Today, we had the second offering of a conference call on Reflective Practice. It was really interesting to talk with a second group of colleagues and explore the different ways people are thinking about reflection: how they are working with students, and how they are working with their partners on campus.

SKiP Call notes: 2/10/12

There were 11 participants in today’s conference call from IA, IL, MA, MO, SC, and NC.

• Linda talked about her concern about how to explain or teach reflection to her students so they can do it better. Participants agreed that having a list of questions is very helpful. Sarah described a protocol that she uses from an article in The ChildCare Exchange magazine, the Tuning Protocol that she finds very useful.  We also asked the question: “When do we reflect?” Do we model it? Do our students know that we value it?

• Sandra described how she tries to let her students know why reflection is so important. She reads excerpts from Vivian Paley’s You Can’t Say You Can’t Play as a model of reflective practice.

• Elaine discussed her observation that her students seem to have trouble putting their ideas down on paper, and there was a consensus that this is something we all experience. Students seem better able to talk about it. Lisa Talked about a successful strategy she uses to address this using peer review of each other’s writing with a rubric that specifies what to look for.

• Debra talked about an article she just read that describes a reflection strategy involving “well-remembered events” (see reference below). Students write weekly about an event that stands out to them in their student teaching. They must first describe the event, then discuss what they think is the cause/ what influenced the event, and then discuss what the implications are for teaching.  This seems like an interesting approach to helping students reflect on experiences that are meaningful to them.  Sarah suggested that this represents metacognition, and that education today does not support reflection or thinking about thinking, so students do not have experience in reflective thinking.

Carter, K. Preservice teachers’ well-remembered events and the acquisition of event-structured knowledge. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 26 (3). 235-252.

• Ellen described an article that she uses, The Power of Mindful Reflection, and how it talks about automatic thinking we tend to go to what we already know, which helps to explain why students need encouragement to go beyond their comfort-zone and put their ideas out to the group. Someone suggested that we, as professors, also seem to be wary of risk-taking in a group, and that we can be sensitive to this when we wonder why our students might not be comfortable sharing their opinions and ideas.

• A question was asked about using video-taped sessions of students in the classroom as data for reflection. We suggested that the observation protocol submitted by Laurie after yesterday’s SKiP call was a potential tool for this.

• Finally, a participant going through accreditation suggested that the experience of reflecting for the self-study gave the faculty in her program new insight and sensitivity to what it feels like to be required to reflect. The general consensus is the more we reflect, the more we will be able to offer our students opportunities to reflect and to scaffold their efforts.

It’s been a busy couple of months here at ACCESS headquarters. Those of you who are ACCESS members will be getting the next edition of the newsletter soon and at that point you will learn about all the exciting things going on.

Today, I would like to report on the first ACCESS SKiP call of the year. SKiP stands for

Shared Knowledge & Practices

and the SKiP committee, headed by ACCESS VP of Professional Development Debra Murphy, hosts several events each year including SKiP conference calls on various topics. Today, we met and discussed Reflective Practice.

We had ten participants on the call today. There were ACCESS members from a variety of states including Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Iowa, Texas, North Carolina, and Illinois (I’m sorry if I left any state out!).

Debra put together a Reflective Practice handout -

Feb2012CallHandoutonReflectivePractice 02-09-12

This handout sent via the listserv as an attachment to the invitation. Eventually, we will have a SKiP area in the “Members Only” section of the ACCESS website. For now, feel free to download documents that are highlighted throughout this post.

Several people shared ideas about how they involve their students in reflective practice and agreed to send along their resources. See the Reflective Practice handout above for details about the theories of John Dewey and Donald Schön that underlie reflective practice in education.

• Laurie discussed a reflection template they use for many different assignments throughout the program. She said that faculty are now using the same reflection questions in their own practice, and that this has been very helpful. She agreed to share it, so here it is! reflection template
• Kathy suggested that this template could also be used by faculty to reflect on key assessments.
• Debra interjected that a question she has been thinking about is to make these more than just an assignment, filling in the blanks or answering the questions without internalizing the practice. How does it become “what we do?” All agreed that we need to model reflective practice ourselves so students come to see it as valuable.
• Lisa described how she uses a variety of reflection questions starting in a curriculum course and how she tries to encourage her students to understand childrens’ experiences through their own experience, for example, how they feel when they feel competent and relating it to how children feel when they feel competent.
• Nancy mentioned the idea of using a mind map to represent ideas that come up in reflection and then having students use the mind maps to later write about the process. Debra mentioned www.wordle.net that she uses with her students in the practicum course to create a visual about how they see themselves as teachers at the beginning and at the end of the practicum, then writing about the changes and why they think they occurred.
• Carrie discussed a reflection activity that she uses in class to help students process their own learning as they describe how they could make an answer to a quiz question stronger. reflective quiz taking
• Other questions and suggestions that came up: Asking students: “What did you learn from the children?” after implementing a lesson plan. How do students interpret reflection, what does it mean to them? How do we reflect it back to them?

For those on the call, is there anything you would like to add to what we have posted here? Please post a comment so we can continue the conversation. I will also add more notes after tomorrow’s SKiP call which is on the same subject.

I hope you can join us tomorrow:

Friday, 2/10/12

2:00-3:00pm EST, 1:00-2:00pm CST, 12:00-1:00 Mountain, 11:00am -12:00pm PST

Please check your e-mail for call-in information.

Debra Murphy, ACCESS VP of Professional Development, gave a wonderful presentation titled,

The Art of Nature Science – Inspirations: colors, forms, materials, color theory, and the art of Andy Goldsworthy

She started with a poem that may be familiar to many of us -  it really set the stage for what she was about to share:

It’s very difficult to put into words the power of Debra’s talk. I’ve seen her present on a number of subjects over the past few years, and every time I am amazed at the subtle beauty and power of her piece. I am particularly awed by her ability to quietly draw us all in to the world of her students and the journey they go through in her courses. Debra embodies the relationship of theory and practice. Everything she does is rooted in solid, evidence-based practice yet she doesn’t bore us with that side of things. She lets us discover it as we are drawn in to the compelling photographs that she so willingly shares with us.

In fact, she has offered to share her Flickr site with us which includes her photographs and much more. Take some time to explore it, and, next time you see Debra, please be sure to thank her for sharing such wonderful resources with us!

Debra’s Flickr site:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29613329@N02/

Tagged: Andy Goldsworthy, art, color theory, Debra Murphy, evidence-based practice, Flickr, forms, hundred languages, materials, nature, Orlando, photographs, professional development, Reggio Amelia, resources, science, SKiP ]]> http://accesstosharedknowledgeandpractices.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/orlando-the-art-of-nature-science/feed/ 1 cnepstad Hundred Languages poem Fall 2011 036 Fall 2011 038 Fall 2011 039 http://accesstosharedknowledgeandpractices.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/student-engagement-references-handout/ http://accesstosharedknowledgeandpractices.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/student-engagement-references-handout/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:27:32 +0000 cnepstad http://accesstosharedknowledgeandpractices.wordpress.com/?p=344 ]]> Please see this pdf document: BasnettNAEYC References offered to you by our morning presenter, Victoria La Placa Basnett, M.Ed.

Her talk was called, “Engaging Students through Cooperative Learning and Technology” and the handout includes all the references from her presentation including the wonderful and thought-provoking video clips, and the learning style survey among other things. I hope you will find this useful.

My favorite clip is “A Vision of Students Today”, check it out!

But now, back to business:

The ACCESS day was full of many activities from morning til night. We began the day with a lovely breakfast sponsored by Cengage Learning. A big thank you goes out to Kara Kindstrom and all our friends at Cengage.

We started the morning sessions with a TeamUP presentation by presenter Victoria La Placa Basnett on active learning. I am happy to say that this was a very engaging presentation! I personally have been to many presentations on higher education that focused on “active learning” and “engagement” that did not employ the techniques the presenter was talking about. This was not the case with Ms. La Placa Basnett’s talk. She had us really thinking and participating. One of the points that I took away from the talk is to think about our era in terms of when we went to school and then think about today’s students and how different things are for them particularly in terms of the information they have access to through their laptops and phones. I also thought it was helpful to think about what motivated us to go to undergrad and what might be motivating our students to be in our classes – it may be very different!

icebreaker

I also appreciated that the presenter understood that we were an audience filled with faculty. She demonstrated how to prepare a presentation and then, based on the feedback from the participants, she was able to skillfully move through the presentation seamlessly. I think this was a wonderful example of active engagement. In order to engage learners, it is so important that we remain responsive to them throughout the session. It felt tailor-made to our learning needs – which is a real treat!

During the second part of the morning session, I talked for a bit about various ACCESS updates. For two different presentations, I tried something new which is called Prezi. I mentioned this in a previous post.

Well, I don’t think it was a complete failure…but I certainly need to practice my navigation skills! I think I figured out that if you minimize the wording on the presentation, the zoom effect is not as dramatic and hopefully will minimize that dizzying feeling caused by all the zooming in and zooming out.

Click here to view the ACCESS updates Prezi. Once you click the link, you can click the play button for each piece of the presentation. There is a plus and minus sign you can use to zoom in or out on each section. Try it out and see what you think!

Updates, in brief:

1. ACCESS has launched the newly revised website, please save the following address in your favorites file as this is now the “go to” place for all things having to do with Associate Degree Early Childhood Teacher Education. www.accessece.com
2. The blog, has become a good source of ongoing information about ACCESS activities but also in terms of a place to share ideas. As of today’s date, this blog has 36 posts, and 45 followers (subscribers). Our biggest day was October 11, 2011 when we had 112 views. This is great! I was very pleased to hear from so many ACCESS members that they find the blog to be helpful. If you are interested in writing for the blog, please contact me directly at cnepstad65@gmail.com I would very much like to see more ACCESS members sharing things this way.
3. Partnerships: ACCESS has partnerships with ECADA, NAECTE, CONNECT, and Voices of Practitioners. Please stay tuned for future blog posts about each partnership.
4. ACCESS is in the process of developing a Handbook of Assessment in Associate Degree Early Childhood Teacher Education. I am spending my sabbatical working on this project! So far, I am in the process of finishing a literature review with annotated bibliography about “assessment of student learning in higher education” with an emphasis on “ECE teacher preparation in Associate Degree programs”, when available (not much assessment research out there focused on our specific field within the community college framework). The second half of the handbook will consist of practical applications including sample rubrics and assessment plans as well as a variety of stories about how various programs make use of assessment data.

This is where you come in! We need more samples. Please send your rubrics, key assessments, assessment plans or reports, to my e-mail cnepstad65@gmail.com

The goal is to make the Handbook an open educational resource, which means that we are freely sharing what is written and what is contributed. We are not working through a professional publisher or charging a fee, we are simply pooling our resources to develop our own handbook in an effort to provide the most current research and practices to fellow ACCESS members. By the way, one of the most brilliant examples of an open educational resource is one I use with my son and recommend to my students. It’s called Khan Academy and if you haven’t seen this before, I encourage you to check it out.  If you want a really good summary of what Khan Academy is and a striking example of the potential of open educational resources, please take a few minutes to check out this TED talk which explains it really well. Save it for later if you don’t have time now, but all of us should be aware of this powerful (and free) resource. Enjoy!

That describes the first half of the morning!

At this point, many of us have wandered over to the Orange County Convention Center to check out the room ( Room W330E/F/G) where our ACCESS presentations will take place all day tomorrow (see ACCESS Program). When you are facing the main entrance, turn right and walk all the way down the hall (almost to the end of the building) and then go to the second floor. Be prepared to walk and be sure to wear comfortable shoes!

Sneak Peak:

During tomorrow’s meeting, I am going to announce the launch of our newly revised website.

www.accessece.com

*Please note the change from .org to .com

This is where you will go to renew your membership for 2012. We are now doing electronic applications – no more paper! To join or renew, everyone must go to the website and fill out the online application. You will still have the choice of whether to pay online or send in a check. Either way you choose for payment, you still have to fill in the application online. This saves several steps on our end of things and we hope it will make the whole process more efficient. We will continue to add bells and whistles to the revised site so be sure to check on it from time to time. I hope you like the new look! A special thanks goes out to our VP of Communications, Crystal Swank who has been working hard on this project for a long time. Thank you Crystal!

I’ll have a few handouts at the front desk when you sign in for the day. I’m going to attach them here in case you would like to have an electronic copy and you can save the paper. I also think it would be nice to have the paper handouts for folks who are not ACCESS members and would like information about the organization.

This is a basic ACCESS information sheet

This doc is part of the new ACCESS Orientation packet we are creating and it is about the Blog

I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. And for those of you at home, I hope you are following the activities and that you feel free to make comments and participate too!

The leaves are a gorgeous red, orange, and yellow here in Chicago and we have had a stretch of crisp Autumn days with sunny blue skies and cool air. I’m having a hard time packing for Florida, although it won’t be too difficult to spend a little extended time in a warmer climate as I brace for the Midwestern winter.

I’m getting ready for the conference. I’m in the stage where I wake up in the middle of the night with a running list going through my mind! There are so many behind-the-scenes activities that the ACCESS Board does for weeks before each of the conferences in order to provide the best experiences for ACCESS members. Thank you ACCESS Board – you are amazing!

I’m very excited about our line-up this year. Please see the ACCESS Orlando Program 10-24-11 for details.

I’d like some input from you. During our joint lunch session with NAECTE Debra Murphy and I will be panelists on a discussion about the future of teacher preparation. Each panelist will speak for 15 min.

Here is what I’m planning to talk about:

1. higher education and teacher preparation under scrutiny
2. the way to move forward is through collaboration
3. trends in teacher preparation include a) documentation (which includes assessment of student learning), b) fieldwork, and c) Cultural, Linguistic, and Ability Diversity (CLAD).
4. I will end with a reminder to keep students at the center of all collaborative work as we move forward and I’ll share a personal story about my own students.

I’ve tried a new format for presenting called, Prezi Have you used it before?

It has been fun to play; something to try beyond Power Point. I’m not sure if I like it or not but it was a neat way to organize my thoughts.

Here is what I need from you:

What are your thoughts about the future of teacher preparation?

As an organization, how can we address the criticisms about teacher preparation while moving forward and addressing the needs of our students and ultimately the needs of young children and their families?

Here is my presentation. When you click the play button it will take you to the main points of the talk. You can then use your mouse at each point to see the images and text at each heading or click the zoom button and zoom in for details or zoom out to see the whole map.

Please comment on this post with your thoughts, and I will try to incorporate them into the discussion.

thanks!

Tower guards

I’ve just returned from a wonderful time spent in London with my family. Years ago, my husband and I always loved to travel during the fall season, but once I started my career in academia that ended that. So, as part of my sabbatical plan for this semester, we decided to do some traveling this fall. For the first time since 1999 I am not teaching classes during the fall season.  This has been a life changing experience and I will talk more about my sabbatical  in the next several posts.

This post, however, is about Jamie Oliver.

Have you seen any of his shows or tried out any of his recipes? We are big fans in our household. We’ve watched his show and have several favorite dishes from the Food Revolution cookbook that we make for dinner regularly. His Food Revolution  movement is impressive for a variety of reasons. I like the simplicity of the message which is something like; get cooking, get fresh food into the schools, get rid of the junk, and fight obesity. It’s simple, straightforward, and somehow it sounds doable. Check out this short clip on using fresh herbs in your cooking. It makes you want to start right away. He makes it seem really cool to have a herb garden in your home, and with this brief clip you have enough information to get started and to feel confident about the project.

That’s good teaching!

I have come to love Jamie Oliver’s recipes because they actually teach me. They have clear, simple instructions in layman’s terms and they include descriptions and pictures of the process as well as the end product. When I make his recipes, my food looks like his and each time I make it I learn a bit more about the ingredients, and how to use my senses and observation skills through the entire process.  I’m not a natural cook, but I really like to be in the kitchen and try new things.  When I use Jamie Oliver’s recipes, I always know what I’m doing and what is coming next. I have a sense of the whole process; the big picture. I also have a sense of the smaller details, like a cutting technique or how the dish should look during each stage of cooking it.

This has made me think about assignment descriptions, and how to explain to students what I want them to do to complete the work. I want to explore how Jamie Oliver explains things and to think about how to use his techniques in my own teaching. I recently experienced the panic that a student feels when working on an assignment. As I mentioned in the previous post, I am taking two online classes this semester. I submitted my first assignments last week while I was in London and there was a big difference in how I felt in one class vs the other class. In one class, I am always nervous that I’ve missed something. I never seem to know what I am supposed to be doing at any given time. I need to search for details about assignments in various places within Blackboard and on the syllabus. I’m always searching, and it seems that with every search I find a new detail that I missed the first go around. In the other class, I know what I’m doing each week. I know what is coming up and I have plans in mind for each assignment. I never feel lost and if I need to look something up, I always know where to find it. Big difference!

So, how do I create a learning environment in which students feel that sense of confidence because they have what they need in order to complete the work? If we compare an assignment description to a recipe, will there be similarities? In a well-written recipe, there is an ingredient list, a step-be-step description & picture of the process including various techniques that one must use during the recipe, and finally a description and picture of the end product and perhaps how you can pair it with other dishes.

With an assignment description we need to list the ingredients too. What will a student need in order to complete this assignment?

Readings, observations, lesson plans, a computer, a camera, a notebook, etc.

We also need a step-by-step description of the process and it would be nice to include pictures or samples of what those steps might look like:

describe the various drafts of a paper, describe the steps of doing an observation and finalizing an interpretation, etc.

Within that description there should be some explanation of expected techniques:

describe what is meant by drafts of a paper, describe what is meant by using APA format, etc.

Finally, there should be a description of the final product including a few samples and perhaps some explanation of where you might use this product  in other academic or professional work.

the paper will have three sections, your observation will include a narrative and an interpretation, each picture will have a label, you will do observations like this in an early childhood setting, etc.

As I read through this comparison it sounds overwhelming in terms of the amount of writing I think I should do in an assignment description. However, the best recipes have a short ingredient list, use simple descriptive language, and include various pictures of the process and product – all on one page. If you look at Jamie Oliver’s recipes, they tend to be one-pagers. This is helpful because I’m not having to flip back and forth as I go through the cooking process. Everything I need is in one place. We can do that with assignment descriptions too. It shouldn’t be overly complicated. If a student has trouble reading the assignment description, this will create unnecessary roadblocks to their completing the assignment. Speaking from experience, it also raises stress levels.

I don’t know how to be as cool as Jamie Oliver, but I do think his enthusiasm for what he does is contagious and through his writing and shows I feel like he has confidence in my ability to get the job done and have fun doing it. Why not try this with our students? I’d like to experiment with writing assignment descriptions using Jamie Oliver’s recipes as a guide. Want to join me? If so, send me your assignment descriptions and maybe we can do an ACCESS Shared Knowledge and Practices (SKiP) call about it. cnepstad65@gmail.com

I’ll share a couple of my assignment descriptions; Assignment description Teacher Research Case Study and Assignment description This I Believe essay

Let me know what you think!

A highlight of our London trip is when we went out to dinner at  Jamie’s Italian in Covent Garden.  It was a lively night out. The food was delicious and it was fun to see a tangible example of Jamie’s vision of people enjoying yummy, fresh food together. Cheers!

Carrie at the Tower of London

For inspiration, watch Jamie Oliver’s TED speech:

Teach every child about food

“My wish is for you to help a strong sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again, and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity”

                                                                                         -Jamie Oliver

First and foremost, the preconceptions students have about college and college instruction, as well as their underlying fear of failure, shape the college experience in fundamental ways, at times preventing learners from the kind of active engagement in their coursework that would be needed for them to succeed (p.158)

How many times have I interpreted disengaged behavior in my students as a disinterest in the course or a demonstration of a lack of skills necessary to be successful in my course? How many times have I been wrong about that?Perhaps this behavior, which I interpret to be disinterest might actually be more about the student’s fear of failure. Have you ever been afraid of failing and simply pulled back, and stopped trying? I have.  This book has made me think about the behaviors I observe in my students, particularly early on in the semester, as more about their own anxiety and less about me, my course, my assignments, my field, etc. In her chapter “Reimagining college from the inside out” Cox states that,

Virtually across the board, an instructor’s efforts to assuage students’ fears functioned as an active invitation to take part in the class and marked the first step toward fostering the perception on the part of students that the coursework they were being asked to accomplish was challenging but ‘doable’. In this way, the most promising pedagogical approach accomplished three crucial goals: it (a) demonstrated the instructor’s competence in the field of study; (b) clarified both the instructor’s expectations for student performance and the procedures for accomplishing the work; and (c) persuaded students that they were more than capable of succeeding (163).

Becoming a student again has been a humbling experience and it has been educational on many different levels. I plan to review my own syllabus and assignment descriptions and think about how students perceive my course. I want to remember this feeling of anxiety that I feel as a student and work hard to support my own students as they work through their own anxieties. As much of the stress literature indicates, learning is negatively impacted when the learner is experiencing a stress response. If I know that fear is a very real experience for most community college students, at least at the beginning of their studies, then I feel obligated as an instructor to try to buffer that stress as much as possible, or at least try to avoid adding to the stress levels students experience.

A meeting between ACCESS and the editing Board for NAEYC publication “Voices of Practitioners”

Hanging out at the conference