Module 2 :
Brainstorming, Summer setbacks, and Declarative Knowledge
Concept 1: Brainstorming
Summary
In chapter 4, page 137, Woolfolk cites Osborn’s definition
of brainstorming saying “The basic tenet of brainstorming is to separate the
process of creating ideas from the process of evaluating them because
evaluation often inhibits creativity.” When brainstorming, students should be
free to blurt out ideas without anyone’s “evaluation, discussion, and
criticism” until after all the ideas have been collected. Woolfolk also pulls
in Alene Starko’s rules for brainstorming. These rules even ban “eye-rolling or
laughing” by any student when another student throws out on idea, so no one
will feel inhibited by throwing out a “crazy” idea. She also encourages collecting
many different ideas, and even allowing students to expand and creating new
thoughts off of what others have to say. Even “wild ideas” can trigger others
to think of using the same concept in a more “workable” way.
Reflection
Brainstorming is definitely not a new concept, but the way
it was defined and the “rules” that were outlined in the text made the idea so
much more than I had ever thought of it being before. I never really looked at
the process of brainstorming to be creative or a time where a group would work
together in a non-judgmental way with the freedom to share any idea, no matter
how outrageous it might be. Setting the parameters as Starko outlines, and then
enforcing them, shows how brainstorming can allow for creativity, especially in
a classroom among peers. Without knowing these parameters, true creativity can
be withheld by the fear of being judged and being embarrassed. This also sets
the group up for sparking ideas off of each other’s ideas, which can lead to
even more new creative ideas.
Woolfork also shared how she used brainstorming to make a
list of all her ideas and then she set the list aside and come back to it as
she was writing her book. I had always thought of brainstorming as a group
event and never thought of it as an individual exercise. Now looking back, I
realize I am practicing individual brainstorming every time I make a list of my
ideas and then narrow the list down to come to a topic for an assignment or
paper. As I do this in the future, I am going to impose Starko’s four rules on
myself because I think that will help me to be more creative too. Even though
it is just with myself, I think I stop myself from letting the ideas out of my
head and writing them on the paper because I think they are too “wild” of an
idea. If I allow myself to write any and every thought I have onto the paper,
then step away like Woolfork suggests, I can come back and tone down or expand
on my own ideas just like you would do in a group brainstorming. It helps to
step away and come back with a different perspective. This concept of
individual brainstorming is one that I will definitely use when I am planning
activities and lessons for my future classes too.
In my field placement, my cooperating teacher used
brainstorming to help the students come up with ideas for a debate they were
going to have in class the next day. He split the class into groups and had
them pick one person in each of the groups to be a note taker, but he did not set
any ground rules. Both he and I walked around the room while the groups were
meeting. I listened in on several of the groups and I noticed that in each
group there was a very dominant person who was throwing out most of the
suggestions. When some of the other kids tried to offer a suggestion, some kids
in the group laughed, then the person who had made the suggestion that was
laughed at would shut down for the rest of the time. I could tell too that
after the laughter from the one person’s idea, all the ideas slowed down
because students were afraid to share their idea because they too didn’t want
others laughing at them. I wish I would have read this section of Woolfolk’s
book prior to this class day so that I could have shared the four rules with my
cooperating teacher and the class. I definitely agree, especially among peers,
that having these rules in place, will help to open the channels of the
students’ creativity as they are given freedom to share, without the fear of
being laughed at or judged by their ideas.
Brainstorming is a very worthwhile activity with groups of
students. It not only teaches students to work in groups, but it also teaches
them to open up and share their ideas and learn from other’s ideas. Especially
in middle school social studies classes where we will do a lot of interactive
projects, I will use the concept of brainstorming in my classroom like my
cooperating teacher did, but I will make sure that I set Starko’s ground rules with
the students before we begin to make sure that all the students understand the
purpose and the parameters. Hopefully this will help them to be more creative
and to feel more comfortable sharing their ideas.
Concept 2: Summer
Setbacks
Summary
In chapter 6, page 227, Woolfolk talks about the growth that
students loose over summer breaks from school, and how this loss has
contributed to the reading gaps between students in poverty and students from
middle-class homes. She reports “students in poverty begin school about 6
months behind in reading skills” and by the time these students reach 6th
grade, the gap is almost 3 years and has been continuing to increase since the
1970s. Her explanation for this increasing gap in reading is the break from
reading many lower income households, especially ones where English is not the
first language, take during the summer months. She argues that since the lower
income group does not have as much access to books and are not encouraged at
home to read over the summer, “every summer vacation creates about a 3-month
reading achievement gap between poor and advantaged kids.” Because studies show
that the more students read, the better readers they will become, if students
are not reading over the summer, they have the potential to fall behind
students who are reading and moving forward with their reading skills. She
suggests the solution is to provide summer reading programs for low-income
communities to try to close the reading gap by helping the students to grow
rather than lose ground with their reading over the summer.
Reflection
I remember every year being so excited to have a break from
school in the summer. However, even though we didn’t have to go to school in
the summer, we still did schoolwork at home each weekday. My mom would give us
one full week off from school, and then the second week of summer, she would
take us to the book store and let my sister and I each pick out a summer
workbook to help us prepare for the next year of school. My sister loved to do
this, and she would always ask my mom if she could even get two workbooks. I
was never as excited as my sister, and I would have been completely fine with
getting none, but that was not an option. The workbook would contain school
work for the grade we would be entering in the fall. Each morning, before we
got to do anything fun for the day, we would spend a half hour going over a
lesson in our workbook with our mom. After our workbook time, we would get a
15-minute break, and then we spent a half hour reading from a book that we got
from the library. Our local library would have a reading program each summer.
Once we signed up for the program, we would get a reading log. When we reached
certain goals on the log, we would bring our log back to the library for
prizes. We did this every summer from preschool through middle school. Even
though somedays I really didn’t like that we did this, looking back now I see
it helped us to keep on track and keep our minds growing over the summer months.
I am grateful for the time my mom allotted for us to do this each day. I
remember too my teachers always telling us at the end of the school year to be
sure to read over the summer.
Although my mom was really disciplined with this practice,
not many of my friends or classmate’s moms made this a daily practice. Woolfolk
mentions that she feels this lack of summer reading causes students to lose
gains they made in the prior year and may be a factor contributing to children
who live in poverty falling even further behind. I think the lack of summer
learning affects both students from the middle-class and poverty, but I do
agree that the middle class students are given more opportunities to read, but
they may just not take advantage of them. I would think that in poverty areas
there are still public libraries that could offer reading programs to the
students, but Woolfolk points out that since the parents may not speak English,
they may not know about the program and may not take their children to the
libraries to get books. It would be very helpful for schools to inform parents
about the need to read, and the availability of local free summer reading
programs.
As my sister is a 2nd grade teacher in Milwaukee,
she is planning to set-up a summer reading program for her students to give
them several opportunities to keep their reading progress going over the
summer. First, she is putting together reading bags that she is going to give
to each student on the last day of class before summer break that will contain
two books, a bookmark, and a reading log. The students will be asked to read
their book each day and log their time on the sheet. Her school gives her a
budget to buy books for her class. She (and I frequently go with her) goes to
every library used book sale and resale shop to buy as many books as she can to
have to give to her students. For Christmas and Easter, she wrapped up books
and gave one to each of the kids. The kids are so thrilled to get their very
own books that they get to keep. She writes a personal note on the front cover
of each book to help foster a love for reading in her students. She is also
planning to hold a biweekly book club that her students can attend to check in
with her with their reading log. She also intends to have additional books
available for them to borrow from her “library” of books. She is hoping this will
be incentive for her students to want to keep reading, and growing their skills,
over the summer. Many of her students first language is not English, so she
will also be sending a note to the parents in English and Spanish letting them
know the importance of encouraging their children to keep up their reading over
the summer.
It is good experience and practice for me to learn these
ideas from my sister, so that I can practice them when I become a teacher too.
Her class is 2nd grade, so we are always on the lookout for Junie B.
Jones and Geronimo Stilton books at all the book sales. Now when we are at the
sales, I am going to start looking for history books so that I can begin to
grow my “library” of books that I will be able to offer to my students to read
over the summer to keep them interested in reading and help to keep the gap
closed on “summer setbacks.”
Concept 3: Long
lasting declarative knowledge: making meaningful connections
Summary
In chapter 8, page 324, Woolfolk discusses that the way you
learn information helps you to recall that information again later. She states
that “one important requirement for building lasting knowledge is that you
integrate new information with your prior knowledge” in order to build a deeper,
lasting understanding. The way to
achieve this, as she states, is through “elaboration, organization, imagery,
context, desirable difficulty and effective practice.” Building on prior
knowledge is a great way to learn new topics, and this is what is referred to
as elaboration (324). Taking new ideas and making them your own will help you
recall them later. Also, making sure all information is organized, when
presented to students, will make it easier for them to learn and remember (325).
Forming an image of an object in your mind helps with recall (326). Remembering
the context when you learned something, either physically or emotional, can
help with recall of information (327). Desirable difficulty is defined by the
more effort that is originally put into learning something, the greater the
recall will be when you go back to the same activity or object (327). Struggling
and taking time to figure something out creates a stronger memory than just
being told information. The last practice she refers to is the retrieval
process that she defines as “repeated recall” which help consolidate memories
in the brain and “strengthens the neural pathways so the knowledge is easier to
find later” (327). As these different methods of making connections to prior
knowledge are used, learning and remembering skills will increase.
Reflection
In one of the social studies classrooms that I observed at
the beginning of this school year, after the teacher would teach a new concept,
he would say, “ok, now turn to the person on your right and explain the concept
I just explained in your own words to them.” Reading Woolfolk’s definition of
elaboration, I realized that this teacher was using a form of elaboration to
teach the students to retell the information he had just taught. This process
would help the students to see if they actually understood what had just been
taught to them well enough to explain it to someone else. Also, saying it in
their own words would help the information to stay in their memories better too.
He would then ask the person on the left if what the person on the right said
to them was an accurate explanation of the concept he had just taught. This was
a way to make sure that both the student telling the explanation, and the
person hearing the explanation were understanding the concept correctly. If
there were any misconceptions, the teacher would correct them to be certain
that everyone was learning the concepts correctly.
I remember when I was in elementary school, the pastor of
our church would encourage the kids in the congregation to take notes like
their parents during the sermon. He suggested, if it would be easier for us to
remember concepts with pictures, that we should draw rather than try to write
words. He would put a principal from the sermon up on the screen, and then ask
the students to illustrate what this principal meant to them. He would break
the sermon down into “small bites” to help the students focus on that one
section and then tell us to draw what would help us to remember the concept. I
was not a great drawer, but I was able to draw simple pictures that would help
me remember the mini principals better
than if I just wrote the words from the screen. Reading Woolfork’s details on
imagery on pages 325-326, I see where the pastor used this method of imagery to
help us learn mini-principals from his sermons. Often the pastor would show
pictures that students had drawn from the prior week to the congregation as an
example of how the students were learning the concepts from the lecture through
their illustrations. It was a great way for younger kids to learn and remember
one “small bite” of the sermon rather than try to grasp the whole sermon by
being distracted with trying to listen and write words on the paper. This was a
great way for kids to learn how to start taking valuable notes that they could
relate to and remember.
There are a lot of great techniques and ideas in this
chapter to help students learn and recall information that I will definitely
put into practice in my future classroom. I especially like the idea of
mneomics to help with recall. I often try to find acronyms with information I
need to learn to help me recall and keep the ideas in my memory for long term.
I know from my own experience that actually relating a concept to prior
knowledge or creating an acronym will help me to remember concepts much more
long term than memorizing items. When I memorize items, the may stay in my mind
for the test, but then they quickly leave my memory. I have learned that in
order to commit items to memory for long term, I need to use one of these other
methods. I want to be sure to share these different ideas for long term memory
storage with my students and find ways to implement them in my classroom like I
saw my observation teach do with the practice of having the students retell the
concept just learned to another student in the classroom.
