Chapter 10: Conditions for Redoing Work for Full Credit

Chapter ten had conditions that students should be allowed to redo assignments. Allowing students to redo assignments can be very powerful for understandings. However, this can also cause problems with students repeatedly putting in a half done assignment because they know that there will be a chance to repeat the assignment later on. This can cause more time grading for the teacher and more headaches. What I plan to do is to allow students to redo their work only after they have talked to me about what they did wrong and how they plan on revising and fixing the assignment. I hope that students will not rely on a redo but use it as a tool to further their knowledge. Giving students a chance to redo the assignment is very important but can be very frustrating and disappointing if not handled corretly.

Chapter 9: Ten Approaches to Avoid When Differentiating Assessment and Grading

What really stuck out to me during the reading of chapter nine was the idea that teachers shouldn’t grade students practice. This means that teachers shouldn’t grade student’s homework. This was strange to me, because I know that homework I know isn’t going to be graded has a chance that it won’t get done. After reading the options for grading homework, I came up with a few good ideas that I hope to utilize in the classroom. Give the homework a small percentage of the overall grade so it won’t affect the overall grade but will keep students honest by doing the assignments. Teachers should also provide non-graded feedback on homework so they know what they are doing wrong and can adjust their study habits or thought processes. This can be very beneficial to the teachers as well. The homework of students will be a clear indication of whether they understand the material that you are going over. So this is also a test for the teacher, homework, or any formative assignments are very important!

Chapter 8: Why Do We Grade, and What About Effort, Attendance, and Behavior?

Chapter eight was very similar to one of the chapters in Multiple Intelligences, which talked about grading participation, attendance and behavior. When teachers grade students on these tools, it tends to skew a student’s grades and may cause students to turn away from the material that is being taught. I remember when I was in school; I had my days where I didn’t talk at all because I simply didn’t feel like talking. There were classes that I felt uncomfortable in because I knew that if I didn’t contribute to the class, and then my grade would go down. I feel this unfair and students may not learn by demonstrating their knowledge to the class. In order to portray a clear demonstration of a students mastery of a subject, I will not grade students on their participation, attendance or behavior unless directed so by the school or the school district.

Chapter 7: The Relative Nature of Grades and Their Definitions

Chapter seven focused on grading and how I plan to do it. A grade is not a good indicator of how much a student knows, it is simply a letter or number on the test. By giving out grades on having no formative assessments, students will never receive the feedback that makes them a stronger learner, nor will the teacher know how well he/she is doing. The shift in grade expectation was really interesting to me because it represents a change in ideals. Students are expected to achieve higher so “C’s” are no longer average but poor. “B’s” are the averages now and this is plain to see in students today. I can remember talking with students who felt that receiving a “C” was just as bad as failing. Students need the feedback that comes with more formative assessments. I plan on giving out tests which are summative, but also a lot of formative assignments that will show what the students need to work on and what I need to make more clear in the section.

Chapter 12: MI Theory and Cognitive Skills

Teaching students through there intelligence, you can help students. Chapter twelve delves into the ways that teachers can help students learn, such as giving students rhymes for their spelling words and grammar issues. I can remember to this day that “I” comes before “E” except after “C”, or when it sounds like an “A”, as in neighbor or weigh. Giving motions to words or ideas may help those students who are kinesthetic learners. There were so many good ideas that I would like to try in my learning. I can remember my chemistry teacher singing element Christmas carols to us during class. It made me want to learn the elements and see what they did, not to mention I became a secondary education, chemistry major!

Chapter 11: MI Theory and Special Education

Chapter eleven was really beneficial to me, because it explained about kids who are in special education and help make them learn easier and faster by teaching them through their intelligence. Even students with IEP can learn through their own intelligence. I thin that this chapter helped open my eyes to the fact that everyone can be taught, not just the students in the honor classes. With the right teacher, anyone can learn because everyone is a master in their own intelligence. If I can make sure to use as much variance with my special education students, they will never be left behind because they can learn own way.

Chapter 8: MI Theory and Classroom Management

Chapter eight discussed using multiple intelligences with classroom management. For the most part, the ideas that were described seemed pretty elementary, but there were some neat ones. Like using animals or actions with the class rules and schedules. This could be important because the lab can be a dangerous place and so if I am able to help my students remember the rules of the lab, I could save the students a lot of injuries. Keeping my students engaged during the rules and schedules will help them to remember what it is they will need to remember for certain classes and keep them engaged, even during the most boring talks, such as safety.

Chapter 8: Grading and Reporting Achievement

Chapter eight focused on grading and reporting grades in a differentiated classroom. I found that this chapter was really interesting because it reminded me of all my teachers going through school. I never thought about using a curve system or a weighted system of grading. This type of teaching can hurt some students on both ends of the spectrum. The use of a bell curve is not a good representation of how students should be achieving. My students will hopefully have a high end toward the A end and very few at the F side of the grading scale. Students should not get an A in a class where students normally get C’s or D’s and then get C’s or D’s in classes where students get A’s or B’s.

Multiple Intelligences Chapter 14: MI Theory and Existential Intelligence

A ninth, potential intelligence, was introduced in chapter fourteen. The existentialist intelligence incorporates the big ideas of life, such as “why are we here?” and “who are we?”. These topics are challenging because they may lead into religion or morals. These are touching subjects, especially religion which was banned with the separation of church and state. Science can be difficult to incorporate this intelligence within my lessons. The material in chemistry could lead to existential questions, but it could also lead to religious talks very quickly. I’m worried about bringing up touchy subjects and causing problems with my students and the subject that I teach.

Multiple Intelligences Chapter 13: Other Applications of MI Theory

Chapter thirteen focused on three areas that MI theory should also be used in the classroom. These three examples were computer technology, cultural diversity, and career counseling. Computer technology is important because there is such a strong emphasis on computer geeks. There are a lot of different ways to use computers and the internet that emphasize all eight intelligences. Certain software enable students to use any intelligence that they want depending on what they are working on. I want to use technology as much as I can in as many different ways as I can. The chart in the book showed a lot of different ways that technology can be used, including plenty of nature and bodily/kinesthetic.

Multiple Intelligences Chapter 7: MI Theory and the Classroom Environment

Chapter seven introduced the activity center model for using MI in the classroom. This model is broken down into four quadrants that are split based on whether they are open ended or topic-specific and permanent and temporary. There were some really good ideas about ways that I can use MI in the classroom by setting up different stations and allowing students to either choose which station they wish to work in or place the students in the stations as I decide fits. The only problem that I have with this model is that I’m not sure that it will work out well for a high school chemistry class. Some of the stations did not sound like they would be applicable to the age group that I hope to teach. I guess I can always tweek the models so that they can fit the lessons I teach and the assessments I give out.

Understanding by Design Chapter 9: Bringing it All Together: Curriculm and Instruction Through the Lens of UbD and DI

Chapter nine summed up everything that we have learned in the book so far. Using UbD and DI in our lessons is vital but you have to be aware that not every lesson can use every single strategy. Throughout the lesson, the strategies should be used and implemented wherever applicable. One of the most important things for me to do is be flexible with the way that I instruct and assess. Starting the planning process with the big ideas, then the assessments and the lessons is important to maximizing the effectiveness of my lesson plans. Keeping the students and their learning styles in mind will help to make the class a safer and more encouraging place for students to learn and demonstrate their knowledge.

Multiple Intelligences Chapter 6: MI Theory and Teaching Strategies

Chapter six introduced new ways to help incorporate new ways of using the eight intelligences in the classroom. There were numerous examples of integrating the lessons in different ways. Seeing all of the different examples that I could choose from really helped me step back from the material and appreciate the different methods of learning and teaching. I felt relieved because I found that I could use most of them in my classes without any problem. Talking about using the techniques and actually using them in your lessons are two completely different things. After seeing ways to solve the same problem in different ways really gave me the confidence to use each intelligence to help my students.

Multiple Intelligences Chapter 5: MI Theory and Curriculum Development

Chapter five focused on implementing MI theory into curriculum design. I learned a lot about the different ways that I can incorporate multiple intelligences in my lessons. It can be very difficult to include all of the eight intelligences because of the various ways that each intelligence is displayed and used. Looking back at my education, I can list off most of the things on lists of examples that I’ve done in my classes. I never realized all of the ways that my teachers have included the different activities in their plans without our knowing it. I definitely plan on using as many of those examples in my lessons as possible. I want to enable my students to have the best chance of learning by having as many different methods as I can.

Understanding by Design Chapter 7: Teaching for Understanding in Academically Diverse Classrooms

Chapter seven focuses on the three main parts of planning lessons: using essential questions to engage learning, using the six facets, and the WHERETO model. These three tools can be used to engage students in your class and provide help in lesson plans. What relieved me was that I don’t have to use these tools all of the time in my planning. Trying to remember everything that should be included in each and every part of the lesson planning can be daunting. By using these tools here and there, it will help to un-clutter the planning process and allow for flexibility in my plans. The three main tools will be very effective in my classroom how ever because it will help to keep the students engaged in the lesson. I would also like to challenge my students who need a little help. I don’t want to label them as being “slow” and give them basic material to work on. I want to push them to keep doing their best as well and have them attempt to understand the bigger questions involved, while still being reasonable.

Understanding by Design Chapter Six: Responsive Teaching with UbD in Academically Diverse Classrooms

Chapter six is about flexibility in a teacher’s instruction. Flexibility is the key to helping students when they haven’t mastered the material. Using multiple intelligences and activities in your lessons helps all students in the classroom. The best grades I ever got in classes were the ones where the teachers tended to flex how their instruction was taught. Giving students more time on certain assignments and giving more time on instruction where students were falling behind. There are classes where the teachers were not so flexible and I had a lot of trouble. I know that I will make sure to give students a second chance on homework, because this can help students to really master the material. Giving them feedback about what they have learned will help them to hone their knowledge.

FIAE Chapter 6: Creating Good Test Questions

This section was one of the best sections so far because I really enjoyed looking through all of the examples and seeing the different ways that I can improve my tests for my students. Some of those were giving lots of small quizzes in between tests, changing the vocabulary of questions so they aren’t stuck in the same format and giving feedback as soon as possible. One of the formats that really stuck out at me was the use of many quizzes in between the big tests. This has always been a very important way for me to focus on whether I have truly mastered the required information or if I needed to go back and fix my misconceptions. Quizzes do not have to be long nor do they have to be difficult. Giving the students feedback will allow them to adjust the focus of their studying. Using quizzes will also give me feedback on how the students are doing and what needs to be worked on for a little bit longer on what the students have mastered.

FIAE Chapter 5: Tiering Assessments

Chapter five talked about the concept of tiering. Tiering is used for adjusting the challenge level in assignments. Not every student will be at the same level in the classroom, so this will give all the students a chance to learn the material at their own level. The best classes I have ever been in gave the ability for each student to work on their own level of work. This doesn’t mean that the students were able to slack off if they wanted to but they also weren’t required to do work harder than they were able to do. Tiering is an important skill that I hope to incorporate in all of my lessons and assignments because it will give everyone, no matter the skill level, the ability to do their best work. By encouraging students to work at as high a level as they can, I hope they will push themselves to achieve as much as possible.

FIAE Chapter 4: Three Important Types of Assessement

Three types of assessment were introduced in chapter four, including portfolios, rubrics and self-assessments. Portfolios are useful to students because they require the students’ work and their explanations for why their piece of work meets the goal that was set for the portfolio. Beyond simply doing an assignment, portfolios really made me think about why I did that assignment and how that assignment really fit into the main ideas of the class. I felt like this really benefited my understanding of my work and forced me to really master the material that was being covered. This could be very helpful to the students in my class because if they keep a portfolio of the important ideas that I lay out for them in the beginning of the year, the important concepts that I want them to truly grasp will hopefully be imbedded. This is also a way for me to check and see if the students truly grasp the concepts at hand.

Multiple Intelligences Chapter 10: MI Theory and Assessment

Chapter ten discussed the way that we cannot only use MI theory on our lessons, but also on assessments. Some of the methods that were suggested were student interviews, anecdotal records, and informal assessments. Student interviews was the one that really jumped out at me because I had never used it or even heard about it being used in a classroom. Varying assessments will be a good way to keep my students interested in my class and help them learn truly master the material, not simply know it for the test. By varying the ways that my students will be assess, I hope to change the process of learning the material for test and then forgetting about it later. By doing assessments that require the knowledge of the material, I hope they will have deep understanding, not surface knowledge.

FIAE Chapter 3: Principles of Successful Assessment in the Differentiated Classroom

The biggest thing that jumped out to me in chapter three was to be abrupt with the students.  Tell them what is going to be on the tests so that they can look for those important facts that they will need to put in their reservoir of knowledge.  Having an idea of what I will be expected to know for an assessment before the content was provided always allowed me to know all of the information that was truly important in the material covered.  I learned more when I knew what it was that I needed to concentrate on instead of memorizing everything in the book.  I will pass out tests at the beginning so that they can differentiate the important aspects from when they come up in class.  The numbers and certain material in the “true” test will be changed, but everything else on the test will be exactly the same.

FIAE Chapter 2: Mastery

Assessments are difficult to give students because teachers need to see mastery of the subject not just lucky guesses.  Teachers must assess students in ways that they can be sure that the students truly understand what they had done with a certain problem.  I will have to find ways in order to create assessments that demand true understanding of the ideas.  I will need to become creative when I create my tests and assessments because I will differentiate the assessments in as many ways as I can; at the same time I will make sure that the students will truly understand the point of each topic they are learning.  My students will have to write out their reasons for certain answers.  I will require them to do different types of questions using the same knowledge with different contexts.

FIAE Chapter 1: The Differentiated instruction Mind-Set: Rationale and Definition

Differentiation is in everyday life including going to the grocery store.  Without differentiation in the classroom, we would probably never be able to learn all of the skills that are necessary to graduate.  Differentiation is important because, differentiation can be a deal breaker in students’ success.  Being the one who can create success in a student or ruining his/her academic career is an important and sometimes scary prospect.  Students will see as many different ways to learn and succeed as I can find in my career.  Having the necessary skills to join a college classroom and understand the different ways of learning will hopefully be something that I will be able to provide for my students. 

Understanding By Design Chapter 5: Considering Evidence of Learning in Diverse Classrooms

Giving students multiple types of assessment options is key to finding students mastery of the subject.  Allowing them to do the certain type of assessment can encourage students to succeed by giving them options to do what they want.  Keeping students motivated during assessments will keep a happier class.  I want to be flexible in the ways that my students learn, so it is important that I vary the ways that I teach and the ways that I assess the students’ mastery of the subject.  By using the tic-tac-toe method, students will be allowed to choose certain projects and assessments that they find interesting and worthwhile.  By giving feedback on the projects, my students will be able to adapt and grow stronger based on the helpful feedback I give.

Multiple Intelligences Chapter 4: Teaching Students MI Theory

Chapter four was about teaching students the multiple intelligence model of learning.  The different ways to teach students the model are five minute introduction to MI theory and activities for teaching, including, career day, field trips, biographies, lesson plans, quick experiential activities, wall displays, displays, readings, MI tables, human intelligence hunt, board games, Mi stories, songs and plays.  In order to help my students and myself I could show them the different ways that they learn and then discover how they learn straight from the horse’s mouth.  I think that this would save the kids that I will be teaching, and I, a lot of grief because I will know immediately who can do what.  I think that the students will benefit from this method the most because they will know how they learn and they can begin to see where their talents lay.  I will also be able to better suit the different learners in the group because I will know who learns the best in certain intelligences.

Multiple Intelligences Chapter 3: Describing Intelligences in Students

Chapter three talked a lot about the different ways of discovering what the different learning styles of kids are in a classroom.  Included in the chapter was a checklist for teachers to use as a guide to discovering how some, if not all, of your students learn.  By finding out how a troublesome kid learns and applying a difference in your lesson plan to incorporate that student sounds like a very important step to solving a lot of problems in the classroom.  Being able to take tabs on all of the students and their tendencies sounds like it will be very difficult.  But if I can take just a few notes a week on a student, it can add up to be a very long list by the end of the year.  By discovering the different learning styles in the classroom, my students will be adjusted to in each lesson.  I will find ways to incorporate as many of the learning styles that prove to be visible in the students of each class.

Understanding by Design Chapter 4: What Really Matters in Planning For Student Success

The fourth chapter talked about the nine attitudes and skills that teachers need to learn.  Those are establish clarity about curricular essentials, accept responsibility for learner success, develop communities of respect, build awareness of what works for each student, develop classroom management routines that contribute to success, help students become effective partners in their own success, develop flexible classroom teaching routines, expand a repertoire of instructional strategies, and reflect on individual progress with an eye toward curricular goals and personal growth.  These are all good examples of the skills that I hope to acquire over time while in practicum and when I’ve become a teacher.  I will have to really watch out for ways to change my instruction and personality to fit these important components.  My classes will greatly benefit from the essential skills and attitudes such as the expansion of a repertoire of instructional strategies.  The lessons will vary in the structure and work that they will be asked to work on in and out of the classroom.

Understanding by Design Chapter 3: What Really Matters In Learning (Continued)

One of the most important tools at a teacher’s disposal is the lesson plan.  The lesson plan is made of the three stages that consist of deciding on the content of the lesson, deciding on how to assess the students on what you’ve decided to teach and plan the instruction and experiences.  This is a vital skill to learn because this will be needed for every lesson that I will teach in the future.  Each stage is important because it covers all the aspects of teaching that lesson will be, starting at what you hope they will take from the lesson to how you will assess what they actually took from the lesson.  In this chapter, the author talked about the standards that we will have to meet.  This will be important in my classroom because I will have to adapt my lesson plans to meet the Maine Learning Standards.

Understanding By Design Chapter 2: What Really Matters in Teaching?(The Students)

The second chapter introduced ways to meet the needs of the classroom as a whole. The author spoke about the need to help as many of your students as possible, but not to expect to help every one. This chapter gave me a few ideas that I wouldn’t mind implementing if I do perceive a problem with one of my students.  One of my big worries was that I wouldn’t be able to satisfy every type of learner with every lesson I taught. Being able to diagnose that there is a problem and then attempt to discover the cause is a very important step.  Teaching is a continuous learning process that will never stop because there are so many different types of learners that I will have to account for. 

Understanding by Design Chapter 1: UbD and DI: Ab Essential Partnership

Being able to successfully implement understanding by design and differential instruction is key to helping students learn in an effective and welcoming way.  Differential instruction and understanding by design should used together in order to maximize the effectiveness of the teacher.  One of the most important things I saw in the chapter was the part where teachers are still learners.  This is important because as teachers, we will need to keep learning new ways to implement different styles of teaching and learning in our classrooms.  Another one of the important things for teachers to do is to keep the students interested in the material they’re learning.  Allow them to apply the things they are learning to the groups or the activities in their own lives.

Multiple Intelligences Chapter 2: MI Theory and Personal Developement

Chapter two talked about the importance of balancing your own intelligences.  It is important for teachers to incorporate as many different types of teaching as possible.  I know that I do my best to stay away from the intelligences that I lack in but I know I should change this.  There were some good tips in this chapter that will help out with my deficiencies in some of my intelligences. Some different ways to help yourself in the classroom is to ask your colleagues, ask students to come up with examples of art or music, and simply push yourself to change your deficiencies.  Bringing in as many different examples of each type of learning in all my units will encourage students to learn no matter what type of learner they are.

Multiple Intelligences chapter 1: The Foundations of MI Theory

Chapter one focused on how people learn and the eight intelligences.  There are eight intelligences including Linguistic, logical-Mathematical, Spatial, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Musical, interpersonal, Intrapersonal and Naturalist.  These eight intelligences make up who I am, and how I learn.  I learned that everyone is different and there a lot of different ways for someone to be intelligent in their own way.  This will be important because I will need to incorporate as many different styles of teaching in my classroom as I can.  I also learned that everyone’s personality and they’re style of learning is much more difficult to pinpoint than I thought it would have been.