Active Learning and Students Capstone Project

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Early Childhood Special Education and English Second Language Capstone Proposal

As Tomlinson (2010) points out in "Notes from an Accidental Teacher," a "zeal for learning" is one of the five elements and practices that make up effective teaching (p. 22). This element has the most significance for me because I count it as the most essential aspect of what it means to be able to teach -- one must be eager to learn. A teacher cannot pass on to students what he or she does not know or already possess. Thus if a teacher has no zeal for learning, it is to be expected that the teacher will have nothing to pass on to students. The desire to learn and to accumulate understanding is a necessary foundation for teaching: it is like the soil full of nutrients that the tree's roots must stretch out and reach so as to obtain nourishment that the tree might grow big and tall. If that soil is barren (i.e., without understanding, knowledge, information, wisdom, etc.) then the tree will not grow at all. For me, being a great teacher depends upon first and foremost being a great learner. If one is a great learner, one can build on that foundation and learn the ways and means that enable one to be an efficient and effective teacher in the classroom.

Reference

Tomlinson, C. A. (2010). Notes from an accidental teacher. The Effective Educator,

68(4): 22-26.

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Approaching the process of giving feedback from a standpoint of curiosity rather than judgment is an effective way to create a dialogue with the individual under review (Reilly, 2015). When one engages another by immediately being critical and judgmental, the person who is being reviewed can feel hurt or misunderstood and immediately shut down, even if the criticism is valid. A better and more effective way to engage the individual is to begin by asking questions and by genuinely showing interest and curiosity about what the individual has done. This enables the person the opportunity to explain his or herself and allows the reviewer to approach the situation from a more respectful and objective standpoint. The reviewer giving feedback can identify the objective and discuss whether or not the method was effective in achieving the objective and why or why not it was or was not effective. This enables a dialogue to transpire and a positive exchange of viewpoints to take place without hurt feelings arising.

Other alternatives that might be utilized in this situation would be for the person providing feedback to ask the individual under review what he or she might like to have done or might like to do to improve outcomes or methods and why. This engages the person under review in a critical way but without the feeling of judgment being passed. It promotes self-criticism but from an objective standpoint and opens up the feedback process to discussion because the person providing feedback can then follow up on the individual's comments with his or her own perspective.

References

Reilly, M. (2015). Saying what you mean without being mean. Co-Teaching: Making It

Work, 73(4): 36-40.

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This is an educational and creative exercise because it is situated in active learning. It requires Caine to understand the mechanism of the arcade, as well as the business aspect of providing entertainment (tickets, prizes, money, etc.). It forces Caine to think about what is fun, what customers would like, how to make the arcade games work and so on. In my classroom, to inspire creativity like this, I could challenge students to construct their own arcade games and explain how they work, or I could challenge them to pursue their own creative outlets -- whether this be music, dance, writing, building, reading, or singing: every child has his or her own special gifts and talents and this is a good way to tap that potential and encourage the student to push themselves to achieve something special. In this way, they learn about themselves and about that which they are truly interested in.

References

Caine's Arcade. (2012). YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faIFNkdq96U

Caine's Arcade 2. (2012). YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul9c-4dX4Hk

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I do see creativity being stunted in the classroom but I also see it being supported. In some ways, the children are encouraged to do active learning, to engage with problems at the board, to get out of their desks and interact with classroom objects (books, tools, learning toys, etc.). Other times, the students are required to sit still for a long time and are not given any freedom to move around or be creative. I can work creativity into my lessons by setting aside an appropriate amount of time for students to apply the lessons they learn in a creative way -- either in writing a story, or acting out a particular instruction at the board, or working together in groups to problem-solve. I could defend this to an administrator who might question it by pointing out that active learning stimulates creativity and helps learning to become more deeply embedded in the mind.

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The need to integrate new media into the curriculum is what I found most interesting from reading the Uncommon Core. I always felt when teaching that new media is far more important for young students to be acquainted with than old media, because the Digital Age is here to stay and students need to be acquainted with this reality -- not a reality that is quickly vanishing.

Reading "Creativity Requires a Mix of Skills" I found most interesting the statement that creative thinking "appears to require both convergent thinking -- which focuses on speed, accuracy, and logic -- and divergent thinking -- which uses information in unexpected ways to produce alternate or multiple answers to a problem" (Goodwin, Miller, 2013, p. 81). This made me think of my work with ESLs and doing sentence diagramming at the board, which challenges the students to be creative, to be fast (in board races) and to come up with alternative ways of diagramming or seeing how a sentence fits together......

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