Getting Students up to P.A.R.R.

With a navy blue, hooded sweatshirt pulled tight over his head, he slouches down in his desk hoping not to be called on. Flanked by the overzealous, eager overachiever and the caffeine guzzling, text-a-holic, he is one of the many. The athlete who refuses to show his brains to match his brawns. The class clown hoping to gain attention by diverting it from the teacher. Unique to their class, but not unique to the classrooms of America. They all are wonderfully unique, yet the same to many teachers. These are the student profiles that teachers encounter on a daily basis in 21^st century American classrooms. Full of hope, promise, fear, trepidation and brilliance – all of them. As a teacher it becomes essential to find a way to reach all of them – to make education relevant to each and every one – while not using gimmicks or tricks. This can only be achieved through a solid foundation; it can only be achieved through developing one’s educational philosophy.

As a teacher, if one does enough research, he or she can find educational pedagogy or theory to support a wide variety of philosophies. Thus, it becomes even more important to identify the core values or beliefs that I hold to be most important as an educator. I must decipher which theories and philosophies align with my beliefs. To do this, I begin with my own education. As a graduate of Seattle Preparatory School and Santa Clara University, I spent eight years in Jesuits schools. While learning as a student, I failed to realize the pedagogy behind the content I learned in those classrooms. It wasn’t until I became a Jesuit educator myself that I realized how much I enjoyed the Jesuit approach. This pedagogical story began nearly 500 years ago. As a young worker with the Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius of Loyola began opening schools for his new Jesuit recruits throughout Europe. After a request from the magistrates of Messina in Sicily, Ignatius began opening schools for lay people as well. In a letter he wrote about the

St. Ignatius - Founder of the Jesuits

founding colleges in December of 1551, Ignatius wrote, “Finally, since young boys become grown men, their good education in life and doctrine will be beneficial to many others, with the fruit expanding more widely every day” (O’Neal, 2003). Ignatius and the Jesuits saw that with educated men being able to become lifelong learners, they could make an impact on the world. This idea evolved over the years to involved compassionate and service-based education. As a way to move Jesuit ideals into action in the classroom, the Jesuits created the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm in 1993 (JSEA, 1994).

Based upon the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP) involves five steps to education: context, experience, reflection, action, and evaluation (JSEA, 1994, p. 298). This approach allows teacher to build upon past classes and learning (context), trying out a new skill or lesson (experience), reflecting and group work (reflection), homework or assignments (action), and evaluating their understanding of material from the previous day (evaluation). While the Jesuits created a model that I can appreciate and look to for guidance in developing my own philosophy, it isn’t the only model with a similar approach. In fact, educational philosophers and experts for years valued the “experience” and “context” involved in teaching a lesson much more than the traditional educational format would have one believe. With the focus on standardized tests and the physical structure of a classroom – involving a lectern and desks in rows – it seems as if education really hasn’t changed since the Colonial era. Yet evidence shows that many educators value the IPP approach or something similar.

American education philosopher John Dewey emphasized experience in his philosophical approach to education. He wrote in his book entitled Experience and Education:

John Dewey

“What we want and need is education pure and simple, and we shall make surer and faster progress when we devote ourselves to finding out just what education is and what conditions have to be satisfied in order that education may be a reality and not a name or a slogan. It is for this reason alone that I have emphasized the need for a sound philosophy of experience (Dewey, 1938, p. 91).

With a focus on experience as the central manner in which to educate young people, Dewey in many ways rejected the old educational model. At the same time, Dewey took special consideration of not blindly supporting experience without addressing the questions that would arise from other educators. Throughout his book, Dewey presents possible questions to using experience as the model in education and continually addresses those concerns. While Dewey valued experience in education, he clearly also finds importance in context. In his Pedagogic Creed, Dewey stated: “Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child’s capacities, interests, and habits. It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations. These powers, interests, and habits must be continually interpreted – we must know what they mean” (Dewey, 1897, p. 78). Dewey believed that teachers couldn’t simply teach all children the same way. He believed in not only the experience, but finding out what students’ talents, interests, and habits are in the classroom. Only though combining these two factors could a teacher truly be effective. While Dewey may be considered the giant of educational philosophy, many others came along before or after who agreed with this viewpoint.

Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire, despite living in a different area of the world, agreed with Dewey on the importance of context and experience in education. While he focused mostly on social movements and ensuring that oppressed people had access to education, Freire accomplished this through this writing on the experience in the classroom and outside as well. In Joy Palmer’s Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present, she described Freire’s approach. Palmer (2001) states, “Education can help us to understand the world we live in and can make us better prepared to transform it, but only if we deeply connect education to the larger realities in which people live, and to struggles to alter those realities” (Palmer, 2001, p. 130). As teachers it is imperative to not assume prior knowledge or to simply instruct without context. Freire believes that a student will become more knowledge and ultimately a better citizen of the world if they can connect their work in the classroom to the world outside. This can be achieved through an educational approach to involve context, action and reflection. As I review multiple approaches to education, it becomes clear that I value a multi-faceted approach that requires students to not only be engaged but to also reflect upon their involvement in the educational process. I build my philosophy off of the Jesuit approach but alter to fit my personality as well. My approach is “Getting Students up to P.A.R.R.”. In this case, P.A.R.R. stands for prior knowledge, action, reflection and repetition. Through this educational process, the student will then learn skills that will allow them to become a life long learner. 

As many educational scholars point to students needing a connection to material in the classroom, I believe prior knowledge to be essential to education. As I begin a lesson, I spend the beginning ensuring that students understand the purpose and rationale for the lesson. Additionally they must be able to relate to the content and apply it to their experience. This can be achieved through accessing prior knowledge. For example, when I teach a lesson on the Stamp and Sugar Acts of the Revolutionary Era in United States history, I can access prior knowledge in students through a variety of ways. I can compare the experience to protesting some rules at school or I can have them review the prior events in American history up to this point. This allows students to begin their engagement in the material and to begin applying it. After this point, I move toward action. While there are days that I will lecture at the front of a classroom, I really don’t believe that learning can take place passively. If students simply sit in their desks and attempt to take in knowledge that I recite to them, then they will never engage the material fully. It is essential that students interact with each other and construct their own knowledge with my assistance. This is the action step of my philosophy. Other educational scholars agree with this approach. Barry Kort and Rob Reilly (2002) wrote about a new approach to education using this type of model in their article entitled “Restructuring Educational Pedagogy: A Model for Deep Change”. They stated: “The focii of attention shifts to the construction of ‘knowledge’ and to the extraction of meaningful ‘insights’ from the ‘big picture’. When ‘knowledge’ is coupled with a personal or cultural value system, ‘wisdom’ emerges” (Kort, 2002, p. 3). Through context and action, the student can begin to gain skills and knowledge that can transform material outside of the classroom and into their daily lives. Yet this process won’t be complete until they reflect on the experience. 

Reflecting on the material and the student’s own experience becomes an essential aspect to my educational philosophy. After experiencing the learning process through a given lesson, students are required to reflect on the learning that took place. Too often reflection gets interpreted as journal writing or sharing in small groups. This isn’t my purpose. My aim is to have students be able to identify why the lesson matters to them or to history, what is significant about the lesson, and why they need to learn the material. This allows students to attach meaning to the learning. Instead of simply taking notes on why I think the material is important, I strive to have students identify this key to the process. Often this can be achieved through written assignments, but also can be done more informally through class discussions or small group work. Reflection provides students with the necessary discernment period to capture the meaning of the lesson. Without this process, students would superficially learn the material but would not truly engage in the acquisition of knowledge. After this step, students must repeat the process. This does not imply that students must repeat the same lesson over and over, nor does it mean they should repeat learning the same facts, dates, or names. It does mean that students absolutely must repeat the process and the skill work gained in the process. For example, if my students work on creating thesis statements concerning a topic in the Middle Ages unit in freshmen history, they will follow the whole P.A.R.R. process. They will access their prior knowledge, not only of the Middle Ages, but of creating thesis statements. As they think about their prior work, the students will begin creating these statements and even get feedback from others through the action step. As they complete their thesis statements, they then reflect on how they did in the process. Could they have done better? What would they do differently? As we move to other units such as the Age of Exploration, they practice the skill of thesis statement creation again. This ultimately not only gets students up to par, but creates life long learners in the process. 

With an educational philosophy built upon the repetitive process of acting and reflecting students learn to appreciate the acquisition of information rather than going through the motions in school. The more meaning students can attach to their learning, the more they seek opportunities to learn in the future. As Dexter Chapin describes in his book Master Teachers: Making a Difference on the Edge of Chaos, teachers choose their profession in many ways to experience these moments of connection that students experience. He states: “Everybody has moments of success, but teachers see it every time the kids’ eyes light up when they see and understand something never seen and never understood before” (Chapin, 2009, p. 12-13). As students reflect on their action and experience, they attach meaning. Through this process they see that learning is something that they achieve, not something that happens passively. They DO it. Thus in many ways learning becomes a part of life through my educational philosophy. It doesn’t exist solely in a classroom. In traditional African Education, learning and life are not separated. Timothy Reagan points this out in Non-Western Educational Traditions: Alternative Approaches to Educational Thought and Practice. He states: “Education, then, in the traditional African setting cannot (and indeed, should not), be separated from life itself. It is a natural process by which the child gradually acquires skill, knowledge, and attitudes appropriate to life in his or her community” (Reagan, 1996, p. 19). While non-Western educational traditions may differ in many ways, they approach the purpose of education in similar ways to my philosophy – to create learners for life. Our processes to get there may be different, but the end result is the same. Ultimately this should be the goal of any educator at the elementary or secondary level. Hopefully this leads to an adult who will access their prior knowledge, act upon it and then reflect on the meaning. My goal is for this process to begin in high school and to continue for the rest of their lives. It can be best described by Mortimer Alder in Reforming Education as writes, “I would hope that somehow the feast of knowledge and the excitement of ideas would be made attractive to them, so that when they left school, they would want to go on learning. In school they must be given, not learning, for that cannot be done, but the skills of learning and the wish to learn, so that in adult life they will want to go on learning and will have the skills to use in the process” (Alder, 1977, p. 249). Any educator would be pleased with that. 

References 

Alder, M.J. (1977). Reforming education: The schooling of a people and their education beyond schooling. Boulder:  Westview Press. 

Chapin, D. (2009). Master teachers: Making a difference on the edge of chaos. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Education. 

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Collier Books. 

Dewey, J. (1897). My pedagogic creed. School Journal, 54, 77-80. 

Glassman, M. (2001). Dewey and Vygotsky: Society, experience, and inquiry in educational practice. Educational Researcher, 30 (4), 3-14. 

The International Commission on the Apostolate of Jesuit Education. (1994). Ignatian pedagogy: A practical approach. Washington , DC: JSEA. 

Kort, B. & Reilly, R. (2002). Restructuring educational pedagogy: A model for deep change. The Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

O’Neal, N. (2003). The Life of St. Ignatius of Loyola. 

Palmer, J.A. (Ed.). (2001). Fifty modern thinkers on education: From Piaget to the present. New York: Routledge. 

Reagan, T. (1996). Non-western educational traditions: Alternative approaches to educational thought and practice. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Attention, Attention!

Preparing a lesson for each and every class provides some monotony and a lot of work. Each lesson cannot be perfect, but as a teacher – with preparation – I can strive for it to be pretty close to perfection. Time and schedules prevent every day from being great, but by following John Medina’s rules it can be a whole lot easier. Specifically, following chapter four or attention from Brain Rules can provide teachers with a nice template to follow with lesson plans.

Medina outlines the brain and attention in this manner: 

Emotions get our attention

Meaning before details

The brain cannot multitask

The brain needs a break

What does this mean? Well, Medina proposes breaking up lessons or lectures into 10 minute segments. This involves beginning each ten minute session with the core of the lesson or segment. In many ways this represents the objective of a lesson that fits with the SPU lesson plan template. As I finish my ten minute segment, I must find a way to get their attention back. This points to Medina’s first point – emotions get our attention. I think there are small ways to do this in a class. Movement can elicit emotion as students must find you and see where you are – especially if behind the class. Volume can do it as well. I use my voice to get attention at times. Lastly, humor can do this. I utilize humor a lot in the classroom.

By using the SPU template and Medina’s fourth rule of attention, teachers can create idealistic lesson plans. By planning in movement, partner work, group work, and new material every ten minutes, we can keep the attention of students throughout the lesson.

Learning Differences and Success

The reading for this week’s class in Students as Learners focuses on exceptional learners and those with learning differences. This topic hits very close to home for me due to a couple of reasons. I spent my first two years working at Seattle Prep in the Learning Resource Center (LRC) as an administrative assistant and then program tutor. Secondly, my wife faces challenges with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) both in her personal life and in academic work. Through these experiences, I learned that students with learning differences simply process information differently and often benefit from systems and structure which benefits me as a classroom teacher.

As a program tutor, I spent numerous hours working one-on-one with students. I created plans for work, broke down

Differences in brain activity with an ADHD child

 chapters in A Catcher in the Rye, designed homework action plans, and tutored in math and history. It proved to be a very rewarding time for me. It made me realize I wanted to teach full time. I feel extremely fortunate that my first experience with “teaching” (other than my coaching) involved working with students who possessed learning differences. This forced me to come up with creative ways for students to achieve success. It forced me to meet students where they were in the learning process rather than where I think every student should be all the time. It made me realize, before I even knew it, that each student learns at different speeds, rates, and skill levels. That seems obvious, but not all teachers get to this point.

Additionally, I go home and experience the need for systems and structure with my wife. She struggles with a “fly by the seat of your pants” approach to living. While I am pretty linear in my thinking and fairly structured, I learned to change some of my unstructured life to routines. Why does all this matter to me teaching today?

I am a better teacher today because of these experiences. I feel that students who struggle with attention or writing skills or any learning difference can succeed in my classroom due to these experiences. I use strategies that I learn from my home life and prior school life at Seattle Prep to benefit these students. By writing on the board, using verbal cues, group work with movement, and scheduling one on one conferences, I can lead students with learning differences to feel more success in the classroom.

Slang in the Classroom? Nah dawg – formal style is where it’s at

In Judith Meece and Denise Daniels’ book entitled Child and Adolescent Development for Educators, chapter five outlines the development of language in children and as they head into adolescence. While much of this chapter provides nice context for my future child – my wife is six months pregnant – as a high school teacher, it fails to grasp apply for most of the chapter. Yet Meece and Daniels address a small part on adolescence language that grabbed my attention. They state: “By adolescence, students are extremely skilled at adapting their language to different situations” (Meece 274). While this is the hope of many educators, I find that it is becoming less and less true.

It is essential for students to be able to change their use of language and formal style in different environments. Not everyone agrees with this, but as long as society holds certain expectations for job interviews and work environments, it is essential. While students at Seattle Prep understand this to a degree, there are those who feel that they should be able to express themselves however they wish in school. Especially since their parents pay so much money to attend our school. I am not bothered personally by this style or language use (more informal), but I do feel that students need to learn how to switch their formality on and off at appropriate times.

So how do we help them practice this? I believe there are a couple ways in the classroom to accomplish this. One way is through group presentations. Currently in my junior Collegio, the students are working together on 1920s presentations, as that is our current unit of study. The students present on one of the following: Harlem Renaissance art, Harlem Renaissance music, prohibition, Scopes Trial, rise of the KKK, changing role of women, women’s suffrage, the rise of the automobile, consumerism, popular culture, or the Palmer Raids. While each group uses technology to enhance their lesson and must practice group skills, the true evaluation is on their presentation. Students must learn to adapt their language and style to become more formal. Through this process, students practice essentially for their future encounters in the workplace and in interviews. And in the end, they are agreeing with Meece and Daniels without even knowing it!

Student Group Presentation: Consumerism and Rise of Technology

History: Just Memorization?

While reading John Medina’s fifth and sixth chapters from Brain Rules, I found myself reflecting on classroom experiences and the significance of memorization. Since I teach world and American history, I inevitably face the memorization challenge on a weekly, if not daily, basis. I try to steer away from heavy memorization of facts, dates, and names as that usually makes people hate history in my experience. If you ask the average person how they liked history, most will say, “it was a bunch of dead people and dates I had to memorize!” Not effective teaching, right?

Yet I realize that much of knowing what happened in the past must involve some memorization. How do I balance memorization with significant learning experiences? Medina gives me some insight to how I can make this possible.

Memorize here or at home?

In terms of short term memory, Medina points out that, “retrieval may best be improved by replicating the conditions surrounding the initial encoding” (Medina 113). This can be pretty difficult at school. Our system is set up in many ways for students to study and read material at home and thus memorize material. They then are tested on that material in school! This does not replicate the conditions! We have a base level challenge that will be difficult for students to overcome. Although this challenge in not impossible. By having students study names or a list of terms in the classroom on their own during my teaching time, I may be setting them up for future success. They can continue to study outside the classroom, but the initial encoding happens right there where they will take the quiz or test. This happened recently with a terms of Islam exam I gave to my freshman. They worked on learning the terms in partners in class and almost all of them did very well on the quiz.

While the initial encoding environment is important to memorization, the significance of the material proves to be the most important aspect of the process. As Medina states: “We know the information is remembered best when it is elaborate, meaningful, and contextual” (Medina 114). This is how I strive to teach history. My philosophy never revolves around memorization. I try to use memorization to aid in the process of making meaning out of events in history. The more meaning students can attach to the history, the more they will remember.

Medina’s Exploration and My Experience

As I read John Medina’s 12^th Brain Rule entitled “Exploration”, I realized that in my first year of teaching I really lived out his philosophy. It was just two years ago (although it seems like much longer) that I began teaching at Seattle Prep through a variety of odd circumstances. As a Program Tutor in our Learning Resource Center (our program for students with learning differences), I interacted and worked with students on a daily basis. While it was rewarding in many ways, I wanted to get into a classroom and teach. The school gave me that opportunity with one class – Economics. Senior Economics. While I enjoyed that class, I am not sure I would recommend teachers with virtually no experience begin their career with a senior class.

Six weeks into the school year, the principal at Prep presented me with a new opportunity. A teacher was leaving the school and they wanted me to fill his spot in Junior Collegio, as a history teacher. I jumped in, a little hesitant, with two feet and began my teaching career. So what does this have to do with John Medina? Well, as Medina states, medical school may be the best model for schools of education throughout the country. Medina highlights three aspects to the model that would help teachers: 

Consistent exposure to the real world

Consistent exposure to people who operate in the real world

Consistent exposure to practical research programs

I hit the first two pretty easily in my first couple years of teaching. I not only had exposure to the real world of teaching, I was the real world! That hands on experience early in my teaching career in many ways prepared me to enter a teaching program. I almost feel bad that there are people in my program at Seattle Pacific who are just teaching for the first time. What if they pay $20,000 to find out that teaching isn’t the right fit for them? I found out quickly that despite the hard work, stress, and feeling of being on stage all the time in a classroom, I love it. It is my calling. So I entered the SPU program to become an even better teacher.

Now I feel fortunate to be studying Medina’s Brain Rules alongside Meece’s chapters on Cognitive Development. I begin to see the research behind the real world application. I begin to match the philosophy with the application. The best part is because I have tried things in the classroom with my lessons, I can now directly apply my learning from SPU classrooms to action. I am pretty sure Medina would love that.

Beginning and An End

As Seattle Pacific classes become more involved and in depth as the quarter moves on in January, my classes at Seattle Prep reached an end for the first semester. This contrast presents an interesting opportunity for reflection. While learning about the Brain Rules by John Medina and Cognitive Development in Child and Adolescent Development for Educators by Judith Meece and Denise Daniels, I get to observe these theories in action with my high school students.

After a nice three day weekend, this week is finals week for Seattle Prep students. While this allows teachers to finish up grading for the semester and plan out the next unit, students don’t feel so refreshed and relaxed. Although they

"Brain Rules" by John Medina

 should feel more refreshed than in a regular week. This is because our school a few years back adopted one of Medina’s Brain Rules to our finals schedule. Medina’s Rule #7 involves sleep and making sure we get enough of it. While our normal school day at Prep starts at 7:45 a.m., due to Medina’s research we have a late start every other week that commences the school day at 9:30 a.m. and our finals do not begin until 10:00 a.m. each day. As Medina states, “Mountains of date demonstrate that a healthy sleep can indeed boost learning significantly, in certain types of tasks” (Medina 161). While we can’t go home and tell students to go to bed, the decision as a school to provide later starting times for students on finals can only be beneficial to their results. Unfortunately, as far as I know, we don’t have any data to confirm this idea. If the school surveyed students or compared test results (it would have to be similar tests) from years beginning at 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m., we might have some significant data to back up our decision. Even though we don’t, I can’t think of any drawback to starting finals at a later time.

While students take these finals (hopefully with a lot of sleep), I am preparing for the next unit in each of my classes. As I read through Chapter Three of Meece and Daniels’ text on Cognitive Development, it helped reinforce some of the decisions I make with lesson plans and unit plans. The authors outline the theories of development and its relation to

Piaget's Four Stages

education by focusing on Piaget and Vygotsky. While both researchers present interesting theories on the development of the mind, I found the end of the chapter in which the authors bring both researchers’ ideas together to be the most appealing. The authors focus on learning communities in which teachers relate subject material to the students’ lives and experiences perfectly mirrors the Jesuits approach to education. The IPP – Ignatian Pedagogy Paradigm involves five steps: Context, Experience, Re­flec­tion, Action, and Evaluation. This is the approach to teaching that all Jesuit educators must strive toward in the classroom. As I read more about cognitive development, I am encouraged to find out that the IPP really is just good teaching. It is how to build a community of learners. As we begin with a new semester on Monday, I look forward to seeing my community again.