Month: January 2009

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Student Teacher Evaluation 1971

I recently found my student teacher evaluation. It’s nearly thirty-eight years old – an interesting prediction about what would eventually emerge as my teaching style. At the time, I was a senior at Hartwick College in Oneonta NY. I student taught at very small rural school in South New Berlin NY. It was a K-12 central school of about 300 students with a senior class of about a dozen.  You can download my first evaluation here. (348KB pdf)  
 
Peter-eval
I’ve included a few comments from my college supervisor:

You have no problem with class control when you wanted it. – I suggest you get it as soon as you are ready to start.
Learning cannot go on to any great extent, if half the students are talking.

And I especially like this one – what an image!

Climb on them and let them know what you expect.

[Ironically, I was teaching a lesson on Ghandi and civil disobedience!]
 
I suspect my college supervisor was hoping to see a well-organized lecture with attentive students busy taking notes. At the time, I was just stumbling along trying to figure out how to engage my kid in their learning. After teaching few years,  I realized it involved shifting my role from information dispenser to designer of learning environment. For example, I had to learn not to reply to every student response during a whole group discussion. That teacher-dominated discussion was only teaching my students that none of their comments had any value, until I “approved” them. As more experienced teacher, my classes were filled with student discussion – the difference was, I had well-planned formats that encouraged all students to reflect and contribute. Unlike my college supervisor, I do believe learning can go on with all the students talking!
 
BTW: I did see one positive in my student teacher evaluation. In the space for “Chalkboard Work.” He had written “used overhead.”  Guess I was into cutting-edge technology from the earliest days of my career.
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Meeting Middle East Educators

IMG_0542 Last week I presented at the TeachME 2009 International Education Conference, in Dubai. It was a great pleasure to meet dedicated educators from across the Gulf Coast region. 

While many of the attendees are expats, a sizable number were local teachers and administrators. Their similarity to American educators far surpassed any differences. A smile behind a face veil is no less joyful. 

As President Obama said at his inauguration,  "We cannot help but believe that …as our world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself…" 

I suspect teachers will lead the way. 

Notice the TurningPoint response cards on orange lanyards – everybody loves clickers!
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Search Strategies Revealed

I thought this recent article from the New York Times "At First, Funny Videos. Now, a Reference Tool" opened with the interesting quote on search strategies.  

Faced with writing a school report on an Australian animal, Tyler Kennedy began where many student begin these days: by searching the Internet. But Tyler didn’t use Google or Yahoo. He searched for information about the platypus on YouTube.

18ping.1901“I found some videos that gave me pretty good information about how it mates, how it survives, what it eats,” Tyler said. Similarly, when Tyler gets stuck on one of his favorite games on the Wii, he searches YouTube for tips on how to move forward. And when he wants to explore the ins and outs of collecting Bakugan Battle Brawlers cards, which are linked to a Japanese anime television series, he goes to YouTube again.

While he favors YouTube for searches, he said he also turns to Google from time to time.

“When they don’t have really good results on YouTube, then I use Google,” said Tyler, who is 9 and lives in Alameda. Calif.

Tyler is a self-directed and reflective learner, who monitors his progress. That's good news for educators as long as we can harness his growth, not stand in his way. As Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, once said “Search is highly personal and empowering. It’s the antithesis of begin told or taught.” 

Noah Berger for The New York Times
Tyler Kennedy, 9, at home in California, uses YouTube to research reports for school and to hunt tips to advance in his video games.
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TeachME 2009 International Education Conference ~ Dubai, UAE

Teachme

I'm pleased to have been invited to present at the TeachME 2009 Conference in Dubai (January 14-15, 2009). TeachME 09 has registered delegates from: Australia, Egypt, Gambia, Germany, Iran, Jordan, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Liberia, Pakistan, Qatar, Sultanate of Oman, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and USA.

I will give two talks and offer three workshops. You can download pdf version of the handouts. I've removed the images and video to keep file size down.

Talks

Workshops

The conference has been organized by Rearden Educational – the only educational company of its kind in the Arab world, serving the Levant and GCC countries. Organized under the banner of Excellence in Education, the conference mission is:

Confronted with modern teaching techniques, educators have some thorny issues to sort through and a portfolio of skills to adopt in their quest to ensure lifelong learning. Today’s teachers must motivate students to read, seek knowledge, initiate activities that catalyze their curiosity, engage them in debates, innovate when resources are scarce, stimulate their senses and drive to explore, make it rewarding for them to investigate, captivate their interest in networking and get them to cooperate together towards a common and worthwhile purpose. Experts at the TeachME 2009 Conference will gear their efforts towards focusing their workshops around these themes adding inspiration to education in an innovative approach.


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Physics Department Innovates with Student-Centered Approach

There's an interesting piece in the New York Times "At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard" (1/13/09) that details an effort by the MIT physics department to move to a more student-centered, interactive approach to instruction. Physics is not simply a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking, asking questions and discovering answers.

At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required — classical mechanics and electromagnetism — but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers.

Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants, the professor makes brief presentations of general principles and engages the students as they work out related concepts in small groups.

Teachers and students conduct experiments together. The room buzzes. Conferring with tablemates, calling out questions and jumping up to write formulas on the white boards are all encouraged.

“There was a long tradition that what it meant to teach was to give a really well-prepared lecture,” said Peter Dourmashkin, a senior lecturer in physics at M.I.T. and a strong proponent of the new method. “It was the students’ job to figure it out.”

The problem, say Dr. Dourmashkin and others in the department, is that a lot of students had trouble doing that. The failure rate for those lecture courses, even those taught by the most mesmerizing teachers, was typically 10 percent to 12 percent. Now, it has dropped to 4 percent.

… The traditional 50-minute lecture was geared more toward physics majors, said Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard who is a pioneer of the new approach, and whose work has influenced the change at M.I.T.

“The people who wanted to understand,” Professor Mazur said, “had the discipline, the urge, to sit down afterwards and say, ‘Let me figure this out.’ ” But for the majority, he said, a different approach is needed.

“Just as you can’t become a marathon runner by watching marathons on TV,” Professor Mazur said, “likewise for science, you have to go through the thought processes of doing science and not just watch your instructor do it.”