Going into the field work class I did not know what to expect. All I knew was that there would be trips to local schools and partnerships with the teachers there. What I did not know was what it took to create a lesson plan. In the academic sense, this learning experience has given me a newfound respect for teaching modules. As a group at the Eco-Council, we were able to create a purpose driven lesson that we believe would be able to drive students towards environmental stewardship. This one lesson plan was the culmination of a semester’s process in which trips to the school and discussions with the teachers lead to our final project. On one hand our groups initial challenge at Maury River was made more difficult in that our students already had a topic lined up, but on the hand our group was fortunate in that it was such an important topic. In a broader sense, I was better able to appreciate our students much more as learners and members of the community. I remember the first day my group and I went to meet them and were amazed at their desire to better their communities and desire to learn. We assumed that they must have been the brightest at the school only to find out each one of them struggled with reading. They had been put in remedial classes to no affect until they created the Eagle Academy where they began to flourish. This showed us that even though we all may struggle with something that everyone around us is not, that there is still a place for us in the community. What this showed to me as a learner and an instructor is that we get so caught up in what we think certain metrics of success are that we forget to look at the individual and what they can bring to the table. After my time at the Eagle Academy I was left struck by what students who were driving and passionate about an issue could achieve, from defying the school’s expectations of them the NEST Fest, it amazed me.
Author Archives: moreirasc21
A Theoretical Frame Work for Environmental Education in Practice
Riordan and Klein’s “Environmental Education in Action: How Expeditionary Learning Schools Support Classroom Teachers in Tackling Issues of Sustainability” study published in Teacher Education Quarterly was a perfect fit for what my group is attempting to do with the Maury River Middle School Eco Council. What the study aimed to look for was to look at the work of an organization that works to support teacher’s efforts in the ever growing and more important movement of Environmental Education. Their goal was to “promote the development of responsive and active citizens who are invested in environmental issues and situations, and who are empowered by their ownership of knowledge and skills”. What the essay describes is what the 10 design principles of Expeditionary Learning in schools are. The research promotes and explores sustainable school practices through specific case studies of how expeditionary learning promoted environmental based education and impact student experience and work. This essay provides the necessary theoretical framework needed for our project at Maury River Middle School as it creates the basis for the learning experiences for teachers and for students. It integrates environment education for sustainable development into our proposal and how we seek to see it through. The model provided will let us build an assignment grounded in peer reviewed research that will better enable us to produce quality work. The best way to show these frameworks is to integrate them into our own project. What this will look like is creating an assignment that fulfills the core requirements that expeditionary learning in environmental education tries to instill. The essay shows the importance of teachers engaging in field research in environmental education. In our project what that could mean is that instead of having teachers simply guide discussions, they too should participate as a model for what quality work looks like in environmental education.
Works Cited
Riordan, Meg Klein, J. Emily ““Environmental Education in Action: How Expeditionary Learning Schools Support Classroom Teachers in Tackling Issues of Sustainability”. Teacher Education Quarterly. 2010
What Class Room Leadership Looked Like
Part One: Our third visit to our class was our most recent and the first that we were able to participate in an all be it small way, leading a discussion. The reason I feel that this is the case is because as a teacher who knows what they want, it is hard to make room for others. Our class unlike many of the others, has a very set curriculum that has to be followed so it can be hard to be accommodating. In our third visit we interviewed the students to see what they had thought about nest fest, their wishes, wonders, and what they liked about it. It felt more like I was just being a mouthpiece for a conversation that was really happening between the teacher and the students, but I was able to make the most of it. I would encourage the students to specify exactly what they meant and give as much detail as possible. I felt that this would give better feedback for future nest fests. I would also write down what the students were saying. This also gave me another avenue to benefit future nest fests in that I was trying to capture the essence of what they were saying, by making sense of their thoughts rather than just writing down exactly what they said. What we were doing was reflective of the standards that we went over in class. All of the answers that we collected went on a poster board in a manner to celebrate all of the individual responses and validate their answers.
Part Two: My idea for what the students should do for an activity would be an application of what they have learned at nest fest and more importantly to harness the drive for the environment the conference has instilled. Our proposed unit involves a project that would take several weeks to complete and then a final presentation in front of peers and then in front of school administrators. I think a good way to do this would be to have students build the confidence and courage for such a large undertaking they should start small with their nest fest observations. This would take the shape of students taking the observations they discussed in small groups and standing in front of the class to share the. What this would do in addition to preparing them for our proposed unit would be to meet several of the EL principles. Principles such as student-engaged assessment- cultivating a culture of engagement and achievement as their opinions and wished would be validated by the platform they are given to share them. It would also demonstrate leadership-fostering a cohesive school vision as students would be working together towards a common vision of improving nest fest for future Eagle Eco-Council students.
Unexpected Scholars
My trip to visit Maury River Middle School was best described by surprise in the best possible way. From the onset of our visit, we were taken aback by the building itself. The newness, the design, and most surprisingly the teacher’s pride of the facilities. The first comment made while we signed in was for us to admire the aquatic inspiration and details embedded into the school itself to pay homage to the Maury River itself. Once we got to our class, in which the students where purposefully rearranging the desks into a round table, we took our seats. The teacher had brought breakfast for all of her students and insisted that the students eat, something that showed a level of care for her students that I had not expected. There is a project-based learning poster hanging in the back of the class, displaying student’s quality work as what I can assume to be for inspiration for whatever the students choose as their project to tackle. The teacher went on to explain how all of the students had applied to be there and went around asking what all the students wanted out of the future project in their class charter. Their collective responses can be summed by one student’s answer, “serious yet fun”. They enumerated what makes something fun to them. This could be summed up by confidence in a project and working together. I was surprised by the affluence of their answers to what would make a school project fun. The teacher kept encouraging them to speak up in their answers, something that I felt would serve to boost their confidences. Through all of this, I had assumed that this group of students where the best the middle school had to offer. I had thought that they had applied and stood out academically among their peers. It was not until the end in which the teacher confided in us that these students where actually students who all were struggling readers and had a host of other academic challenges. Students who did not volunteer information in other classes willingly who felt like they could contribute within this environment. This environment demonstrated many of the key EL education design principles, specifically the responsibility for learning. To them, the work they were doing in this class went beyond just schoolwork to them. It was learning in their own personal and collective learning together. They were truly unexpected scholars.
First Visit Expectations and Inspirations
Journal 2
Having many experiences working with middle school students throughout high school and into college, I have the luxury of having some sort of background for the work to come. With that said, I am still a little apprehensive as all of the work that I have done was outside of a classroom environment. This will be my first time working with students within a classroom environment. I am excited to be able to go into the classroom with other cadets accompanying me, as we can each draw from our own experiences to fill in each other’s gaps. Doing the theoretical studies of different educational models, I feel like have also helped prepare me for the upcoming visit. Even though we have yet to actually develop any curriculum from the models ourselves, they have helped me develop my mindset. By looking at lesson plans through the eyes of an instructor rather than those of a student has helped me conceptualize what we will be doing this semester. Having the experts come into class helped in the conceptualization. By having a textbook meant for teachers to build curriculum, it has allowed me to expand my thinking into what it is going to take to create a project from start to finish. Even though it may not be the direction or topic that the project we develop in our own class room goes, seeing an example of a project and learning the steps helped substantially. I may even try and incorporate some aspects of the recycling project into the project, if the city has stopped recycling it must have affected the local schools as well. This would make it closer to home for the students, rather than trying to solve a problem at a foreign school. Most importantly, I think the best thing that we have done in preparation for our visiting is the planning itself. We will not know for sure what to expect, but in those situations, planning is everything. I think by just synthesizing our expectations and inspirations for the visits it is making us better stewards of the field work program.
Classical Education Revisited
What sets the EL education curriculum apart from other methods of teaching is their idea of balanced education and completeness of an individual. Their focus is not simply on how to get students into colleges or into their desired fields, but to develop students of character well versed in all topics. Their model “fosters and celebrates student’s character development…to become effective learners and ethical people who contribute to a better world” (EL Education Core Practices) reminds me of the liberal arts education of ancient Greece where students learned much more than the simple regurgitation of facts. Many schools today have created such a reliance against these classical ideals, instead focusing on rope memorization and reciting. Education “cannot, therefore, be true that the proper studies for one grade are mere reading and writing, and that at a later grade, reading, or literature, or science may be introduced”(Dewey), in much in the classical way, “the progress is not in the succession of studies, but in the development of new attitudes” (Dewey). What was interesting about this for me is that it gave me the criteria to evaluate my own education in public school. I think that us especially as English majors take for granted where we came from as students. All the skills that come so seemingly naturally to us that create the foundation of the major had to be taught at one point. I feel that it is easy to forget the process that it took to get us where we are now. I was very fortunate to go to a school that seemed to have internalized many of these principles. My school had focuses on more than just academic success, but showcased quality student work. There were many exhibitions of fine arts and sciences. There was also an emphasis on development of character but to me it always felt pushed. I think that it is hard for schools to focus on character development without students feeling like it is some sort of gimmick not to be taken seriously.