ED 343 Refining and Integrating Curricular Practices

Fall, 2003


What’s this course about?	Required Texts	Assignments & Grading	Tentative Schedule	Helpful Links

Portfolio Specifications Weekly Audit

Peter Appelbaum

Edie Klausner

Taylor 312A

215-572-4476

appelbaum@arcadia.edu

Office Hours M 4:00- 5:30

W 2:00-4:00

or by appt.

Taylor 319

610-277-3510

Ediekla@aol.com

Office Hours W 1:30-3:00 or by appt.

Welcome!

To engage with our students as persons is to affirm our own incompleteness, our consciousness of spaces still to be explored, desires still to be tapped, possibilities still to be opened and pursued … We have to find out how to open such spheres, such spaces, where a better state of things can be imagined … I would like to think that this can happen in classrooms, in corridors, in schoolyards, in the streets around. --Maxine Greene, “In Search of a Critical Pedagogy”

“You teach reading?” she asked. “The poster said we could get extra help if we needed it.” … “We sure do,” Sister Shani said. “We got to know how to read. How else we going to know what’s going on in the world? We teach history and math, too. And sewing. You get to make yourself a long dress. And we teach the history of the way black people in this country talk, how it’s a lot like some African languages. And tell your friends we teach karate, too. That ought to bring some of them in.” –Eloise Greenfield, Sister

Do you live? – 2^nd grade student note to a teacher

What’s this course about?

This semester is about taking everything you have learned so far in and out of Arcadia, and thinking through the difficulties of applying it and sorting it out in a particular educational setting. We will be working in collaboration with the F.S. Edmonds Elementary School in Philadelphia to develop interdisciplinary projects that are specifically aimed at facilitating the children’s abilities to think and act mathematically and scientifically. We will give specific attention to how to work with children to identify and explore essential questions and how they connect to “the curriculum;” to design and implement strategies for supporting/facilitating student work and learning; and to informing our teaching through multiple ways of assessing/evaluating this work.

You are asked to think and act like a teacher. Just like your job is to get the Edmonds students to help each other think and act mathematically and scientifically, our job together is to help each other think and act pedagogically. We will wrestle with the job of developing meaningful inquiries that speak to the district concerns about curriculum content and standardized testing goals. In the process, you will respond with your own original pedagogical ideas.

One important comment about this semester: In some ways you may be able to use this course as a warm-up to the student-teaching practicum, because you are gaining experience in working with groups of children. However, this is also a course with particular content: The department has designed the mega-sequence so that this semester focuses on three themes: inquiry approaches to teaching and learning, multicultural and diversity issues, and the mastery of a range of assessment skills and techniques. On top of all this, Ed 343 is also the designated course for specific attention to mathematics education, which may raise a host of other issues for you personally. Be prepared for this semester to challenge you in many ways! Not only will you be testing out the kind of teacher you hope to become; you will be asked to practice new ways of teaching that you have never experienced yourself as a student. This can be difficult, and you may need to bring your frustrations back to class for us to talk about. Yet, never lose sight of something: if you have come this far in the major, then you already know a lot about teaching and learning; use what you know to help you cope with the new arts and sciences of teaching that this semester asks you to practice. If you approach this semester with an open mind, then you will truly be refining and integrating your curricular practices!

On campus we will discuss the skills and goals of a teacher who uses the inquiry process, a variety of assessment tools and strategies, the use of information gained through assessment to inform teaching practice, and the implementation of diversity education across the curriculum. At Edmonds you will work in teaching groups of 3 to facilitate an inquiry learning experience that addresses all areas of the curriculum but which is intended to focus specifically on mathematics skills and concepts.

Required Texts:

Available at our bookstore, and on-line.

Burns, Marilyn. 2000. About Teaching Mathematics: A K-8 Resource. Pearson Learning. ISBN: 094135525X.

**McIntyre, Ellen, Ann S. Rosebery, & Norma Gonzalez. 2001. Classroom Diversity: Connecting Curriculum to Students' Lives. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. ISBN: 0325003327.

Moon, Jean & Linda Schulman. 1995. Finding the Connections: Linking Assessment, Instruction, and Curriculum in Elementary Mathematics. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. ISBN: 0435083708.

**Strachota, Bob. 1996. On Their Side: Helping Children Take Charge of Their Learning. Greenfield, MA: Northeast Foundation for Children. ISBN: 0961863633.

** New this semester. Texts from previous megacourses will also be valuable resources for your work at Edmonds throughout the semester.

Photocopies of other required readings will be available in class. You will also be asked to view materian the internet.

All readings must be read by the assigned day. Please refer to the tentative schedule for these dates. We will be discussing them in class.

Assignments and Grading:

Your grade will be based on six parts:

Portfolio of your work throughout the semester	40%
Story of Your Teaching Journey	20
Expeditions	10
Media Project	10
Weekly Audits of your work	10
Participation in campus meetings beyond the minimum expectation of attendance	10

Portfolio:

As a way of organizing your work and making your process transparent, you will develop a portfolio that will be organized around the following processes and products: Reading logs and Reflections; Edmonds Planning and Assessment; and Inquiry and Research

This portfolio is described in detail on the Portfolio Specification sheet.

Audits:

We ask that you email us a weekly audit of what you have done in the last week, and the kinds of support and feedback/guidance you feel you need. On Fridays we will share ideas for optional reading logs and reflections that you may write as part of your weekly audit. Please see the handout on Audit specifications.

Media Project:

We need a group of people that reports to us on a regular basis about what they see us doing. This is a form of reflection and assessment crucial to effective teaching. Therefore, once during the semester you will be required to step out of your teaching group and observe the others. Together with some other people who are equally frustrated about having to leave their teaching group for two days, you will be in charge of reporting to the whole class what you see happening over a two-session period at Edmonds. The format for reporting to us is up to the group. Think of yourselves as “the media.” Do you want to give us a newsletter highlighting particular events or issues that you think are interesting or that you want us to consider? Do you want to document in pictures with captions what transpired, or create a satirical editorial? Upon analyzing your observations with your media group, would it be appropriate to challenge the rest of the class with a set of questions? You will have 10 minutes to do your presentation. Important will be to provoke our class to think about one focused, significant theme or issue.

Expeditions:

Teachers are never confined to their classroom. They are constantly on the move, aware of potential resources, human and otherwise, that they can utilize in their teaching. Sometimes they need to plan a time to identifying potential curricular assets; they must seek out new sources of support for their work -- hence the name “Expedition.” In your expeditions for this class, we expect you to be creative in collecting and identifying anything and everything that might be possible for you to use in your teaching work. You will have time in class to share this material with your colleagues. We have planned the first two for you; where you go for the third is up to you as long as it is clear that it will help you in your teaching. Based on the first two, we will develop a rubric for the third expedition in class. All of this work should be documented in your portfolio. Please see the tentative schedule for dates.

Story of Your Teaching Journey:

Over the course of the semester, we are reading a series of reflections by teachers about pedagogically important points. Each author presents their ideas as a story of a journey. In the last part of the course, you will be looking back over your portfolio; focusing on your work with children at Edmonds, you will decide what the story of your own journey has been about. The story must develop your own original pedagogical idea. You will paint a portrait and support the description of your own original idea through a set of varying events that occurred throughout the semester. You will select events for their power to portray different facets of your main idea. Last year we found that many people wrote excellent papers; still others experimented with interesting formats that grew our of their work at Edmonds (for example, video and role play). We will use this work as the basis for a public sharing of our original pedagogical ideas at the end of the semester. The goal is for your story to influence the work and teaching of others in and out of class. This will take place outside of class time in the evening or on a weekend; be prepared to invite friends, family, and Arcadia faculty and staff who have been important in your growth as a teacher.

Tentative Schedule:


Date	Topic(s)	Read before this day:	In-class work	Assignment due today:
Week 1 8/27	Welcome!		Installation 1
8/29	Reorienting ourselves to teaching and learning in context	Strachota Ch 1-3	Installation 2 Prep for 9/4	Come with materials/questions for Installation 2


Week 2 9/3	Phil. Core Curriculum Getting to know your students	Philadelphia Framework Website, section on mathematics	How to interview Interpreting Scope & Sequence	Audit due
9/5	Scope & Sequence Finding youth’s real questions	Appelbaum handout; Philadelphia Framework, Grid for math for your grade	Planning for Edmonds Further interview planning
Week 3 9/8	What is a math question?	Burns, About Teaching Mathematics, 3-42; Parker handout	Planning for Edmonds	Start to plan specific things to do the first day with your students Audit due
9/10 Edmonds Day	Understanding our School and its neighborhood		Classroom observations; Check out where you will be; Neighborhood Expedition	Come prepared to document your expedition
9/12	Ways to learn about students, personally and academically		Planning for Edmonds Expedition 1 reports	Expedition 1 report Use our readings to think of specific ideas for how to begin working with your students
Week 4 9/15 Edmonds Day	"Opening" Meeting the students Creating ways to know the students			Audit due Come prepared with materials to facilitate an authentic meeting
9/17	Identifying (math) questions with students	McIntyre et al. Chs 1,4,5,6		Your meeting should be documented in your portfolio – bring your portfolio to class, as always
9/19	Learning with children: creating infrastructures	Strachota Ch. 4-6	Planning for Edmonds	Connect Strachota to your meeting at Edmonds
Week 5 9/22 Edmonds Day	Using student interests to create the issue; establishing routines, rituals, and special places			Audit due
9/24	Project guidelines/criteria	McIntyre et al.Chs 9,10	Creating guidelines & criteria for effective inquiries
9/26	Workshopping the issue/inquiry	McIntyre et al. Chs 2,3,7,11	Planning for Edmonds Information on student teaching	Portfolio due
Week 6 9/29 Edmonds Day	*Creating the issue with* students; maintaining routines, rituals, and special places**		Media grp. 1	Audit due
10/1	Horizon: toward 12/10 through assessment	Moon & Schulman 7 & 8	Final decisions about expedition 2
10/3	NO CLASS MEETING: Plan for Edmonds on your own; Expedition 2		Edmonds Planning


Week 7 10/6 (Yom Kippur)	NO CLASS MEETING Plan for Edmonds; Expedition 2	Moon & Schulman 4,5		Audit due
10/8 Edmonds Day	*Designing projects with* the students**		Media grp. 1
10/10	Return of the core curriculum	Burns, About Teaching Mathematics, 45-145	Edmonds Planning	Come prepared to make Burns relevant to your Edmonds inquiry; Bring copies of I/R work to share
Week 8 10/13 – at Arcadia (Edmonds closed)	Looking back to look forward: Impact Theater for reflection and discussion	Strachota, Ch. 7; Sapon-Shavin, Ch. 5	Minilessons, workshop, clinics	Media grp. 1 presentation due. Expedition 2 due What do your students need and want to learn? Come prepared to discuss this. Audit due
10/15	How are your students talking & working mathematically?	Moon & Schulman Ch 6; Wiggins handout	Planning for the 18^th	Come prepared with documentation/examples of your students talking/working mathematically/ scientifically
10/17	Looking more at mathematics	Burns, About Teaching Mathematics, 45-145	Edmonds Planning
Week 9 10/20 Edmonds Day	Doing the Project; Continuing ongoing assessment; responding with mini-lessons, wkshps, clinics		Minilessons, workshops, clinics Media grp. 2	Audit due
10/22 Edmonds Day	Doing the Project; Continuing ongoing assessment; responding with mini-lessons, wkshps, clinics		Media grp 2
10/24	Integrating mathematics content strands; Exhibition Rubric		Edmonds Planning Personal Choice Expedition Rubric	Ideas for your Expedition 3 will help us finalize our rubric together
Week 10 10/27 Edmonds Day	Doing the Project; Continuing ongoing assessment; responding with mini-lessons, wkshps, clinics		Media grp2 Minilessons, workshops, clinics	Audit due
10/29 Edmonds Day	Doing the Project; Continuing ongoing assessment; responding with mini-lessons, wkshps, clinics		Minilessons, workshops, clinics
10/31	Looking back and looking forward to how to perform what we are learning	Handout TBA	Edmonds Planning Share personal choice expeditions I/R swapping	Media 2 presentation due Bring copies of I/R work to share; **Prepare a reflection on how students can show what they have been learning.
Week 11 11/3 Edmonds Day	Preparing for "performance of our work"		Media grp 3 Minilessons, workshop, clinics	Audit due
11/5 Edmonds Day	Preparing for "performance of our work"		Media grp. 3
11/7	How are your students talking & working mathematically? 2	Moon & Schulman Ch 9 & 10	Edmonds Planning	Media grp. 2 presentation due Expedition 3 due


Week 12 11/10 Edmonds Day	Create "Performance" Continued assessment		Media grp. 4 Minilessons, workshops, clinics	Audit due
11/12 Edmonds Day	Create "Performance" Continued assessment		Media grp. 4
11/14	Your intellectual/ pedagogical journey through this course 1	Armstrong handout	Edmonds Planning	Media grp. 3 presentation due How do Armstrong, Strachota, Ball, the teachers in the Diversity book, and Parker construct their stories?
Week 13 11/17 Edmonds Day	The "Performance"			Audit due
11/19 Edmonds Day	Student/Performer Self-Assessment		Plan with students for audience debrief	Come prepared to facilitate this assessment event
11/21	Your intellectual/ pedagogical journey 2	Osborne handout	Edmonds Planning: preparing for debriefing Workshop for working draft of story Conversation on what would have been better guidelines/criteria?	Portfolio Due **Identify significant items in your portfolio for use in preparing your journey piece
Week 14 11/24 Edmonds Day	Archaeology		Audience Debrief	Audit due
~~11/26 and 11/28~~	Thanksgiving		Edmonds Planning
Week 15 12/1 Last Edmonds Day	Archaeology			Audit due Come prepared to say goodbye and thank you
12/3	Your intellectual/ pedagogical journey 3	Duckworth handout	Workshop on story of the journey: clarifying variations on your theme	Media Grp. 4 presentation due; Bring a working draft, with copies, of your journey Bring I/R requests
12/5	Preparing our own "performance of our work"		I/R swapping	Come with copies of I/R work for swapping
Week 16 12/8	Envisioning the future (Student Teaching and beyond)		Final in-class prep for our own performance	Final Course audit due
Wednesday 12/10 7-10 pm	Our Own "Performance"
12/12	Exam Period			Journey due