect methods. His example of the student that knew
everything about Newton’s laws, but was simply not used to showing it on a
written exam was especially moving. If a
student knows all the information, then it is a crime for them to fail the test
on it. The teacher needs to take the
time to help the students learn how to express their knowledge in different
ways without the punishment of a bad grade looming over them. I really liked the overall message of his
address. The classroom should reflect
the students’ cultures and interests.
There is no reason for school to feel like a punishment or jail, and
everyone should be comfortable enough to freely participate. One issue that was not talked about was what
if my classroom is filled with many students who’s cultures differ wildly from
one another’s? Is there a good strategy
to engage all students when all the students participate differently?
I
had a very positive experience at Promising Practices. I enjoyed the experience of getting to see
the solutions that educators have created to combat some of the problems in
their classrooms, and it got me to start thinking even more about the ways I
would want to run my own classes in the future.
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