week[3] - Cowboys Red, Falcons Blue

Not going to lie, this week hit me hard. Lots of time in the gym kept my confidence and general mood up, but I constantly felt pressured for time and worried that I was going to fall even further behind. I'm glad that I've managed to put together some better task-management routines, and hope to keep doing this for the future. It will take daily maintenance, which I now realize is going to be a necessity.

Some goals for the week:

• Finish the second stats homework. I have some progress down, but need to dig into the meat of the new material (especially multiple regression modeling, which I'm less familiar with in R). I did make some progress tonight and the problem set is melting away quickly before my code, which is nice to see.

• Set up the new closet. You may remember this goal from last week... lol.

• Reshape my fantasy team. It's looking like I'm going to lose, in both leagues, as we close out week 2 of the NFL season. Time to make some changes (or maybe not as I have very few of the many, many players injured in week 2)

This is something I haven't done yet, but I thought it might be interesting to briefly summarize what I'm learning in various classes so you can get a taste for what I'm talking about in my coursework.

Math/Sci Ed Policy, PD & Teacher Prep

This class focuses largely on what policy around education looks like, what "reform" efforts look like and aim for, and our working model for how factors inside and outside the classroom inform curriculum & instruction.

This week, we focused on pre-service and in-service teacher training, learning, and development. To do this, we engaged a few different sources (listed below) that lay out models for how and what teachers learn as part of a community; I also looked at a source that examined how different aspects of a Lesson Study PD session can impact teachers' growth, learning, and expectations moving forward.

• Hammerness, K. (2005). How teachers learn and develop. Preparing Teachers for a Changing World, 358–389.

• Putnam, R. T., & Borko, H. (2000). What Do New Views of Knowledge and Thinking Have to Say About Research on Teacher Learning? Educational Researcher , 29(1), 4–15.

• Akiba, M., Murata, A., Howard, C. C., & Wilkinson, B. (2019). Lesson study design features for supporting collaborative teacher learning. Teaching and Teacher Education, 77, 352–365.

Core I

This class (first of a two-semester series) focuses on what educational research is, our position and identity as researchers, and how equity and social justice can be emphasized throughout educational research. It also serves to develop our analytical and communication skills!

(yes, this class has a lot of reading)

This week, we focused heavily on how improvements to pedagogy could better serve more learners in school. I focused on a chapter about Talking About Leaving, a study from the 90s (revisited recently with a follow-up) that looks at why students switch out of STEM majors. In many of our readings this week, we noted the many ways in which "traditional" education methods often disproportionately fail women and students of color, and how inclusive and culturally-responsive pedagogy can often improve the educational experience vastly for these groups.

• Andrews, D. J. C., Brown, T., Castillo, B. M., Jackson, D., & Vellanki, V. (2019). Beyond damage-centered teacher education: Humanizing pedagogy for teacher educators and preservice teachers. Teachers College Record, 121(6).

• Kahne, J., Hodgin, E., & Eidman-Aadahl, E. (2016). Redesigning Civic Education for the Digital Age: Participatory Politics and the Pursuit of Democratic Engagement. Theory & Research in Social Education, 44(1), 1–35.

• Mirra, N., Morrell, E., & Filipiak, D. (2018). From Digital Consumption to Digital Invention: Toward a New Critical Theory and Practice of Multiliteracies. Theory Into Practice, 57(1), 12–19.

• Murphy, P. K., & Knight, S. L. (2016). Exploring a Century of Advancements in the Science of Learning. Review of Research in Education, 40(1), 402–456.

• Peele-Eady, T. B., & Foster, M. L. (2018). The more things change, the more they stay the same: African American English, language policy, and African American learners. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 31(8), 652–666.

• Seymour, E., Hunter, A.-B., & Weston, T. J. (2019). Why We Are Still Talking About Leaving. In E. Seymour & A.-B. Hunter (Eds.), Talking about Leaving Revisited: Persistence, Relocation, and Loss in Undergraduate STEM Education (pp. 1–53). Springer International Publishing.

General Linear Methods I (Stats)

This class is the second of a three-course sequence in basic statistical skills in R. It covers multiple linear regression, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), multiple comparison procedures, factorial ANOVA, Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), nested designs, and some other skills.

So far, we've worked our way up to linear regression (these weeks of the course have mostly been review from Quantitative Research Methods I, of which I placed out). On this homework and covered in (asynchronous) class next week, we're starting multiple linear regression (which uses several explanatory variables, rather than one, to build a predictive model for a response variable).

Since this class is asynchronous and focused on particular statistical skills, there isn't much to say about our conversations (since there really... aren't any, besides my professor, TA and I chatting in office hours about how much stuff I still don't know how to do in R). So, I'll show you some things I got to make in R so far, which should get prettier (or uglier -- who knows) as the semester goes on.