As I read Brown’s article, I recalled my memory when we talked about Reggio pedagogy in an early childhood education classroom. I think curriculum integration is very similar to Reggio style class, that students are having their voices to decide what to learn from their teacher. We discussed whether or not it is possible to have students getting this kind of education all through their school life. At that point, we all thought it would be an idealistic picture. But after learning more about children and student teaching in a progressive school, I started to think about whether or not we as educators underestimate students’ capability. I found that the more responsibility to put on your students, the faster they are going to grow.

I also noticed that the author suggested that the NCLB policy is an obstacle of progressive education. However, I think sometimes policies, just like standardized tests and common core standards, are being stigmatized. I believe that if teachers have a lot of choices to make if they can be braver in the classroom.

…“In adult life you have to learn how to agree and disagree and how to make good choices if you want to survive, just as we do in here” (from Isabel, eighth grader)…(Brown, p12)

(Smith, 2012, pg. 173)

Learning differentiation is something that I’ve tried to implement in my classroom. I’m constantly learning how to scaffold activities so low-performing, average performers, and high performers take advantage of the learning environment. It’s not easy to engage all students at the same rate, making sure they’re also helping each other. Other things that I always find important to differentiate is making different types of activities based on learning styles, be it using visuals, audio, writing, and how I organize information on the board, color code important grammar changes, etc., as a future Spanish teacher. It’s also key to reach a balance understanding not just students’ academic performance, but also different learning styles and strategies, which can be also be implemented with different types of differentiation. For this reason, thinking about using different types of modalities like visual, kinesthetic, auditory in classroom activities and lesson planning will help students reproduce authentic material that represent different structures of the Spanish language and its culture—be it by writing, speaking, drawing, pictures, etc.

“For almost a hundred years, ability grouping has remained one of the most controversial issues in American education. On the one extreme are those who view tracking as a means of maintaining the existing political status quo whereby students’ race, class and ethnicity determine the currency of one’s education. On the other, are those who believe that grouping maximizes the learning potential and contributes to the positive affective development of all students” (Ansalone, 2010, pg. 7).

I’ve read a lot about and have engaged in multiple discussions with educators regarding the topic of ability grouping, all of which have entailed various views and opinions. When I read across this passage, I had to stop and let it all sink in, pondering once again how I feel about grouping. I liked that Ansalone’s article debunks a lot of assumptions about ability grouping, but there’s a relevant piece missing that may have not been appropriate to mention in his article, but is worth mentioning here. In theory, I think grouping is brilliant, especially when you only take it at face value, e.g., “[it] maximizes the learning potential and contributes to the positive affective development of all students”. It would be easy to say, “Wow! This is great! Let’s start grouping students then!” It’s when you examine the potential consequences of grouping, the inevitable disadvantages that it poses on students, that you quickly understand that grouping can be used (and, unfortunately, is often used) as a means to determine the “currency” of a student’s education based on his or her race, class or ethnicity. I think this is the part that needs to be mentioned: it feels discouraging that something that could be used to really improve the learning environment for students and teachers alike (if used without any bias whatsoever), is commonly used on an institutional level to further disadvantage them; it’s manipulated for the benefit of someone other than the students themselves. The only assumption that Ansalone addresses that turns out to be true, is that teachers actually prefer teaching upper tracks (higher-performing students) “since they often define their status as teachers according to their track assignment” (pg. 13). And this is true! I have been in a department, and worked closely with another department, where there were multiple fights between teachers over who would teach the AP course versus the creative writing courses. Again, it’s worth mentioning that it’s just so discouraging that a concept created to better the learning environment for students, is so easily manipulated into a political move or ego booster for the adults responsible for providing free and equitable education for all students, regardless of their race, class or ethnicity.

“Tracks can create a self-fulfilling prophesy of behavior in students and play an important role in defining the type of person they believe themselves to be” (Ansalone, 2009) (Ansalone 2010) Page 12.

This has been one of the texts that I found easier to read as an ELL, but one of the hardest to reflect upon. So I’m just going to make varied comments related to the quote I chose and some other references:
1. I kept waiting for the reference to gender base tracking, because this is the one I’m most familiar with. At a particular school in Colombia, they used to separate boys and girls during Math, Humanities and Language Arts classes, as soon as they started puberty or were close to it. So the equivalent of Middle and High school at that school was a gender tracking examples. No other gender was considered. Teachers used to swear that it worked, because it lowered the hormonal effect and their classes were great. They also had male teachers for the boys and Female teachers for the girls. Any thoughts? Continue reading A little of everything (unlike tracking) →

            Mathematics is often not included when teachers think of problems that students may have in reading, but the use of symbols both in the form of reading words and in numbers is an integral part of teaching in this content area. Thus, for students with special learning needs, the lack of higher level language development and usage, organizational and planning problems, and reading issues may be significant barriers to success in the classroom (Marinell, 2008, pg.166).
Continue reading MVP#7 We do learn language in our math class! →