Students should consider themselves academic athletes, eating and exercising for brain health to achieve their highest potential as students giving them every opportunity for their future. Before this class, I had worked on many projects in different settings: individual pre-clinical research projects and team projects in clinical science, and even human health projects in nutrition and fitness. However, I did not know how to construct a unit teaching plan breaking down and teaching complex concepts utilizing project-based learning. This course provided the road map for me to develop a new approach to teach nutrition to middle school students as an experience intended to change their lives.
At this time, I have a unit map and daily lesson plans for the unit in nutrition! However, I still need to develop rich course content on short slide presentations to teach key ideas about the human body, plants, food preparation, and the connection between eating and exercise. Because of what I have learned in this course and others at the Teachers College, I feel that I have the curriculum development tools necessary to complete each lesson and finalize the unit. Other obstacles will need to be overcome. For example, I need to find the time in the courses that I teach to include these lessons. It may be possible for me to distribute the weeks throughout the year in a core class to develop student skills required for each to achieve their best. One week could possibly be taught at the start of each of the four quarters of the academic year. Throughout this class titled, Curriculum for the 21st Century, I learned many new exciting concepts some of which I could implement right away in my science classroom. In learning about authentic assessment, I had a chance to read and write about a topic that I experienced in the science lab.-- assessing for understanding. In this approach to learning, assessments are formative and do not sort and rank students. This kind of assessment keeps students engaged in learning throughout the school year. I teach my middle school science students a simplified heuristic reasoning termed claim-evidence-reason (CER). CER is a powerful approach for students to begin to learn about the world of nature. I am pleased to have tools to keep my students engaged and locked on learning throughout the school year.
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As we approached and then entered the 21st Century, computers changed how we work, learn, and communicate. Computational power changed the skills needed by employers. Global computer access brought many highly skilled workers into close digital proximity, no matter where in the world they live. Consequently, in the 21st Century, employees are increasingly likely to work on multi-disciplinary teams (frequently remote teams), transforming the seemingly unsolvable nature of complex problems when challenged by individual thinking. Many new skills must be taught to today's students if they are to have the required skills for life in the 21st Century.
In years past, learning was inefficient, and children were instructed by the keepers of knowledge in the community. Facts and procedures were taught in abstraction from the problems they can solve (Sawyer, 2006). Students were taught by rote learning, the most advanced thinking from the dawn of civilization and beyond; however, what students learned inside the four walls of the classroom they often could not apply in their daily activities. In the future, students should be taught by practitioners in their area of knowledge, and there must be a focus on the application of core thought. This idea is consistent with the constructivist learning theory, where what information is learned and how information is learned changes the final knowledge present in the student's mind (Center for Research on Learning and Technology et al. (2001, p1). Humankind cannot do without the rich resource of human thinking found in highest abundance in India, China, and the United States (Data from World Bank, 2020). Because of the high number of people alive today, and because the regions of the highest human density most often have the lowest income per household (Roser, 2018), human ingenuity should be viewed as a global resource, in fact, as a natural resource. For example, even though much progress was made up to late last year on eradicating extreme poverty (New Ways of Looking at Poverty, 2018), up to date projections foresee the global impact of COVID-19 as reversing the improvement in wages seen in previous years (The World Bank, 2020). Human thinking applied to small challenges may even reverse this kind of financial trend. In my classroom, I teach middle school students to practice heuristic thinking through claim-evidence-reasoning as a way to think through the phenomena of nature toward understanding. Scientific reasoning is effectively applied to nature's study, and each student can check their claim using reductionist reasoning against the evidence. My students learn best through constantly thinking-a-loud with the teacher which suits my personality as an extreme extrovert. I have found that when I affirm human dignity through daily affirmations and as I value and promote my students' insights, connections, and new paradigms, allowing them to think and work with their peers in individual thinking, group work that students are engaged and learn. In the future, I plan to increasingly bring in 21st Century skills to my classroom. Just a few weeks ago, I had approximately 150, 13- and 14-year-old adolescents choosing a favorite 21st Century skill to showcase during the first week of classes. The students loved it. I could not agree more with Boss (2019) in that students need to be empowered, and as I would see it, students should own their learning. Boss, S. (2019, February 5). It's 2019. So Why Do 21st-Century Skills Still Matter? EdSurge. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-01-22-its-2019-so-why-do-21st-century-skills-still-matter Center for Research on Learning and Technology, Savery, J. R. S., & Duffy, T. M. D. (2001, June). Problem Based Learning: An instructional model and its constructivist framework (CRLT Technical Report No. 16-01). Indiana University. Data from World Bank. (2020, April 08). Global population analyzed by country. https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_pop_totl&idim=world:Earth&hl=en&dl=en#!ctype=b&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_y=sp_pop_totl&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_x=sp_pop_totl&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&ifdim=country&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false Roser, M. R. (2018, September 12). The map we need if we want to think about how global living conditions are changing. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-cartogram Sawyer, R. K. (2006). Introduction: The New Science of Learning. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of: The learning sciences (p. 1–16). Cambridge University Press. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-07157-001 Stauffer, B. (2020, March 19). What Are 21st Century Skills? Applied Education Systems. https://www.aeseducation.com/blog/what-are-21st-century-skills The World Bank. (2020, June). Projected poverty impacts of COVID-19 (coronavirus). http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/461601591649316722/Projected-poverty-impacts-of-COVID-19.pdf World Bank. (2018, October 17). New ways of looking at poverty [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5uMI2DsXlA&feature=youtu.be Traditionally, according to Black et al. (2004), assessment in the classroom was used in many ways to verify the knowledge contained in the human brain. The author's write that assessment must be an integral part of the learning process whereby it promotes learning, not just used merely to check for knowledge. This is consistent with the idea that I do not recall where I first heard that computers have demonstrated that the human brain is not so great at memory, and we all know that because we rely on the memory in our personal computers to remind us of what we forget including our personal calendars which are indispensable to modern life. However, human reasoning can be superb, which has inspired software programmers into teaching computers to self-learn by an approach termed artificial intelligence.
In other ways, the sorting and measuring of student knowledge do not acknowledge that each student may have or possibly later develop an individual perspective that may contribute new insight into understanding the common within the uncommon. For example, in science, individual practitioners of science may have new understandings that profoundly impacts how we live, and this leads to innovation in the applied sciences and in engineering. I feel that learning is a journey, and all occasions to interact with the words and meaning related to that subject of interest should build on individual strengths and lay a new foundation. Through the King's-Medway-Oxfordshire Formative Assessment Project (KMOFAP), that Black et al. (2004) developed in collaboration with classroom educators, innovative practices for classroom assessment following the principle of assessment for learning were crafted and tested by teachers in classrooms. This has and will improve my practice of teaching. The concept that assessing itself is a learning opportunity is a belief that I share, and that I have taught to my middle school science students over the past couple of years. This is something that I first became conscious of in my own belief system when as a research volunteer, after undergraduate studies, in research collaboration with other members of my faculty mentor's research laboratory, and during weekly presentations on science research by students working closely with my mentor. In the laboratory, assessing to test knowledge did not seem in any way useful; however, assessing to continue learning furthered the research in which we were engaged. The ideas put forth by Black et al. (2004) are so fully developed and clear that chances for change and improvement are easy to find. For example, today in class, I engaged my student learners in reflection after group reading in a jigsaw pattern in individual questions and answers by group. I even waited in uncomfortable silence for students to respond with the students. When we did not complete the group discussion at the end of our time in class, I did not worry, and I told my students that we would return to this learning as a class tomorrow. Recently, I prepared a multi-choice reflection question for students to consider. I initially anticipated posting in Google Classroom for student response after all groups had participated in the discussion following a Jigsaw Puzzle reading assignment. Instead, to conclude today's work, I posted the question at the end of our work today, and I allowed students to see a graphical summary of their peer's responses. And, in this way I allowed the students to determine not only the pace of their learning, but also through low risk assessment to continue to learn the finer points from the reading. From my reading of Black et al. (2004), I have additional confidence in focusing on student learning exclusively, and I have many new approaches to implement in my classroom. Black, P., Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshall, B., & Wiliam, D. (2004). Working Inside the Black Box: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom. (Cover story). Phi Delta Kappan, 86(1), 9–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/003172170408600105 I wrote this reflection after I read the Summary section of the report titled, "How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures" published by The National Academies Press in 2018. Many points of view were presented on how learnings from neuroscience should change the practice of teaching.
As I read, I found myself imagining what must occur for a student to learn. (Because I was trained as a scientist, I practiced biochemistry for many years at university and I often think about what goes on in a living cell which is the basis for life. To me, this sort of thinking can and does allow me to understand my own needs, although this may not be immediately obvious.) I remembered the Induced Fit Model of RNA-Protein binding, which replaced the lock and key model to explain molecular binding. In the induced fit model, molecules are moving to respond to factors in their environment, including each other. As one molecule, for example, which may be RNA forms complementary bonding with its cognate binding partner, a protein of a particular family, both molecules influence each other’s rearrangement in 3-dimensional space until an exact fit is achieved between the two and some stability of binding occurs. It may be that people learn with some similarity. Each brain and the world around it, including other people, are in a constant dynamic exchange of information. Whatever knowledge proves its usefulness by advantaging the organism through learning for survival, that brain retains losing the old thinking while retaining the new way of thinking. In this way, the brain and its environment are in a dynamic exchange. Each person's brain responds until Maslow's hierarchy of needs is satisfied for each person. Because the human body and the environment around it are always changing, based on growth, maturation, reproduction, and annual cycles, learning is always occurring and ever dynamic in the exchange of newly found information. How could my students benefit from a teacher with this kind of specialized knowledge? To put it simply, I may conclude that the teacher is learning with each student, and students learn with other students. Parents are exchanging learning with their students, who then, in turn, take that back to the school to ask a question of the teacher seeking clarification on parent's confusion on the students learning. Oh well, all learning takes work. The old adage is probably right: "A teacher's and parent's work is never done"—is that the way it goes? |