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I am an edu minor so I am hoping we are able to go into the schools in-person. Tutoring on zoom is very hard. I have worked in the schools all four year here both for class and volunteer work. Last year with COVID I did not enjoy online tutoring but there was a really fun app that a LMS teacher was creating that I helped with. That was insightful and fun.
I do not know yet how I am going to apply the three sciences. I have a couple ideas though. I think it would be good if I could find a way to get the student to tell me what I could be doing better. I really like the retrieval practices we are doing in class. I would like to ask the student to explain to me what we did last time to make sure they are absorbing and learning. That can then inform how I decide to teach after.
I want to see what learning is like from the other side. I have rarely been the teacher thinking about learning. I have taught a lot but I have not thought about what I'm really doing. I'm looking forward to putting some structure into my teaching. I think I can make more of an impact if I can name the strategy I'm using. I think this experience will help me learn that ed psych is important to the practice of teaching. It not just teaching but instead thinking about the question of why!

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This week something that I started thinking about was how students get frustrated when they can't figure something out. I am tutoring math and unfortunately I know several people who say "I'm just bad at math" or "I just can't do math." This is not true and when they say it it reinforces this notion that they are bad at math. I want to help change this behavior. When a kid gets frustrated that they don't get something, I want to turn their attention away from that and have them focus on something good. When I see a kid start to get discouraged with a problem I plan to ask them to skip it. I want to at the end of every session ask the kid to write down something they understood to help the behavior. I feel like this will keep them from getting frustrated and discouraged in the future. It might help change their mentality. I think this would be called positive punishment. I am adding the writing of a good idea to decrease the negative behavior of frustration.

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This week something I thought could be really helpful was social constructivism. I noticed the emphasis on prior knowledge. How it is so important. I think that this is a super valuable tool I could use when working with high school students. I think I could ask them what they know about a topic before we dive into questions. I can see what I need to stress and really work out with them so we are more effective with our time. I also think with math, structure and process are very important. I think will help me identify a specific part of the process where they struggle.

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I'm super excited to be able to go into LHS this week. I think I can finally use what I've been talking about. I'm really excited to test out the theory on having them recall what they already know about a subject before we talk about it. I don't know if it will work but I'm excited to try. I think it will help with letting me know where I need to focus their attention. Knowing what they already know will help me know what needs to go into the funnel. I also liked today how we talked about how people study. Math is tricky in that reading isn't normally that effective. I interested to learn what techniques the high school students use. I would probably suggest practice questions as the best form of studying since math is so systematic. I definitely have questions for tomorrow. P.S. I might do an update on this post tomorrow seeing how it goes.

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So I actually cannot go onto the high school this week because they have an early release on the day I go in. But I went in last week and there was something I noticed about one girl. She was saying she came to math help because her teacher was not telling them how to do any of the problems. I thought at first that was just bad teaching but now it sounds like the generated learning practice. I think that maybe I can help this girl if I share this practice with her. She seemed to be trying to parse out a structured set of steps to make sense of what the teacher said. So I think she has the right idea and is doing the generating without realizing it. I just want to change her attitude. I think if I can make her see what she's doing she can absorb the learning more.

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This is only my second time going into my field placement and it's been three weeks so it's hard to genuinely reflect. But I think I have gained some sort of learning insight. I have really started thinking about the why and specifics fo learning. I have tutored in the past but not in the same way. Here I am thinking about why the kids are learning the way they are instinctively. I'm not exactly trying to take a different approach but am still doing it without thinking. I think this is beneficial to my field work. In the past I would take a very structured approach. I would walk the kids through a very structured set of steps one how to do something. I thought that was what they needed and wanted. But this class has told me there are so many different ways to learn and it's about figuring out what works for each kid. I've definitely been exploring more recently with that might be good for different learning interests.

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I hesitate to post about this because I am not sure it directly fits into what we talked about this week but I thought it was worth mentioning. I was asked to help students with a math project they were working on this week. One of the students in lab was "tasked" with explaining the assignment to me and showing me what she got so far. My host teacher seemed very excited for this student to show me. Turns out the kids are making virtual escape rooms with math problems to solve that result in a numbers that make up a code to get out. The process we talked about in class today reminded me of this project but I wasn't sure in consolidate quite fit in correctly. The students can make the escape room whatever theme they want. One girl is a baseball fan and she made it being stuck inside the Red Sox locker room. I loved it! I think the teacher was trying to make the kids more excited about the project with freedom but I wonder if adding that freedom counts as consolidation as it is alluding to prior knowledge. It is fitting math problems into a context they are excited about and already know but they don't know it in an academic context. So I wonder if consolidating can happen with two very different things fitting together. I think it definitely works in making the kids more excited about the project but I think i need more info to see if it actually works.

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So this was the example I gave in class but I thought it was worth mentioning again here. There is a student at LHS who just outright refuses to do more than half her homework. She is getting an 80% in the class and for her that is "good enough." So she has zero motivation to do the rest of her homework. In class we discussed this might be because of the idea of cost in the energy equation. The teacher I was speaking to about this said she told the student, "Imagine what your grade would be like if you did all your homework!" But that did not work. So she doesn't seem to be interested in a reward system. I admit that is probably the most likely explanation. Although the cost part of energy is definitely an issue I think it mostly steams from the expectations aspect of that equation (or maybe even value). There is a real disconnect in what she expects of herself and what standards she is holding herself to. I think there is a lot in the energy equation to work on with this student if I see her this week.

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The theories we talked about this week reminded me of something I remember doing in like my second week at LHS. There was a girl who was struggling with factoring by splitting the middle term. This requires finding all the factors of on term and seeing the one pair that works. She calls me over and I look at the problem. She tells me the only pair of factors she can think of don't add up to the middle term. I pause for a moment because I can clearly see the right answer instantly but I don't want to just tell her. I decided to go through the process with her. I said, "well, let's go through it systematically. 1? yes because all number are divisible by one. 2? No because it's not even. What about 3?" She does some quick division and figures out the right answer. After she's done I say, "Great! looks good to me!" The host teacher looks over and says, "See? Isn't she so smart." I replied, "Yeah, after we talked about the systematic starry she got it!" I didn't know this was process praise at the time but looking back it definitely was me recognizing she knew how to do it and praising the systematic approach I had her do. The teacher also might have been commenting on her implicit beliefs about intelligence but telling her she was smart even though she believed she wasn't good at math.