Research into diversity
This artifact is a scholarly research report, comparing 2 academic articles, I made into the state of diversity in the classroom of today:
Diverse Populations Article Research and Comparison
Article 1.
1. Gallagher, James J. “According to Jim: Democracy and Gifted Children.” Roeper Review; 30:158, 2008.
2. There was no biographical information about the author other than he is a commentator who has written many opinion articles regarding academic issues, and has published them in a variety of academic journals.
3. The author discusses the issue of handling gifted children in public schools. He explains that a problem faced by gifted children is that they are often ignored and placed into classes where the focus is for teachers to assist the lowest-performing students rather than to challenge the students who excel in their coursework. He states that many schools do not receive needed resources because it is an investment that may or may not yield results, and that those results will not be apparent for decades. Due to this, resources are allocated to immediate crises, such as reducing school violence, truancy, or hunger among young children.
4. The past research the author builds on is that, historically, democratic states must attend to the needs of the most people, and cannot attend to the needs of a select few without first addressing immediate crises and issues. In this sense, democratic institutions have difficulty in investing in long-term goals. The author makes a connection between democratic states and democratically-run public schools, in that the schools are designed to service the most amount of people and often need to teach to the slowest learners, thus creating problems for gifted, or even above-average, students.
5. The author concludes that the answer to this problem is to invest in future planning for a tiered educational system. This would require more educational infrastructure, and oversight to ensure efficiency, curriculum development, educational research, and personnel preparation. The author also states that these must be funded over long periods of time, and that results will not be immediate with these types of investments. He uses the U.S. federal highway project as an example, and how it was thought to be too expensive and not useful when it began, but proved to be invaluable years later.
6. This article relates to my group’s curriculum unit plan in that the author seems to be advocating for the “T” in WHERETO, as he strongly urges educators and administrators to focus more on individual student needs rather than simply educating a large group and focusing on educating the slowest learners. To address this, my group and I could create more projects, activities, and assignments which challenge the students to individually push themselves into deeper understandings of course materials. This could be in the form of open-ended, creative coursework which challenges students to do their personal best; such as creating advertisements for healthy food products or physically creating nutritious meals and bringing them to class.
7. This information relates to my own experiences in that I found that many times in middle and high school, I was bored with my classes and that the coursework was nothing more than “busy-work.” I often felt like I already knew the information that we spent weeks learning, and as such, I just did my work very quickly so I could engage in more enjoyable activities. For example, I would go to my math class and do my homework for the night instead of listening to the teacher because I felt like I already knew the material. I would work ahead like this in most of my high school classes. According to this article, this is due to the fact that my teachers could not focus on challenging me, but instead needed to focus on teaching students who were struggling with the material and could only move as fast as the slowest students in class. Additionally, my high school only had a few honors classes and did not have enough resources to allow many people in the honors curriculum. This meant that I was able to get into a few interesting honors classes, but could not get into others. What the author is suggesting is that there needs to be more of an investment in creating more classes to better meet the needs of individual students so that people like me can get into classes that move at a pace that suits the needs of most of the students instead of simply the slowest students.
B. This article detailed how the needs of many gifted students are not being met in public schools. Gifted students add to the diversity of classrooms because they require more specialized instruction and move at a different pace than do most students. Some schools offer classes for gifted students but these are mostly private schools that exist outside the financial grasp of most families with children in public school. One way of addressing this problem is to fund more school infrastructure and create more efficient ways of dividing students into ability groups so that each student will receive the best education possible.
Article 2.
1. Thadani, Vandana, Melissa S. Cook, Kathy Griffis, Joe A. Wise, and Aqila Blakey. “The Possibilities and Limitations of Curriculum-Based Science Inquiry Interventions for Challenging the ‘Pedagogy of Poverty.’” Equity And Excellence In Education, 43(1), 21-37, 2010.
2. Biographical information was offered only for the main author, Vandana Thadani. She is a professor of psychology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She researches educational psychology and conducts studies into the effectiveness of current teaching methods.
3. The problem that the author discusses is the issue of the “Pedagogy of Poverty.” This is a phenomenon where students in low-income public schools are subjected to an instructional method that focuses, to the exclusion of all other methods, on textbook reading, worksheets, tests, specific directions, and quantitative homework. This system is criticized by the author as a system where students are passive learners and do not actively engage in class content in any meaningful way, and that this system creates an atmosphere where students can earn successful grades with only a limited knowledge and understanding of the material. This is due to low-expectations and pressure on teachers to manage the way in which their students spend classroom time. This system is most pronounced in academic areas such as the sciences and mathematics.
4. The article does not discuss the history of the “pedagogy of poverty” but does discuss that investigative approaches, educational scaffolding, and guided-inquiry based lesson plans have been found to stop the negative outcomes of the “pedagogy of poverty.” This is due to increased student involvement and higher expectations for student learning and engagement. It also puts the teacher into a position to be a facilitator of understanding rather than an authority figure tasked with managing how students spend time on school grounds.
5. The author concludes that investigative approaches, educational scaffolding, and guided-inquiry methods are the most effective at increasing student understanding and involvement. This was studied at three low-income public schools where unit plans in science classes, based on photo-synthesis, were altered to incorporate these methods. The author explains that students were tasked with generating scientific questions, testing hypotheses, make observations, and to generate their own conclusions. The teacher made more use of demonstrations, activities, and research-based assignments instead of worksheets and textbook use.
The success of these changes to the lessons was determined by a panel of university-level science education faculty and an observation board of middle-school science teachers. They measured the academic progress of the students in the altered lessons versus control groups in schools that were not given altered lesson plans, and they found that the students who had been in investigative lessons performed better and understood more of the material.
6. This article, in relation to our curriculum unit designs, is advocating for a similar unit design to the ones we are currently developing in that the units must be designed to form deeper understandings of material. The article is advocating for doing this through forming essential questions and using activities which teach students to apply knowledge on their own. I could apply the information from the article to my unit design by giving students assignments which task them with formulating hypotheses about nutrition, and then generating their own conclusions based on research which will challenge them to apply information they are learning in the class.
7. The information in this article relates to my own beliefs in that I can see a connection between what the article is advocating for and what our textbook is advocating for, in that both emphasize the importance of students having deeper understanding of course content and being able to apply their knowledge in real-world settings. I agree that older methods of teaching, which involve pressures to time-manage students and having them frequently complete quantitative work based on non-contextualized facts, are not sufficient for use in real-world situations. Students must be conditioned in classrooms to retain knowledge, know why the knowledge is as it is, and be able to spontaneously apply that knowledge.
B. The article details a study done on how the use of investigative approaches, educational scaffolding, and guided-inquiry methods can be used to improve the effectiveness of education in low-income schools. My reaction to the information in the article is that the “pedagogy of poverty” seems to be prevalent in many school systems, not only low-income schools. This phenomenon makes it necessary for colleges to teach newer teaching methods so that the next generations of teachers can create an atmosphere in their classes to evolve beyond methods such as the “pedagogy of poverty.” Backwards Design is one such method that can impart a deeper understanding of course content onto students, and more methods exist which can accomplish the same goal, but these methods need to make it into real-world classrooms in order to benefit newer generations of students.
Article 1.
1. Gallagher, James J. “According to Jim: Democracy and Gifted Children.” Roeper Review; 30:158, 2008.
2. There was no biographical information about the author other than he is a commentator who has written many opinion articles regarding academic issues, and has published them in a variety of academic journals.
3. The author discusses the issue of handling gifted children in public schools. He explains that a problem faced by gifted children is that they are often ignored and placed into classes where the focus is for teachers to assist the lowest-performing students rather than to challenge the students who excel in their coursework. He states that many schools do not receive needed resources because it is an investment that may or may not yield results, and that those results will not be apparent for decades. Due to this, resources are allocated to immediate crises, such as reducing school violence, truancy, or hunger among young children.
4. The past research the author builds on is that, historically, democratic states must attend to the needs of the most people, and cannot attend to the needs of a select few without first addressing immediate crises and issues. In this sense, democratic institutions have difficulty in investing in long-term goals. The author makes a connection between democratic states and democratically-run public schools, in that the schools are designed to service the most amount of people and often need to teach to the slowest learners, thus creating problems for gifted, or even above-average, students.
5. The author concludes that the answer to this problem is to invest in future planning for a tiered educational system. This would require more educational infrastructure, and oversight to ensure efficiency, curriculum development, educational research, and personnel preparation. The author also states that these must be funded over long periods of time, and that results will not be immediate with these types of investments. He uses the U.S. federal highway project as an example, and how it was thought to be too expensive and not useful when it began, but proved to be invaluable years later.
6. This article relates to my group’s curriculum unit plan in that the author seems to be advocating for the “T” in WHERETO, as he strongly urges educators and administrators to focus more on individual student needs rather than simply educating a large group and focusing on educating the slowest learners. To address this, my group and I could create more projects, activities, and assignments which challenge the students to individually push themselves into deeper understandings of course materials. This could be in the form of open-ended, creative coursework which challenges students to do their personal best; such as creating advertisements for healthy food products or physically creating nutritious meals and bringing them to class.
7. This information relates to my own experiences in that I found that many times in middle and high school, I was bored with my classes and that the coursework was nothing more than “busy-work.” I often felt like I already knew the information that we spent weeks learning, and as such, I just did my work very quickly so I could engage in more enjoyable activities. For example, I would go to my math class and do my homework for the night instead of listening to the teacher because I felt like I already knew the material. I would work ahead like this in most of my high school classes. According to this article, this is due to the fact that my teachers could not focus on challenging me, but instead needed to focus on teaching students who were struggling with the material and could only move as fast as the slowest students in class. Additionally, my high school only had a few honors classes and did not have enough resources to allow many people in the honors curriculum. This meant that I was able to get into a few interesting honors classes, but could not get into others. What the author is suggesting is that there needs to be more of an investment in creating more classes to better meet the needs of individual students so that people like me can get into classes that move at a pace that suits the needs of most of the students instead of simply the slowest students.
B. This article detailed how the needs of many gifted students are not being met in public schools. Gifted students add to the diversity of classrooms because they require more specialized instruction and move at a different pace than do most students. Some schools offer classes for gifted students but these are mostly private schools that exist outside the financial grasp of most families with children in public school. One way of addressing this problem is to fund more school infrastructure and create more efficient ways of dividing students into ability groups so that each student will receive the best education possible.
Article 2.
1. Thadani, Vandana, Melissa S. Cook, Kathy Griffis, Joe A. Wise, and Aqila Blakey. “The Possibilities and Limitations of Curriculum-Based Science Inquiry Interventions for Challenging the ‘Pedagogy of Poverty.’” Equity And Excellence In Education, 43(1), 21-37, 2010.
2. Biographical information was offered only for the main author, Vandana Thadani. She is a professor of psychology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She researches educational psychology and conducts studies into the effectiveness of current teaching methods.
3. The problem that the author discusses is the issue of the “Pedagogy of Poverty.” This is a phenomenon where students in low-income public schools are subjected to an instructional method that focuses, to the exclusion of all other methods, on textbook reading, worksheets, tests, specific directions, and quantitative homework. This system is criticized by the author as a system where students are passive learners and do not actively engage in class content in any meaningful way, and that this system creates an atmosphere where students can earn successful grades with only a limited knowledge and understanding of the material. This is due to low-expectations and pressure on teachers to manage the way in which their students spend classroom time. This system is most pronounced in academic areas such as the sciences and mathematics.
4. The article does not discuss the history of the “pedagogy of poverty” but does discuss that investigative approaches, educational scaffolding, and guided-inquiry based lesson plans have been found to stop the negative outcomes of the “pedagogy of poverty.” This is due to increased student involvement and higher expectations for student learning and engagement. It also puts the teacher into a position to be a facilitator of understanding rather than an authority figure tasked with managing how students spend time on school grounds.
5. The author concludes that investigative approaches, educational scaffolding, and guided-inquiry methods are the most effective at increasing student understanding and involvement. This was studied at three low-income public schools where unit plans in science classes, based on photo-synthesis, were altered to incorporate these methods. The author explains that students were tasked with generating scientific questions, testing hypotheses, make observations, and to generate their own conclusions. The teacher made more use of demonstrations, activities, and research-based assignments instead of worksheets and textbook use.
The success of these changes to the lessons was determined by a panel of university-level science education faculty and an observation board of middle-school science teachers. They measured the academic progress of the students in the altered lessons versus control groups in schools that were not given altered lesson plans, and they found that the students who had been in investigative lessons performed better and understood more of the material.
6. This article, in relation to our curriculum unit designs, is advocating for a similar unit design to the ones we are currently developing in that the units must be designed to form deeper understandings of material. The article is advocating for doing this through forming essential questions and using activities which teach students to apply knowledge on their own. I could apply the information from the article to my unit design by giving students assignments which task them with formulating hypotheses about nutrition, and then generating their own conclusions based on research which will challenge them to apply information they are learning in the class.
7. The information in this article relates to my own beliefs in that I can see a connection between what the article is advocating for and what our textbook is advocating for, in that both emphasize the importance of students having deeper understanding of course content and being able to apply their knowledge in real-world settings. I agree that older methods of teaching, which involve pressures to time-manage students and having them frequently complete quantitative work based on non-contextualized facts, are not sufficient for use in real-world situations. Students must be conditioned in classrooms to retain knowledge, know why the knowledge is as it is, and be able to spontaneously apply that knowledge.
B. The article details a study done on how the use of investigative approaches, educational scaffolding, and guided-inquiry methods can be used to improve the effectiveness of education in low-income schools. My reaction to the information in the article is that the “pedagogy of poverty” seems to be prevalent in many school systems, not only low-income schools. This phenomenon makes it necessary for colleges to teach newer teaching methods so that the next generations of teachers can create an atmosphere in their classes to evolve beyond methods such as the “pedagogy of poverty.” Backwards Design is one such method that can impart a deeper understanding of course content onto students, and more methods exist which can accomplish the same goal, but these methods need to make it into real-world classrooms in order to benefit newer generations of students.