Constructivism

When teaching conventions of Standard American English and why it is used academically in a constructivist way, I would engage the class by speaking in a dialect different than my own. Maybe I'll speak with a southern accent and then switch to a New England accent (if I can). Once the students are engaged and wondering why I am speaking differently, the students will explore through a short webquest done in groups of 4. The students will explain to the class what they found and why they came up with that explanation. To elaborate students would choose something specific that they learned from the webquest to research farther. They would write a paper and do a short presentation about their findings. To conclude learning about why Standard English is the one used in academics, I would have the students evaluate what the lesson means to them in a pair and share, then write their self-evaluations in a minute paper.

Information Processing

When teaching students how to evaluate a speech using the information processing model, I will get my students attention by singing the first lines of the Beatles song "Come together, right now" and the students will sing "Over me." Once I have their attention, I will have them activate prior knowledge by recalling a speech they have heard and thinking about what they remember most about it. Then as a class we will discuss important parts of speeches including point of view, reasoning, rhetoric, and evidence. We will repeat a chant of those four elements of speeches and at the same time I will show pictures relating to each element. The chant with the pictures is dual-coding the information that they need to know. The encode into the long term memory we will watch and evaluate a speech that is relevant to their lives and then the students will have to write and deliver their own speech using the four elements we learned. This will probably be a week long unit rather than just a single lesson.

Motivation

I will help students overcome learned helplessness by helping them develop learned optimism. I can help the students learn that through self-regulation and self-instruction they can become successful in the future. I will focus and model an incremental view of ability, that when we're not good at something we can change and improve over time. 

Another important way I will help students overcome Iearned helplessness is to meet as many of the needs on Maslow's hierarchy of needs as possible. I can make my classroom safe, help my students feel like they belong and they are loved. I will praise my students' successes so that their need for esteem will be filled. I will fill their needs for cognitive, aesthetic, and self-actualization with the content of my lessons.

Review 2

1. What are you doing well? I am doing the study guides and reading well.
2. What are you not doing well? The blogs, obviously. I think about them but don't get around to writing them.
3. Are you making sufficient progress on your goals? I am definitely learning how to connect with teens better. The field experience was a great way to do that. Through working on my assessment inventory I am getting a lot of good ideas for assessment in my future class. I have become a more efficient learner and I hope I'll be a good teacher but I don't know yet.
4. List specific things you need to change in order to meet your goals. I need to stick to my schedule more and stop getting distracted by the beautiful summer days outside. Using the 20 minutes then a break rule will give me a little bit of both worlds and I won't fall farther behind.
5. How is your motivation? Are you focusing on mastery or performance goals? Does anything need to change? My motivation is good. Even with distractions I really like this class and want to learn the material so that I can be a good teacher.
6. How is your field experience going? Name at least one take-away from your field experience to this point. Field experience is done, just working on the journal. One take away is that none of the theories that we've learned cover all the experiences in the classroom and a combination of theories makes the most sense with the evidence I've seen during the field experience.
7. What can I (Dr. Cox) do to improve your learning in this course? You're doing great. I have learned so much in this class and I feel like it's really applicable.