Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School Classroom

I fell in love with their format for final presentations. I love when my kids "perform" because I feel like that is a better judge of what they have learned and of how they have learned. I like that students have the option to pick how they want to present the information they have learned.
When I plan to do this, I want to tell students at the beginning of the unit, so as they are going through it, they have a lens for what they want to do and the information they want to include. Having the lens for what they want to do can also help students who need scaffolding throughout the lesson. It can adapt to different learning styles, such as kinesthetic or auditory, or visual.
I also like the idea of having other students pose questions to the presenter, as that is how it works in college and in the "real world", and students will have a lower affective filter because of their peers rather than the teacher asking questions.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Assessing and Evaluating student learning

My mentor teacher does not tend to give many "tests" and instead focuses on essays and continual responses from students (with a few small quizzes thrown in). In "Assessing and Evaluating Student Learning", there is a section that discusses evaluating journal and blog responses. My personal philosophy is that students tend to dump everything they know on an objective test and then forget it. I would much rather students read the text and then emotionally respond to it before discussing it in a class (kind of like how we are doing this right now). I believe that students gain more skills from journaling/blog posts. Because at the end of the day, I want students to read the texts, but its less about what they read and more about how they read it. Last year, when I started thinking about what I would like to do for my student teaching lesson, my original idea was to read The Hunger Games  with students and have them do a theme journal, where they work with partners to...
Read more

"I Read it but I Don't Get it."

What struck me about this book was how much it actually applied to me as a student. During the fake reading section, I found that I was reading about myself. Often, when I don't have time to read, I will skim a text until I make it work. I don't like to do that, but when I don't have an assignment or something to do with the reading, I find that I am less likely to complete the reading. I also have found that in my school setting. When I ask students to read something and don't give them a lens or reason to do it, the words of the reading often go over their head and they can't actually comprehend it.  Giving students a lens through which to read and how to read a text. Don't just give them a vague reason to read ("there will be a test on it"), say "I want you to read this for the different characters and fill out this sheet so we can talk about it tomorrow!". Give students a reason to read and really look for certain aspects of a text, a...
Read more

Readicide

All the way through Elementary and Middle School, whenever my parents went to parent-teacher conferences, my teachers always said "she is a good student, but she is always reading during class". I LOVED reading. I would finish books in a matter of a day sometimes. But since high school and college, I have been reading less and less. Even when I have the time to read (which isn't very often), I don't want to read because I am so burned out. When I am averaging reading 200 pages a week of generally boring or dry material, I don't even want to pick up the most exciting of novels. I think that our education system, as it has been and sometimes continues to be, doesn't allow for enough choice for students. We give them exactly what to read and how to read it, and we don't give students the ability to think and learn about how these texts apply to their own lives. Or we don't allow students to choose their own reading enough. But it isn't just about ch...
Read more