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7/10: Pecha Kucha

The link to my Pecha Kucha on engaging students with culturally-responsive teaching can be found here .  When I started my undergraduate degree at Bucknell University, I wanted to study literature and psychology. But when I went to register for my first semester of classes, all of the psychology classes were full. In a desperate attempt to learn something about psychology, I registered for a class called Educational Psychology. Because the course was within the Education Department, I figured I might as well see what other classes the department had to offer. And thus, the following semester, I found myself registering for a course called Social Foundations of Education. Before the course started hardly knew what to expect. What’s social about education? It wasn’t like I was going to be a teacher anyway, I just loved school and wanted to learn how it worked. Needless to say, that class changed me in a million ways. It opened my eyes to the vast inequities that exist within our co...
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7/7: School in a Cloud

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I really appreciated Sugata Mirta's TED talk about his "school in a cloud." We talk so much about the manifold advantages and disadvantages school districts face, but I don't think we put enough effort, energy, or resources into actually creating change in those underserved communities. What would it mean to distribute Chromebooks to all of our kids? What would it mean to inspire curiosity and forgo the pressures of relentless testing? Mirta's students in India engaged in learning because it was relevant to them. As Wesch reminds us, we must  engage students in that which interests them. Testing does not interest them. We know this. We also know we need data, so how can we balance these two drastically different needs (admin v. students)? It is perhaps an age old question, but what can we do about it? Mirta asks newer questions. Can we level the playing filed? Is it really just a matter of resources? Willing knowing every be obsolete? Are we adapting to a changin...
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7/6: Turkle and Wesch

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Everyone can admit the ways in which our society has gone digital. Standing in line at the grocery store, I look around me at all of the people looking down at their phones and am disappointed. This is not to say that our digital lives don't have value. It's true that they provide us with entertainment, allow us to organize our professional selves, and help us stay in touch with people who live far away from us. However, the Turkle argues that these same devices are taking us places we don't want to go (a life with absolute control, edited photos, planned friendships, pre-meditated conversations, etc.). The unlimited and endless power to edit and delete gives us agency to clean up both our bodies and relationships, pushing us away from honest connections and compromising our capacity for self-reflection.  How do we teach our kids to self-reflect? Wesch, in his article on anti-teaching, suggests giving students space to connect, be creative, and think critically in order to ...
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7/5: Popular culture and media through a critical lens

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I know I've mentioned this in class before, but one of the first lessons I ever taught was on gender stereotypes in popular culture. It was during my semester of student teaching, when I felt very ambitious but relied heavily on my cooperating teacher for moral support and lesson advice. It was an AP class -- eleventh grade -- so most of the students were role models for good behavior and participation. They wrote essays, made collages, and broke down advertisements in a similar way to the activity Brittany led for us. Then, this past year, I taught a similar unit for my eighth-graders in the inner city. Though the experience was different in many ways, I saw a lot of the same critical thinking and questioning from them that I did my AP high schoolers.  In the very beginning of her essay, Christensen explains what I think is essential to understand before diving into such an intense and political topic: that we rarely have firsthand experience of people who are different from us. I...
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7/4: GoGuardian: A Mini-Tutorial

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When I learned last summer that my new school's curriculum would be 100% online, I was nervous. Though great for the environment, I didn't know how I would be able to monitor students' screens and keep them on task. I began the year with apprehension and tried my best to get students to "crocodile" their Chromebooks whenever we weren't using them. But then I was introduced to the most wonderful website in existence.  GoGuardian is every teacher's best friend. It allows you to set up digital classrooms that line up with your bell schedule so that all of your students' screens appear together in real time. With all of the screens in a mosaic in front of you, it's easy to see which students are off-task. Then, in a glorious act modern-day teachers dream of, you can click on those off-task screens and close the students' tabs for them. (The best part is watching their faces as their YouTube video disappears before their eyes.) You can also open ta...
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7/4: Rethinking Schools: Middle School and Gender Stereotypes

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In looking through our textbook to choose a chapter to read for today's blog post, I wanted to find something relevant to my own teaching practice. I landed on a chapter called Seventh Graders and Sexism by Lisa Espinosa, mainly because it was about one of our curriculum topics (gender issues in media) and was centered around middle school students (seventh grade).  Espinosa uses the chapter to tell the story of her work with middle schoolers in identifying and protesting against gender stereotypes in popular culture and the media. In an attempt to supplement the curriculum with what she considered to be a pressing and relevant issue, Espinosa recounts her plan: "I planned for them to reflect on some common gender biases and to critically analyze the media’s role in reaffirming these stereotypes" (p. 154). She had her students brainstorm stereotypes for men and women and then asked them to reflect on why they had engaged in the stereotypes they had identified. She used c...
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7/3: The Golden Circle

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We spent some time last week looking at advertisements and the ways in which they influence us. In watching and reading ads and thinking about the intention behind them, it became clear that companies often market lifestyles, philosophies, and aspirations more than their actual products. The commercials that typically have the most influence over us are the ones that appeal to our emotions and logical minds, the ones that leave us with a feeling  instead of just the name of a new product or service. Simon Sinek's TED talk on innovation and success in business tells us why: companies that market the "why" of who they are are inherently more successful than those who market the "what" of their business. We, as consumers, want to know what a companies stand for so that we can subscribe to those that align with our beliefs. A few examples come to mind: This famous Budweiser commercial from the Super Bowl in 2013. Nike's commercial promoting the Black Lives Mat...
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