Prompt #3: Shor

In the school I have been teaching in, it is very clear that there are many cultural differences and many bilingual students. As a teacher, one needs to be aware of the differences among students and accommodate to the many diverse learners they will encounter throughout their years as an educator. Educators need to understand that different students will all learn differently and we can’t ignore that.

My service learning classroom doesn’t have too much of a linguistic variety; all the students speak English from what I’ve heard. My teacher doesn’t seem to really need to adapt assessments or assignments for any certain student based on their linguistic, sociocultural or ethnic characteristics. If I was a teacher, however, and I had a large classroom with many linguistic, sociocultural or ethnic characteristics that required individual attention for certain students, I would follow the ideas of Ira Shor.

Shor talks about how education is very political based on three aspects. The first is that the interaction between students and teachers, and students and students is political in itself. There are always classroom rules that require raising your hand to speak, not talking during class work, not talking to your peers, ect. Shor says interaction between each other is critical in order to truly learn. I would personally allow class discussions for the students to talk about the material being learned, so they are able to mentally test each other on what they understand and don’t understand, as well as for themselves. Then I would allow more time to have a class discussion so we could clear up any questions they need. This would allow them to be more prepared for any assessment coming up. Oh, and of course I would make all of the discussions interesting in some way! =]

Shor’s second aspect is funding in schooling is very political. As a classroom teacher I would not have much, if any, authority to determine where the funding goes in the school, therefore this subject is irrelevant. But, his third aspect of political schooling is testing. He says that because some teachers still follow the “traditional” style of teaching like using a straight forward script or syllabus or giving standardized tests, it’s giving unequal opportunities for students to learn. Shor says studies actually show that women and minorities are proven to do worse on standardized tests. He says the answer to this problem is teachers giving student-centered tests because they are more likely to increase the knowledge of the students; what you learn depends on the teacher.

As future educators we need to remember that not every student is going to learn the same way other students may. We can handwrite our own assessments, allow students to engage in activities and interact with each other, and most importantly listen to what they have to say about the content matter. From there we can determine where they are knowledgably in terms of the current topic they’re being tested on, and clear up any problems or misunderstandings they might have, and make tests depending on that.


note on the video: This gives a lot of good advice on how to differentiate your teaching for students who learn in different ways. Many of the quotes, if you pay close attention, are almost exactly what Shor and Dewey are saying in their articles! This is great advice and a really great video to watch! Enjoy!

Prompt #2: Dewey

When I look around my classroom I see a variety of faces, each one different; different colored skin, different features, and most importantly different voices. There are only two white students out of the fourteen in the class, one Asian student, and the rest are all African-American or Hispanic. According to Infoworks, 59% of the school is Hispanic, 31% is African-American, 6% is white, 3% is Asian and 1% is Native-American. Every time I go into the school I see how much more different it is than the schools I was educated in.

Every student is different and I believe that everybody has something different to bring to the table. When I was observing my classroom last week the teacher was reading the students a book about a cowboy who lost his horse. Each section of the book had a picture that demonstrated what was happening. At the very last page was blank lines and a picture of the cowboy and his horse. The students were asked to come up with their own ending to the story and write it on the lines, and then color in the picture. When they were finished a few students read aloud their endings. It was so interesting to hear all the variations the students had come up with. Some students said, "And they lived happily ever after" other students said, "And the cowboy was happy to have his horse back, but he made sure he never ran away again" while other students said, "The cowboy was still mad that his horse ran away, but he made sure he never gave him a reason to run away again." Many students had gone into depth about real values and lessons they learned from the story, while others just simply wrote an ending. I couldn't believe some of the conclusions I heard. Each student brought a new idea to the table and a different way of looking at the story.

I can relate this experience to John Dewey's article The Democratic Conception in Education. He talks about how a community is having a large number of values in common, and in order to do that you "must have an equal opportunity to give and take." Hearing what other people have to say, how they think and their views on certain things is something I think is really important in life. It opens up your eyes to new experiences and ways of looking at things. You don't necessarily have to believe what others are saying or believe in the way they think, but to take into consideration what they have to say is important in a society and makes it functional. John Dewey is saying that we need to have equal opportunities in life to listen to others and have others listen to us in order to be a society. My teacher was doing just this by allowing others to read their endings of the story and listen to others' endings so they could get different view points on the subject. A lot of kids, when hearing other endings, said "wow I never thought of that," or, "that was a good ending." It opened up their eyes to new ideas and may change the way they think about things. Dewey says that an individuals place in society should not be determined through birth or wealth but by his or her own nature discovered in the process of education. Every child needs to see others for who they are and learn about their experiences, their points of view and their ways of thinking. This creates a more functional society and allows for more growth as an individual and as a part of society. It is our job as teachers to give students the opportunity to do these things, and help their voices get heard and allow them to hear other voices.

p.s. I was fiddling around on the Internet and i found this picture! I thought this image was really cool because it's exactly what we learned in class the other day! Enjoy!