ED 430 Curriculum and Instruction Spring 2019

I apologize for the late blog. Life comes at you fast! Week 13 discusses the negative and positive connotations connected to grades and how we evaluate students' performance. I can see the perspective of grades having little to no value true value because they push learners to be motivated by grades rather than the "joy of learning." It is true that we as educators need to do a better job at pushing the learning process to be a joyous one and one that is much more than just a letter grade. So often, we get caught up in the mandates that we have to meet. Unfortunately, I can't show up to my Principal's office with no grades entered and say "the kids learned a lot." I personally that the system was more so built like that because I think it would help create a generation of thinks, inquirers, innovators, etc. I think that accountability and follow through are important but genuine learning experiences are more valuable in my eyes. I have even told studen...

Over the course of this semester, I have really enjoyed my time in ED 430. One of this things I respected and appreciated the most was the people that showed up and shared their opinions with all of us. I love hearing different perspectives and thoughts on the different topics that we learned about. I think one of the lessons that sticks out the most to me was when we looked at different education quotes and had to pick our favorite.  I surprised myself with what quotes I agreed and disagreed with. I also loved seeing what quotes everyone else shared as their favorites. Another memorable day was when we had the student board come in and talk about stresses of high school life and curriculum. This really helped me reflect on my own teaching because I got to see school through the eyes of students. It has been a long time since I was in high school, and things have definitely changed. Hearing the thoughts of kids currently in the education system made me thing about my own studen...

So, I totally spaced on when I was supposed to blog, not even thinking to look until it was already a week too late. So apologies for this being about something we already talked about in class, two weeks ago now. But I feel like it can be informed by what we talked about in class! To recap, I felt it was instructive to think about federal spending on education as a fight between the 10 th and 14 th amendments , with the 10 th saying that all of the powers not explicitly granted in the Constitution go to the states, and the 14 th saying that all people must receive equal treatment under the law. For a long time, the 10 th amendment won out, and the federal government had basically no role in education policy. Then in the 1960s, the Supreme Court set down the Brown v. Board of Education decision using the 14 th amendment to declare that schools could no longer be segregated based on race because when students were separated, they were not treated equally. This spurred the...

Week 14 Reflection I have two big takeaways from this course, which are really ideas I’ve had for some time that were reinforced by the activities and readings we’ve done: First, there is so much that goes into every lesson that teachers teach. We did the activity where we thought of all of the environmental factors that might go into what a child was thinking as a teacher was teaching, most of which are out of the teacher’s control. But many of those factors the teacher does think about, like the pacing of the lessons, making activities varied and interesting, setting the culture of the classroom,   deciding what to focus on in the first place, deciding how to hold students accountable for what they are supposed to have learned. I appreciated the resources and ideas for varying lessons and writing meaningful goals and objectives. There are so many decisions that teachers have to make, which, of course, having taught in high schools for over a decade, I already knew. But ...

Apple’s article presents the effects that the disastrous event 9/11 had on schools. He analyses the social and pedagogic context of the 9/11 tragedy. In the article, Apple uses “compulsory patriotism” to describe the damaging effects the event 9/11 caused in schools. He assumes that 9/11 had effects on pedagogy, which pushed schools to participate in a complicated set of patriotic discourses and practices. However, he thinks that the patriotic fervor that arose with the supports of the government and the public after 9/11 was radical and also a threat to real freedom, at least in the field of education. I was shocked when I read that a lot of extreme and radical revenges on some Islamic, Punjabi, Sikh and other students occurred in high schools and at universities after 9/11. How could this happen? Was it just because of patriotism and anger stimulated by the tragedy? Why did students who receive education have those extreme behaviors? I think this irrational reveng...

Apple’s article talked about pedagogy, patriotism and democracy by using the example of 11 September 2001. The author said that it is important to place what happened in the wake of 11 September in a context of the ‘American’ psyche and of dominant American understandings of the roles the United States plays in the world. And the author mentioned some teachers ignored the horror by simply resorting to normality as a defence against paralysis. In other classes, days were spent tin discussion of the events. Sadness, disbelief and shock were registered.  When I read about this, I was wondering what kind of class I will choose to have if I were one of the teachers. I think I probably would choose the latter one. I want to lead the class to talk about the events, let the students sharing their feelings about it. I agree with the author that pedagogical work needed to be done. But it wasn’t a simple issue. On the one hand, pedagogical can brings people together and unity for a count...

The first reading by Alfie Kohn highlighted the accountability of grading and why they are not necessary part of schooling.  He splits his argument into 4 main parts: effects of grading,  why they are problematic, improving grades and deleting grades.         To sum up the effects of grading, the main claim is that grades cause student's interest in subject matter to decline, creates "goal" orientated work, in which student's pick the easiest possible route, and finally grades reduce the quality of students thinking . According to Kohn, grades are problematic because they create extrinsic motivation compared to intrinsic motivation. Grades also cause  curriculum to be aligned to one skill or standard, leaving little flexibility to outside thinking and creativity. Kohn also states a problem grades is the task to improve them. "If grades are based on state standards, there's particular reason to be concerned because those standards a...

Evaluation is the test of a teacher’s curriculum design, according to Tyler. They are meant to show how students have changed in either knowledge or behavior since coming into contact with the curriculum of a particular class. Tyler cautions that while most people associate pencil and paper tests involving bubbling multiple choice answers or writing essays as the exclusive forms of assessment in schools, that other forms are also valid, like practical projects involving putting the learning to use to make something, for instance. Evaluations should not only be done once, but several times throughout a course to show whether a student’s behavior/knowledge has changed/improved over time. Tyler optimistically muses that evaluations should be given yearly to students, even after they graduate, to see if they’ve retained what they had learned. While this sometimes happens in longitudinal studies, it is not currently standard practice in the American education system. ( Not the onl...

After reading the article this week, I learned that course evaluation is an important part of course management. It is related to the improvement of teaching quality as well as the reform of the curriculum.     I p ersonally think that teaching evaluation should be multi-dimensional. However, in the actual evaluation, we are prone to problems such as single evaluation object, single evaluation subject, or over-quantitative evaluation target, etc. To achieve a comprehensive evaluation, we should make the process include the objectives of the teaching goals and tasks as much as possible. But this doesn't mean we have to pay attention to all the issues. On the contrary, we should be able to distinguish which are the most important issues. In addition, we should grasp the main contradictions and evaluate them from the dominant factors that determine the quality of teaching. In the process of teaching evaluation, we must make the evaluation criteria ， method and attitude objectiv...

In this article, the author covers " What the federal government controls, how it controls it, and how that balance does ( and doesn't) change from administration to administration." Although the Department of Education was created in the late 1860's, it was not until the mid-1960's that the federal government started to play a large role in education. One reason being that in the late 1980's political power houses started arguing that federal and state laws should be mandated because they felt like the United States was falling behind on a global scale. This article  states that the turning point for federal oversight was in 2001 when No Child Left Behind was implemented. When Obama came in to office he replaced this with the Every Student Succeeds Act . This act made nationwide standardized tests to hold schools accountable for what they are teaching. Personally, I think that the federal governments role in education is important, especially when ...

As a foreigner, I have a clear understanding about the function of the federal government on education in the United States of America after reading this article "When it comes to education, the Federal Government is in Charge of......". It is quite difficult to understand and confused about the complicated role of the federal government in education, if we do not know the national conditions of a country. Different national conditions of countries contribute to different national systems, including economic systems, political systems, and educational systems. This article provides detailed information about educational policies implemented by the federal government in American history, which helps me know the corresponding age backgrounds and corresponding international backgrounds, such as the Cold War, the segregation, and the Post World War II. I got to know that every educational policy reflects unique  and special conditions of historical backgrounds, and they are the...

The reading this week was a commentary on how the U.S Department of Education and its policy implementation affect schools at the local level with the bigger picture being that the relationship between the federal government and public education is foggy and educational policies can be transient--especially from administration to administration.  The author of the article, Brendan Pelsue, has two key points:  -The presidential administration and the Secretary of Education have a heavy hand in shaping what, how and when students learn.  -Although the Department of Education does not directly oversee the nation’s public schools, it does exercise its federal power through utilization of funding and policy directives to shape education .  Historically major changes in the government’s role in education have stemmed from the nation’s political state. Below is a brief timeline as mentioned in the reading: -In the 1830’s the educational aims were t...