WAITING AND TEACHING (WEEK 7)
This post was AMAZING! In this first post by Mrs. Follis she talks about how jobs in her past taught her things for her teaching career! She was a pizza girl and her job was to serve the customers that came in. She compares this to things she does now by stating the students are like the customers, even though they might need something they may stay quiet. She alerts teachers that we shouldn't just sit at our desk and wait for student that have questions but that we should know by looking at them. This post really hit home for me. As a student I was always so scared to raise my had and ask questions, I was scared my classmates would think I was stupid or that what I might say was the wrong answer. I would sit at my desk in complete confusion about my work and not do anything. Sadly I didn't have a teacher like Mrs. Follis. My teachers never noticed I was struggling because they weren't looking for it. They sat at their desk and expected me to come ask. The reason I loved this post so much is because it really opened my eyes to how important it is a a future teacher to pay attention to the children. I never really thought about this issue until I read this post. As teachers we are suppose to do everything we can to make sure every student has an equal learning opportunity and if that means walking around and asking every student that looks confused then thats what we should do. No more waiting at our desk for students to come to us, we should go to them!
COLLABORATION AND COOPERATIVE LEARNING (WEEK 8)
Another amazing post by Mrs. Follis. In this post we are reading about group work for students. I completely agree with everything Mrs. Follis is saying. When group work is assigned a think it is very important to allow the children to choose their groups. This is because as stated in her blog children will choose other kids with the same mentalities as themselves. This make the group work setting about as fair as possible. The danger of the teacher assigning groups is there will always be students who try hard and want their A and work for it and there will also be students who don't care as much or don't want to try. When these two very different students are paired together disaster strikes. Often there is one student who does all the work while the other student sits back and collects the benefit of a free A. However if the student choose their own groups the over achievers will pair with other over achievers and get everything done together and the students that don't care so much will be paired with other careless students but will have no choice but to do their work for fear of the other student not doing it. This is such a simple but true logic. Im sure anyone who has ever been a student knows the difference in choosing their own group and being assigned one. I know I have been there! I in some cases got lucky and was paired with over achievers that wanted everything done right and perfect so it was easy to work with, but I have also been in groups with the people who didn't care so I had to do EVERYTHING! Also after reading this post I came up with another idea. If a teacher insist on choosing groups for whatever reason why not make the projects in parts to make sure student workload is fair. Any project can be easily tweeked to where all students have a part and then the final result equals GROUP work. The example I used on the Follis Files was for a literature project. If students read part of a story and are told to predict or make up the end the assignment could include for each student to come up with a section then the group work would be to put everyone ideas in the final draft. I believe things like this could work wonders in group learning settings! I know that when I teach I will always allow students to choose their own groups and if I don't I will be sure to make all the projects fair work load to where every student must play a very important part and if they chose not to do so it would effect their personal grade only and not the student who might actual be hard workers!
NEW FAVORITE READING HANDOUT (WEEK 9)
This post explained a new strategy Mrs. Follis is trying with her students. I completely agree with the way she is coming up with new ways for her students to learn. If more teachers were like her and would use their brain rather than just going by the books we would be in a better place as far as the world of school goes. Mrs. Follis talks about how she is using group work to teach the different sections. say there are 5 parts to an assignment. why make every student do all five parts at once? it just makes more since to do this activity on parts. you get your groups and and assign each group a part. after every group has alternated and done every part you go over it as a whole and make sure everyone understands from not only personal experience but from what their fellow students discovered as well! I love this idea and will most certainly be using it in the future!
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