“The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things” -Jean Piaget 

Trying new things that one is unfamiliar with may often feel uncomfortable or challenging, but we never know what we can discover until we do so. When I was younger, I only remember video games on the computer being played during computer class. We never really had the opportunity to play with and explore them during normal class time because most of our learning was done on paper with little technology. As my learning circle began to discuss video gaming in the classroom, we discovered that a lot of current research sees many benefits of this fairly newer learning enhancer. In trying to gain more knowledge and insight to how technology and video gaming affect the classroom, I became aware that video games have the previously mentioned ability to allow children to invent and discover new things that they may be unfamiliar to, like Piaget stated.

When trying to decide on a video game, my learning circle kept into consideration Gee’s ideas that “good video games represent a technology that illuminate how the human mind works, incorporate good learning principles and have a great deal to teach us about learning in and out of schools” (22). We searched through many Early Childhood Educational websites and were looking to find a very interactive site that had games of many subject areas and concepts. We stumbled across and began to explore the popular children website PBS Kids, where we began with mathematics games because we thought those would be the most interesting. We were proven wrong, however, because many of them were drill and practice that lost our attention quickly. Upon more searching and playing, we found the game “Hamster Run” from the “Ruff Ruffman Show”, which was full of different interactive activities. This page focuses around science and engineering with different videos to watch, activities to do off the computer and finally the game. 

In beginning the game, you first click an arrow that brings you to a screen where the directions and purpose of the game are discussed from the main character Ruff Ruffman. He tells us that the hamsters can not reach their food, the carrot, and you must build different structures that help lead them to the food.

Next, the player is brought to the options of Play or Create, however creating your own course is not accessible until the user has unlocked different levels beforehand. Once the player has pressed play, they are brought to a screen where they must select the level that they want to play. You must beat the levels in order so that you can move on to the following level.

Before the level begins, the student chooses the hamster they want to play with and more hamsters become unlocked as levels are beaten. The next screen shows the path the hamster needs to take to reach the carrot and Ruff instructs them to “use only the square blocks to get the hamster to the carrot”.

Once you figure out where the building blocks should go for the hamster to reach his destination, you press “Go”. When the hamster reaches the carrot, the screen gives a positive encouraging word to the player.

If the hamster does not reach the carrot, he continues to move back and forth where he is stuck and you must press undo to try again. 

This game was very interactive and thought provoking for students to explore. One thing I enjoyed about it was that it allows for differentiation and creativity with the many choices the individual students are allowed to make. The game also does not just stop when the levels are beaten because it then allows students to create their own mazes for the hamster to go through. I think this game accomplished the goals of the MindShift article because it was very efficient, effective and had academic rigor so that the students are able to enjoy the game while maintaining their focus throughout playing. 

 

 

Hello, my name is Nicole Heffington and I prefer to be called Nicole along with the pronoun she. I am a junior Early Childhood Education major and my hometown is in Mentor, Ohio where I have lived my whole life. If possible, I would love to be able to return to my hometown to teach at the elementary school I attended. I am a member of both John Carroll’s women’s basketball team and Love Your Melon organization on campus and have enjoyed the experiences I have had in both of these activities. This semester I plan on trying to dedicate more of my time to volunteering in the community both through my major and in general. Also in my free time, I enjoy hanging out with friends, traveling to new places and reading. 

In order to feel comfortable taking intellectual and creative risks in a college classroom, I prefer to be in classes with people I know and am comfortable with because that allows me to be more outspoken and relaxed. Also, I like when teachers do not call on students to answer questions, but rather let them raise their hands to answer on their own, so they are not put on the spot feeling bad if we do not know the answer. Lastly, to feel more comfortable taking risks I like when teachers have assignments that are more open ended and opinionated versus right and wrong answers because I feel that allows students to be more original and come up with their own innovative ideas.

Something that matters most to me about education is that teachers come to class with the utmost passion and preparation that they possibly can each and every day. I think this especially applies to the classrooms of Early Childhood because these are the children’s first years of schooling, so a passionate teacher will cause the students to enjoy school from the start. The essay “The Role of Passion in Learning and Teaching” by Hamdi Serin helps to show my interests/ concerns as a preservice teacher. This essay talks about how passion is the heart of effective teaching and really increases motivation and excitement in the classroom for learning. The article also talks about how passion can also make the classroom more serious because of the teacher showing “high levels of interest in the subject and putting a high standard on them” (61). I think this displays how much passion affects the classroom environment and is important for me to express from the beginning of preservice teaching into my actual teaching career. 

Lastly, one question I would like to ask would be: do you think technology overall positively or negatively impacts learning with how much more it has become a part of the classroom?

 

I think that school choice has both many pros and cons. For the pros, I think that it is very important that it forces schools to make annual yearly progress because this puts pressure on the schools with bad teachers and weak administrators, like the attached video had stated. However, this seems ineffective in the sense that teachers who teach in poor school systems but are good teachers may have trouble getting their class to meet AYP and it may not be their fault, but the school districts fault instead. Though, this will heavily affect the teacher whose class does not meet AYP because it makes her look bad, which I do not see as fair. I do think that some form of standardized testing is good to be able to measure students progress, but what about students who are simply poor test takers and are forced to sit and take these mandatory standardized tests because of No Child Left Behind? I do not believe it is fair for them and I believe this act fails here because I agree that it “puts too much emphasis on tests scores and does not appreciate other improvements” in the classroom which is also stated in the video. One aspect of this act that I do think is a major benefit is the allowance of students to transfer schools if their school does not meet AYP two years in a row or if the school is seen as persistently dangerous (Spring 253). This allows students who are bullied or who are consistently meeting their test scores but are stuck in a school with those who continuously fail to have a second chance. So, overall I do believe that No Child Left Behind does mean well and does have many good aspects to it. I do think that some parts of it such as the amount of focus on testing could be changed to be a little less emphasized, though.

One experience I have had where testing had determined if I could graduate was OGT tests. These were tests that the whole grade had to take for English, Math, Social Studies, and Science. It was a standardized test given by the state and you had to pass all four of the subjects in order to be allowed to graduate. I personally did not think that this was very fair because if you are just simply a bad test taker, this takes away all the hard work that you actually put into their classes. One standardized test should not be allowed to have that much power over all the work students put in for four years. The good thing about this test however was that those who failed a certain subject were allowed to retake that section over again, which I think was a good way that the state kind of tweaked No Child Left Behind for the better. If No Child Left Behind was not in place, these tests would not have been mandatory and the key to determine if someone will graduate. So, I do not agree in this sense that this act should be able to implement one test that determines so much of a child’s future.

Both African Americans and Irish Americans are two examples of ethnic groups whose migrations have “raised issues in national school systems regarding multicultural and multilingual student populations” (Spring 179). Although the two groups share similarities in their experiences, there are also differences between them. One difference between the two groups is that African Americans were considered a dominant culture that was forcefully brought into the United States for the purpose of being slaves whereas the Irish are considered an immigrant  culture because they freely came here on their own to try and gain a more prosperous life (Spring 186). The discrimination towards African Americans is very common because of the visible difference in their skin tone from the start. In American classrooms, a main issue we discussed was the issue of white washing. The minority students are not forced to give up their culture, but they begin to assimilate towards/ embrace the culture of the more dominant group in the classrooms, the white students. White teachers seem to provide false facts to “hide” or make certain history seem more positive such as the times during slavery. Another issue in American classrooms is that black students will say they feel discrimination in the classrooms, but lack power to be able to stand up against whites. “Whites feel more negativity towards blacks than they do towards Hispanics, Asians, and legal and illegal immigrants and perceive them as lazy, violent, and less intelligent” (Spring 193). These premade judgements are carried into the classroom and it is simply not fair towards the African Americans. For the Irish, even though they were not forced to come here and came here on their own, they still received a lot of discrimination. They were less obvious to point out because their skin color was similar to whites, but they were seen as lazy and a bunch of drunks. Though they were not seen or heard of as a group of slaves, it appeared they were given equal negative treatment as the African Americans were.

One similarity between the experiences of the two groups is the immediate discrimination they both received when they came to America. Neither group has had or continues to have an easy life in the workplace, education system, or in society as a whole. Today, there is still obvious discrimination and one reason mentioned in the article is that in the education system, teachers “have attempted to insert culture into the education, instead of inserting education into the culture” (Ladson-Billings 285). Children from all cultures are put into classrooms, but not all the minority cultures are taught and embraced in the classroom by the teachers which puts certain cultures like the ones previously mentioned at a disadvantage.

I believe there are many steps we can take to eliminate prejudice against all groups of students in the American education system. One step we can take is to end the white washing and instead accept the past for what it was and try to embrace the cultures that were so aggressively discriminated against before. It is important that teachers become aware of the differences within their classrooms and try to understand their backgrounds. They should try to attend church where their students do and live where their students live so they are better able to understand their situations and be more relatable to the diverse culture. Another step that can be taken is to encourage that students with different cultural backgrounds are talking and playing with each other in school as early as elementary school so they have friends from all groups and do not develop prejudiced feelings towards certain groups later on. I think that the large issue of discrimination and racism can be stopped, but it will take more than just saying what you can do to help and instead taking some sort of action to help.

1. There are many examples of cultural bias that Dunn-Kenney describes in this article. Her quote “A candidate with bias towards certain children and families would be, potentially at least, a harmful influence on some of the children that he or she was assigned to teach”(38) applies to the bias of the future teachers who are partaking in this service experience. One example of cultural bias she points out were students that frequently asked whether the site was safe, as it was in an African American neighborhood of extreme poverty, even though no negative incidents were reported by either the students or the center personnel during the service time period. She also pointed out that one of the students who questioned the safety ended up realizing how quick the kids were to be affectionate with them. Another example of cultural bias was that inconsistent participation by residents at the center would make students mad who then blamed it on disorganization. They failed to see that children who came with their parents had to leave when their parents left and that living in poverty would lead to parental frustration and fatigue, so they could not always go not for the reason that they were disorganized. Students planning playgroups wanted to “teach the children some manners” which was biased in assuming they were not taught manners because of their status and they came to realize that they picked up quickly and children living in poverty do have manners. Another student assumed children were unloved and came from violent homes because of their excitement in helping set up the activities despite their ripped clothing, where they live, and how they smelled. A final example of cultural bias I noticed in the article was that Theresa did not feel appreciated by the center or families when they needed to reschedule or did not show up for her play group, but never tried to understand their situation and would immediately jump to the conclusion that the people were not grateful for her help.
2. My service experience is at The Intergenerational School in Cleveland on Wednesday mornings. It is K-8 and is primarily underprivileged African American children who attend the school. We are there to aid students in a specific classroom with simple reading and math tasks who are not fully grasping the concepts needed for that grade level. One example of a cultural bias I noticed at my service site was that a lot of the students tend to run out of the classroom and are not controlled very well. The teacher seems to let them get away with it pretty easy and does not seem to ever want to yell at them for their actions which is bias because they think they already have hard lives outside of school. There are a few white children in the classroom that I have noticed that do get yelled at more than the other students. This shows the cultural bias in the classroom of my service site.
3. One “aha” moment I noticed at my service site while I was working individually with a student was when she did not know any letters of her alphabet and kept saying she wanted to be done and go back to her classroom. I immediately thought she was trying to be disobedient and just did not want to do her letters, but then she told me that her parents do not help or make her practice at home ever. This raised the “aha” moment in me because she did not have anyone giving her support and extra help to get her to learn better and it was not just her trying to get out of working on the letters. Another “aha” moment that a peer in my service site had noticed was that when it was time for the girl to return to her classroom she began to hide under the table and cry saying she did not want to return. The girl started to speak up louder telling her she had to go back and we began to notice that she would hide more with the louder tone. This lead us to “aha” because we thought that maybe past experiences in the classroom or at home with being yelled at was hard for her and that there may be a better way to communicate with her in a way that would not frustrate her.
4. I believe my service has really opened my eyes and help me to be more reflective of myself as well as being less quickly to make first judgements before learning more about situations first. I am starting to learn that some of the students at my site have rougher home lives than it appears and do not receive some of the extra support they need in their learning process. This allows me to learn more about the patience I need to have in trying to understand the best ways to help each student because they all learn differently. My service has helped me to become a more accepting person and to really analyze situations before getting annoyed when the children do not listen to me.

The banking concept of education focuses on the teacher narrating and “filling” the students with the contents of this narration and the students being the listeners. The students do not think for their own they merely record and memorize information and then repeat it without actually analyzing it or knowing what they really are being forced to learn. This concept seems very disadvantaged as Freire states that the students are compared to “containers to be filled by the teachers” and the more they are filled the better students they are seen as (104). There is not any communication in this system where the teacher talks and the students listen and the teacher enforces his choice and the students comply, which appears to be the opposite of the problem posing concept. The problem posing “rejects communiques and embodies communication” (109) and it takes away the full authority of the teacher and allows the teachers and students to teach each other and therefore grow together. Problem posing encourages creativity of the students and seems like a much better approach to effective teaching in the classroom. As a teacher I think you would be able to implement both the banking concept and problem posing concept in the classroom. I think the banking concept comes in when teachers must be the enforcer because if they are not, students will abuse their power and take advantage of the teacher. There must be authority and the teacher being the higher power in the classroom. However, I do not think that the teacher just stating information that must be memorized and repeated on exams and other work should be implemented in the classroom from the banking concept. The problem posing part can work with the banking concept and teachers having the higher authority by still giving children the power to be creative in the classroom and be able to have input on assignments. Instead of memorizing factual information, they can be taught material that they are able to elaborate on and form their own opinions on. They should also be given work that challenges them and allows them to think and share their thoughts and not just be given busy work that the teacher forces them to do. One example of a teacher I had that would solely use the banking method was in a government class I took. Information was put into PowerPoints that we went over each day and would have to memorize that information and then take weekly tests on it. I never actually learned anything from the class because after memorizing it I would end up forgetting it the next week, which shows how unproductive this method is. On the opposite side, a teacher I had for a philosophy class at John Carroll would implement both the problem posing and bank concept by presenting the factual material of what different philosophers thought, but then allowed us to state our opinions on what we thought was right and wrong from the philosophers. This allowed the students to have a voice and also help the teacher grow because he would be able to listen to our thoughts and gain ideas he may not have ever thought of on his own.

Being a typical Caucasian female, I have never felt like an outsider due to race, culture or religion, however I have felt discrimination for my gender. In my tenth-grade math class I had one of our high school’s football coaches as my teacher. At the beginning he seemed like a cool teacher, but as the year progressed he became more favoriting of the males in the class and this was reflected by the higher grades they would receive and the number of things he would let them get away with in class compared to the females.  I feel like this really put the females at a disadvantage because he would give them higher grades on simple papers, allow them to get away with talking in class, but if the females would talk he would call them out in front of everyone, and simply made the females upset. This created a very unequal and unideal learning environment because all the females were afraid to speak and answer questions in fear he would make fun of you, which in turn forced them to keep their questions about the material to themselves.

This experience relates to the discussion about equal educational inequality and student diversity because the discussion talked about children who are minorities in the classroom due to their race, culture or the language that they speak. Those who do not speak English will have a slower learning process, especially if they are not given help for this in the classroom. This relates to the females who are not given the help to just be able to learn in my previous classroom and feel the “blindness” that the non-English speaking students feel. Equal educational opportunities in classrooms are necessary to enable all students to gain the knowledge and resources they need in the real world.

Maxine Greene’s article focuses on “wide awakeness” and she is stating that everyone can go through their life routines, but hardly anyone goes through their day questioning a higher power and being intellectually awake. She feels that in schools, teachers feel dominated and caught within an inescapable system and have no way of speaking up for themselves. However, what they do not realize is that this hierarchy of power is manmade and states, “… such feelings can to a large degree be overcome through conscious endeavor on the part of the individuals to keep themselves awake” (219). If teachers would become awake and take initiative to understand the decisions that the directive make they are “able to define their own moral values… they might see a moral issue involved” (220). She believes that being able to pose questions about what teachers find in the system to be oppressive, mindless and wrong can help them come together as a group and speak up on what they believe is morally right/ wrong. Being isolated and individualized makes it less possible for teachers to act, but a group of “wide awake” individuals with similar beliefs may be able to over throw an entire system.

Today, strikes have become increasingly popular for groups of teachers and entire school districts who are seeking higher pay and more benefits to combat the system they feel trapped in. As stated in article one that is in support of teacher strikes, West Virginia’s huge strike is propelling many other states to follow their lead due to the result which won 5 percent raises for all public employees. Teachers are becoming more awake to the increasing underfunding of public education and the realization that “we weren’t alone, that a whole state of teachers could stand together” (Larry Cagle, a Tulsa high school teacher). Article one states that “a growing number of teachers began to feel overwhelmed, demoralized, and paralyzed in a system that worked to undermine our ability to be the effective and meaningful teachers that we could be.” This realization shows the awakeness of the teachers to realize their rights and be able to come together in states other than West Virginia.

Article two is against teacher strikes and believe that they hurt students and divide the community. In April and May alone, “6union leaders around the state called rolling one-day strikes across the state, affecting 65 districts and closing the schools of 573,000 children, affecting more than half of all Washington students” (Liv Finne). She believes that as schools close, students miss out on educational opportunities that they would have learned in the days their teachers are on strike. Finne also believes that “Strikes divide parents from teachers, and teachers from administrators. Union executives do not need to disrupt the lives of thousands of students and their families to get teacher pay increases.” Article two does not favor any aspects of strikes and believes they only worsen the conditions for communities which can be helped in more effective ways other than strikes.

Based on the above information, I believe that Maxine Greene would say teachers today are organized enough to be able to speak out for their beliefs. As West Virginia went on strike, multiple other states such as Colorado and North Carolina began to follow, showing how many communities became awake and together to stand up for themselves. Article one gave many arguments from different people who all had statements that backed up their reasons for striking as well as statistics such as “78 percent of the U.S. population think teacher pay is too low” and “participants who had heard of the recent teacher strikes, 80 percent say they approve of the tactic”. This support shows that not only are the teachers coming together, but also communities who are backing the decisions of these teachers to go on strike. The amount of strikes that are occurring around the United States is a major support for the statement that indicated Maxine Greene would agree that today’s teachers are organized enough to follow West Virginia. I also think Greene would think teachers are being “wide awake” by going on strike and not just doing what the union tells them to because Greene’s article does not force anyone to take any actions, just states that teachers do have rights to follow their moral beliefs. If a teacher does not believe strikes are morally correct, they do not have to participate in the strikes and “follow the union”. Article two does not have much supporting factors to prove that strikes are hurting students because it does not have facts and statistics that show what the strikes have led to for teachers. Greene would agree with students in article one like Ravi Patel who pointed out that “Our teachers are setting an example of bravery by standing up to ignorance and inaction. Our teachers are setting an example of engagement in activism . . . our teachers are setting a better example than our legislators have for the past decade.” Greene believes that teachers must create their own moral life to challenge and enlighten their students and by having students like Patel recognize his own teachers being awake, he himself is gaining this awakeness. This is exactly what Greene wants and would support the strikes if it means the teachers are standing up for their morals and teaching their students to do the same.

 

 

This quote from Dewey emphasizes the fact that schools need to have teachers who care about both the psychological and sociological side of teaching. According to Dewey psychological factors are “the child’s own instincts” and the “child carrying on his own initiative independent of the educator”. In classrooms that are psychologically oriented, the teacher is basically having the students do work on their own and they are not interacting with each other. In sociologically oriented classrooms, teachers focus on how students fit in with everyone else and teachers and students work together. One example of a teacher that I had who relied solely on psychological factors was my tenth-grade history teacher who would have us do worksheets every single day based off of PowerPoints she presented. We would never interact with each other, work in groups, or get to talk, we strictly worked alone. Dewey would respond to this teacher in a negative way because the students are not gaining this sociological type of teaching which he believes in necessary. Dewey says that “all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race” and by having students just sit and do busy work instead of being able to interact with other students’ thinking, it does not benefit the student alone and more importantly, society as a whole. The teacher could have improved by still presenting the PowerPoints, but then letting students form groups to discuss their opinions on the presented material and help teach each other the material as well.

 

Jason Blakely’s article titled How School Choice Turns Education into a Commodityin The Atlantic discusses neoliberalism and its effects on freedom within school systems and communities. Neoliberalism focuses on making funding for education “portable” in hopes of giving families more opportunities and a free market to choose their preferred way of schooling for their children whether it be public, private, charter, or for-profit. The heritage foundation video shows that taxpayers’ money, which goes to the government to fund public schools and then assigns children by their geographic location, is not efficient due to the poor service that results and the government not meeting the people’s wants and needs. Neoliberalism fixes this issue because it gives choice and allows the parents to be able to spend their educational money on what they see fits, which then creates competition and improves schooling all around, a very positive result. Betsy DeVos, the educational secretary for Donald Trump, is a big supporter of neoliberalism in schools and implementing a voucher system to “reengineer the government to mimic a free market”. The idea of using vouchers that are supplied by the state to choose which school to have their children attend helps to spread this competition among schools because schools will want to be the ones that are chosen by parents. Though it sounds like all positives, neoliberalism can affect the poor.

Market choice without neoliberalism is difficult on the poor because the public schools become defunded and are unable to compete with the competition of other funded schools from neoliberalism and the vouchers that now cover 50% of private school tuition. The wealthy are able to move their children to the best ideal choice whereas the poor may not be able to. This in turn goes to show that neoliberalism creates more barriers and discrimination towards the classes who are not very wealthy, and continues to help those who are most likely already able to afford their school of choice.

Education is believed to be a dead end for innovation because of its closed system without this idea of neoliberalism and free market. So, are vouchers and funding schools to create a free market a good idea, or do the middle and lower class suffer too much from these ideas? I would say the free market would benefit more of society’s needs than damage the poor all around.