Monday, September 22, 2008
Classroom Talk
I have not been to my field placement yet, tomorrow is my first day so I have not been able to witness any discussion or scaffolding in the classroom. I can relate it to my own classroom experiences though. In college I think that most classes are lecture based and there is very little student teacher interaction. If questions are asked it is not in a discussion promoting format. In many of my Spanish literature classes we are assigned a passage to read and the next time we meet we “discuss” it. By this I mean the teacher describes what happened in the story and will occasionally ask a question of any random student, putting them on the spot. The result is a one word answer that most others can’t even hear. The “discussion” moves on from there. No one seems engaged, people are not feeding off of each other’s responses and the teacher is not asking thought provoking questions. The questions are usually fact regurgitation, “in what year was this piece written?”, “who is the main character?”. These types of questions do not promote discussion. As the Triplett article says, “vocabulary discussions were very important…”. I agree with this especially in a Spanish language literature class. We need to have more discussions on the particular vocabulary used in the pieces we read. Some students are more aware of traditional Spanish vocabulary than other students and some are more familiar with one dialect over another. It would be beneficial to discuss these types of things. I also think that scaffolding is a very important part of discussion. In the videos that we watched in class the second one had great examples of scaffolding. The teacher encouraged the students to answer and share their thoughts. She used one students answer to build upon another answer and to help explain certain topics and unfamiliar vocabulary. Scaffolding is necessary in any classroom and some students do benefit from it more than others. I am excited to get into my classroom and be able to see and analyze these things first hand.
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2 comments:
I agree with you when you say that in college, most classes are lecture based with little student teacher interaction. I believe that there is much more discussion in smaller classes in college, and much more discussion than I saw when I was in high school. It often seems that college professors wants their students to answer a question so that they can then expand upon it and explain it, which seems to be the opposite of what should be occurring. We already know that college professors know the information, or else they wouldn’t be teaching the class. Do you think that this may have to do with the fact that some college professors are less interested in what you know, because you have already made it to college and you’re grade isn’t really as important to them? I believe that an elementary school teacher’s responsibility is placed much more on teaching students and assessing what they know to ensure that they will be able to function and do well in the next grade level. In college, really all that matters is that you know basic facts to answer on tests. Do you think that as a teacher it will be hard to get in the role of scaffolding children rather than simply getting responses from them? By this I mean, do you think it will be easier or harder to sort of step back and allow your students to take a larger role in their discussion?
I can totally relate to everything you're saying about college level courses. I've been here for 5 years now and the number of discussion based classes I've had can be counted on one hand. After reading some of these articles it kind of irritates me that college has been one giant recitation even though college is the part of school where you're supposed to be able to express your views a little more when it comes to your education. Even in TE classes, certain TA's lead "discussions" that don't allow the views of the students to come out. My TE 150 class was very much like a recitation because of my over opinionated TA and I feel like TE 150 is a class you can bring a lot of perspective too. In the classes where there has been teacher/student and student/student disscussion I feel that I have gotten a lot more out of them. When more perspectives and opinions get brought to the table I think it gets people who generally don't have much of an opinion on any certain topic to think about it more deeply. Your blog post as well as the articles did that for me; I never really thought about it or how a type of discussion could affect my learning but it really does have a huge impact.
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