Personal Description
A teacher must be able to use an understanding of individual and group motivation and behavior to create learning environments that encourage positive social interaction, active engagement in learning, and self-motivation. Students learn content, practice skills, share ideas, and interact with the teacher and one another in the environment created by the teacher. An environment that is open to ideas, yet behaviorally controlled, sets clear and challenging goals yet supports intrinsically motivated student choices. It allows students to productively work while interacting with peers, setting up students for success. The classroom teacher needs to establish the learning environment on the first day of class and uphold it consistently throughout the year.
Supporting Artifacts and Analysis
I want to manage a self-directed classroom. Unfortunately, this is incredibly difficult, as students are used to being told what to do at school. I need to gradually release responsibility and have clear expectations for behavior.and classroom procedures. This document contains the rules, procedures, and discipline system that govern my classroom. It also contains a plan for teaching these things, including a handful of topics to cover on the first day of each course. Additional information is given on my ideal classroom layout, digital infrastructure to support my classes, and how I envision tracking student differentiation. In the plan, I propose a room setup that is conducive to both group work and focused individual work. The procedures I will teach students are designed to allow many students to be doing different things without losing my control of the classroom. Just like my instructional design, my behavior policy is built on clarity and student-responsibility. Except for obvious misconduct, I will give students a clear warning to change behavior before enacting consequences, and when appropriate, I may ask the student to guide the setting of their own consequences. Finally, to keep all resources organized and available to students 24/7, my course website hosts the schedules, assignments, videos, and solutions that a student may need.
In my first year in the classroom, I was learning classroom management from two different mentor teachers while trying to develop my own ways of doing things. As a result, my procedures ended up being different in each of my courses and poorly enforced across the board. As a teacher who thrives on chaos in the learning process, it is critical that I enforce a consistent method to manage my classroom. In a new semester leading my own classes, I have become more comfortable with my own rules and more comfortable handling students who are breaking those rules in class.
The Minute to Win It project used games to motivate teams of students to perform a variety of statistical analyses. I grouped the class into teams of 3 and asked each team to select a game from the TV show's website. After choosing a game, each team chose a categorical and quantitative variable to measure and made predictions on the outcomes. The game days were chaotic and fun, but to a statistics teacher, it was a ton of data being generated and captured in an incredibly short time. After the games were played, each team needed to complete a series of statistical analyses using two-way tables, the binomial distribution, confidence intervals, and hypothesis testing on the data and use these as the basis for a technical paper. Since the paper was written using Google Docs, I was able to read their work daily and comment on it before the next class, allowing teams to rapidly iterate on their work. The classroom environment throughout this project was very free-form and self-directed. Each team worked on things in their own way, seeking my help when needed or asking me to expand on my earlier comments. The use of collaborative tools such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets made it possible for me to interact with every group, every day, despite the fact that I may not reach every group for an in-depth conversation each period. By providing the students with an open-ended team challenge, clear examples to direct them, and daily written and oral feedback as a guide, the students created incredible papers. My greatest changes to the next iteration of this project will be the content addressed -- I believe that the project will work even better when placed within a newly organized unit on comparative inference.
In this short paper, I discuss the major things I have learned about student motivation. Topics addressed include level of challenge, grouping, choice, and praise. Students need an appropriate level of challenge to stay motivated. In a classroom of 20-30 kids, this means a variety of available challenge levels that students can work through when they are ready. Because of the social consequences of ability-based grouping, students should be in charge of deciding which level of challenge is most helpful to push them forward. Second, students enjoy choice in their specific topic of study. When a range of topics will suffice to teach a skill or concept, it is often best to let each student or group of students choose the topic that interests them. Finally, the teacher's praise and level of expectation can be motivating or detrimental. An effective teacher gives very targeted praise when it is earned and holds high and consistent expectations for all students.
Synthesis
My team-based statistics project represents the style of learning I look forward to making standard practice in many of my courses. In my teaching, I strive to provide students with cooperative, active learning opportunities that mimic realistic uses of the skills they are learning. My short paper on student motivation highlights the specific areas in which I hope to make the curriculum more motivating and engaging -- choice in challenge level and topic. For the sake of time efficiency and clarifying highly non-intuitive topics, direct instruction clearly has a place, but I want to situate it at a time where students see the need for my lesson moments before I deliver it in person or they view it online. An active and differentiated learning environment appears chaotic -- it requires strong classroom management, which I have briefly outlined in my classroom management plan. Finally, the teacher needs to keep close track of all students and offer both praise and coaching when needed. With all of this, I hope to create a learning environment that excites students, motivates them to work hard, and prepares them for college and the workplace.