Meet Me in the Middle Chapter 15

Chapter 15 of Meet Me in the Middle focused primarily on how to bring parents into the classroom and help them be aware of what is happening in the classroom, so they can connect with their kids and learn about what their kids are doing in school. Making sure that parents have a way to access what their student is doing in the classroom is extremely valuable, as it can provide a way for parents and children to communicate about how school is going, or encourage parents to ask their kids about school or go over homework with their child. Keeping parents in the loop, even if it’s just through short postings on a classroom website, will help parents and kids be able to honest conversations about what kids are doing in school. If these conversations are happening, then some kids, who might have thought their parents didn’t care about what was happening in the classroom, might be encouraged to work harder, because their parents know about what they’re doing in the classroom. It also might make kids more excited to share their work with their parents.

Another valuable thing brought up in this chapter was bringing parents in the classroom, or at least into the schools. Sometimes there is such a disconnect between parents and teachers, or between parents and the school, that parents never know what’s going on at school, or what their children are doing, and while a website might help bridge some of those gaps, there is also a value in bringing parents into the school, whether it be for a parent/teacher conference, allowing parents to come and speak in front of the class, or hosting an event where students can display their work to their parents.

Turning Points Chapter 9

This chapter of Turning Points 2000 focused primarily on community and parent involvement in the school, and the benefits of creating those connections. Obviously, it’s important for parents to be involved in their student’s learning, and be made aware of what is happening in the classroom. Creating a communication between parents and teachers from day one is extremely beneficial and will only create stronger connections between parents and teachers throughout the year. These strong connections might also be beneficial to the student, with these strong connections being made, this will help students be encouraged to be more active and participate more in the classroom.

One of the most important things about this chapter, I think, was the stress on the connection between the school and the community. I remember being in middle school and high school and because my school and community were so small, the connection was extremely strong. Members from the community were always coming into the school, and we were always going outside of the school to interact with the community. You can learn a lot about the world around you just by looking at the community that you live in. Every community as the opportunity to be a classroom, and you can learn a lot of life skills by interacting with the community.

Overall, it’s extremely important to build strong bridges between your classroom and the parents and community outside of the classroom. By building these bridges and connections, students will feel like what they’re learning is more valuable, and be more likely to be excited about being in the classroom. By showing them the importance of their learning, and what they’re doing in the classroom means in a real world context, they’ll take their work more seriously and be more likely to succeed.

Why Gender Matters

I found this presentation to be extremely fascinating, not only with the research behind it, but how I was able to connect my own experiences, to what was being discussed in the presentation. Some of the things that were discussed, hit almost completely on the nose with things I had seen and experienced, while other things, were almost the complete opposite. There were a lot of really great points and ideas brought up in this presentation that could be brought into the classroom, such as girls having better hearing than boys, so boys should be closer to the front of the class, or with the different strategies that should be used when working with male and female students. These kinds of things, along with the management, and even the bullying aspects of this presentation, are all important things to remember when being a teacher, because there is a difference in the way that you should work with female and male students, because the brains are different and they process things different ways. Even though, of course, each student's brain is different, it is important to take gender into account when addressing a student.

One of my favorite parts of this presentation, was how easy I was able to relate it to my own experiences. One of the sections that particularly stuck out to me, was the section about friendships. I've always been someone, who had a lot of people that I was friendly with, only ever had 3-4 close friends, while my brother, has always had a large group of friends, never really having any "close" friends. My brother, recently, spent over 2 hours with my mom's friend's son, and never even learned his name, but they were able to communicate and get along in the hours that they were together, something I know I would never personally be able to do. But on the flip side, in own high school experience with bullies, I knew more male bullies that were popular and did well in school, and more female bullies were loners, who weren't really doing well in school.

The idea and concept behind gender differences is something that really fascinates me and makes me really want to read this book so I can get the full experience. While I am afraid that stereotyping and using extreme examples would be an easy thing to fall into, but I do still think that this is an important thing for everyone to read, not just future teachers, but anyone who might have to work with people. I feel like some of the gender differences might be more surprising or more discreet than others, so learning about them would be extremely beneficial.

Overall, I really enjoyed this presentation and I learned a lot about male and female brains that will be useful when I become a teacher. I also really enjoyed the survey that we got to take, and the drawing activity that we got to do. I really want to learn more about gender differences, so this presentation definitely sparked an interest.

Turning Points Chapter 8

In chapter 8 of Turning Points 2000, the big key ideas were how to create a safe and healthy learning environment for all students. This is something that has been touched on time and time again, and for good reason, it seems simple, that if students are in a good and healthy environment, they will be happier and more willing to learn. But, it’s also much more than that. One thing I loved about this chapter is that it went into depth about the different ways to promote that healthy and safe learning environment. Like, teaching students conflict resolution when something arises in the classroom isn’t something that I would have ever thought of, if students know how to resolve conflicts themselves, these conflicts might be less likely to arise in the classroom.

My favorite part of this chapter was the section on health education, and teaching students how to lead healthy lives. If students are learning how to live healthy lifestyles, that will reflect in the environment of the school. I know, reflecting on my own experience as a student, that my health education was very bare minimum, and focused primarily on sex education and the harms of drugs, which of course is important, but there is also importance on teaching kids how to eat healthy and how to take care of their bodies.

Also, it is extremely important to have appropriate and proper health services provided at the schools. Especially if a lot of students come from lower income areas, if you provide health services at school, some of the kids who can’t go to the doctor regularly, can be looked at, at school.

Turning Points Chapter 4

This chapter of Turning Points 2000 focused primarily on a very important part of teaching, instruction. There are many different ways to give instruction to your students, this instruction is the structure of your lesson, and will change from class to class, based on your students and the nature of the lesson. The most popular and extensive type of instruction, is differentiated instruction. Differentiated instruction is instruction that brings student’s cultures and backgrounds into respect when designing lessons, and makes lessons as relatable as possible for every student. It takes into account students who have different learner profiles, or if you have any students with learning disabilities, or anything else that might change their experience in the classroom, like if they’re an ELL student, or if they are partially deaf. Differentiated instruction takes all these aspects and allows you, as a teacher, to create the most successful lesson plan to give all the necessary information to your students.

This chapter also touches on the importance of technology in classroom, while this book was published in 2000, this point is still extremely important. With the ever changing technology in the world, it’s important to use technology in our classrooms, so students have experience with it. But, it is also important to remember, that technology should only be used if it’s necessary, unnecessary technology could be a downfall, rather than a success in the classroom.

The most important thing that I took away from this chapter, is that, no matter which method is used to teach instruction, taking in student backgrounds and needs is the number one priority and should always be taken into account when planning instruction.

A Whole New Mind

I really enjoyed this presentation and came away with so many ideas to encourage right brain thinking in my classroom, and bring some of these activities into the class. I feel like the six aptitudes were connected well to the classroom, and I came away with a lot of ideas on how to bring all six of the aptitudes into a lesson, and effectively help students tune into their right brain thinking. So many of these activities I would have loved to have done as a student, such as the laughter yoga or the story activity, because I feel like stuff like laughter isn't encouraged in the classroom, and unless you're in an English class, thinking fictionally is something that you do very often. Sometimes kids learn best by putting facts into a story, and when kids are having fun, they're more likely to have take away something from the lesson that they're learning. As a student myself, almost every activity that we did today would have been a lot of fun to do in class, and for some of these, if we had done an activity like this during a lesson that I wasn't enjoying, I might have enjoyed the lesson more.

I think my favorite thing that we talked about in the presentation, was the importance of play, and laughter along with joyfulness and games. Kids are always complaining about how school isn't fun, and how they don't do anything fun in school, so if you, as a teacher, make an effort to make your class more fun, students might enjoy your class more. At the end of the day, as much as it might frustrate us as teachers, students are going to remember the class that they got to play a game in, over the class where they simply took notes down. Also, students are more likely to remember what they learn if they're having a fun, and it's important for them to be moving around and being active, so incorporating games and laughter and fun into your lesson, might actually help kids learn better.

I definitely want to go out now and read this book for myself. I have always found psychology and the brain to be extremely fascinating, so reading in depth about the difference between the two sides of your brain would be really interesting. Especially when you apply this psychology to the classroom, when we become teachers, we're going to have students who identify more with the left brain kind of thinking, and some who identify more with the right brain, and as teachers, it's our job to create a lesson that can be absorbed by all of our students. So, by reading this book, it might give some insight on how to help those kids who are more left brained, think more like someone who is more right brained.

Overall, I really enjoyed this presentation. I loved the different activities that we got to do and I definitely want to try and implement them into my classroom when I become a teacher. This subject was extremely fascinating and it really made me want to learn more. I definitely am going to try and use some of these ideas in my class, and am going to read this book so I can go more in depth on this topic.

Meet Me in the Middle Chapter 8

As a student in high school and middle school, I remember the idea of assessments (especially those of tests) being incredibly daunting. I had extremely bad test anxiety when in middle school and high school, I understood what I was learning, but the minute that I was left in silence to stare at a piece of paper in front of me with questions and value points indicated on the side, all the understanding went out the window. Many many times, I walked out of a test and as soon as I opened my notebook, I would remember the answer to a question that I had struggled on. Assessment was something that I, as a student, always dreaded, and I was certainly not the only one. I think, that if as a student I had been given more choices and was reminded that if I did poorly on an assessment, that it wouldn’t be the end of the world, I would have moved forward in school with much less anxiety and dread for these assessments.

One of my favorite things in this chapter was the antidote that Wormeli gives in the beginning about Danny, who composed a musical piece instead of writing a summary, because Wormeli knew that if Danny had been asked to write a summary, he would have failed, but Wormeli knew that Danny knew and understood the piece, so instead he was encouraged to do something that would properly show his understanding.

Another thing I loved in this chapter was the part that talks about how teachers should track progress, not just check at the end of the unit or semester. If we track student progress throughout a unit, and check in using conferences or small assignments, we can get a better understanding of what our students do and don’t understand, so we can help them in areas that they struggle with, before the end of the unit assessment.