Central Falls Scavenger Hunt

During this scavenger hunt the roads were terrible. Cars were still parked in the middle of the street and the snow was very heavy. A lot of the sidewalks were not plowed which made it very hard to navigate and find places to park. Luckily the few places I chose to take pictures of were very close to one another which made navigation easier. 

I learned a lot about the city/town of Central Falls. I learned not only facts, but I learned about what type of city the students are living in. Crime rates are higher in this city, there are less police officers than there should be, the community lacks resources and money, etc. Living in a city like this affects the students’ work and potential. It is important to know what students might be going through outside of school in order to better gage what type of teaching is needed in school. Thus, I now have a better outlook on the life of the students I observe. 

I know that Central Falls High School has shown major improvement in graduation rates. I am now questioning what Central Falls High School has been doing to successfully inspire and teach these students despite their less-fortunate location. How were they able to raise their graduation rates by such a large increase? 

I think the biggest thing I took from this assignment was that it is important to learn about your students and the community that they are involved in. Even if you don’t live in the community, you, as a teacher, are a still an active member of that community. You educate their students, and you guide them towards their futures. In order to teach your students successfully and meaningfully you first have to understand your students. You have to understand their struggles and their strengths. You have to know what goes on out of school, and, in order to understand your student, you have to learn about the place they live. What kind of community is it? What does this say about the home life of our students? What are they getting or not getting? How does this affect how they learn? This assignment was very worth while, and I found great use out of it. I think I will keep this sheet for myself for future teaching. It could serve as a guide to learning about the community within which the school I teach at will be in. Of course some of these questions are specific to Central Falls, but many of them are applicable basic questions that can be used to understand and get to know any city. You can learn a lot just from simple statistics and facts about the environment within which the school is located. 

Here is what I found: 

1.) Question #4: How many schools are in the city? Colleges and universities?

Answer: There are 7 schools, including: 

Captain Hunt Early Learning (PK)

Margaret Robertson Elementary (K)

Ella Risk Elementary (1-4)

Veterans Memorial Elementary (1-4)

Alan Shawn Feinstein School (1-5)

Calcutt Middle Schoool (5-8) 

Central Falls High (9-12)

St Elizabeth Ann Seton Academy (private elementary/middle school) (PK-8)

Unfortunately, there are not any colleges or universities in this city. While this is true, there are many colleges and universities close by like Providence College (PC). 

2.)  Question #19: Visit the Central Falls Library. What events or resources are available?

Answer: The Library is located at 205 Central St! 

According to the records, three are 33,809 books, 442 audio materials, 1,589 video materials, 1 state licensed databases, 8 other licensed databases, and 48 print serial subscriptions. They also hold a lot of book clubs, homework help sessions, and oftentimes have readings performed. Here’s their mission statement: 

3.) Question #18: What is the major religion in the city/town? Are there churches/synagogues/mosques/ temples?

Answer: Central Falls is comprised of mostly christians. Others are not affiliated with religious congregations. Here are the statistics:

MAJOR CHURCHES IN CITY: 

Saint Ephraims Church

Assembly of God

Central Falls Congregational Church,

Holy Trinity Church Complex 

Bible Baptist Church,

Casade Oration Gethsemane Church

Saint Matthews Church

Here's a picture of the Iglesia Evangelica Hispana United Church of Christ:

Here's the statistics: 

4.) Question #12: Are there public Parks?

Answer: Yes! There are four! Here are their names:

Central Falls Historic District

Jenks Park

Central Falls Mill Historic District

Central Street School Historic District 

5.) Question #9: Is there are fire station? A police station? How are fire emergencies handled? What crime statistics are available for the community? 

Answer: There is a fire station located at 150 Illinois Street!

Here's what it looks like:

There is also a police department located next door at 160 Illinois Street. Here's some pictures!

  

The only crime statistics that I could find were available for the year 2012. Here are those statistics: 

Police Officers and law enforcement employees: 42 officers in 2012

Officers per 1,000 residents = 1.65

Rhode Island Average= 2.34

6.) Question #10: Is there a movie theater in town? 

Answer: There are no movie theaters in town. However, there are some close by. Here’s a yellow pages list of some theaters that Central Falls residents might go to: 

7.) Question #8: Is there a post office in town? 

Answer: Yes, there is a post office. It is located on 575 Dexter Street!

8.) Question #24: There are three professional baseball players from Central Falls. Name them. 

Answer:

Max Surkont (Pittsburgh pirates and Boston Braves)

Jim Siwy 

Charley Bassett

9.) Question #14: What is the name of the local newspaper? 

Answer: The Pawtucket Times. Here’s their homepage and some of the headlining news:

10.) Question #29: In this scared space, the famous and the infamous are side by side. But in one part you can see the bullet holes left by a battle that took place between strikes and the National Guard? What is this sacred space? 

Answer: Moshassuck Cemetery located at 978 Lonsdale Avenue. Here’s some pictures from the past and the bullet holes at the sight. 

UBD: Understanding By Design (The Benefits of a Backwards Design and The Teacher as an Architect)

        There was a lot that was talked about in these chapters that was very interesting to read. I really liked the metaphor of the teacher as an architect that has to design something while still adhering to certain standards and being mindful of their audience. I agree that teaching is like designing. You have to design lesson plans, units, goals, objectives, and so on while still being mindful of your students’ needs and your school’s standards. Teaching by the book may hit all of the schools’ standards, but it may not engage students nor cater to them as individualized learners, thus, design is one of the most important parts of a teacher’s job in order to create an engaged and successful learning environment. 

        I found the idea of using a backwards teaching design to be very helpful. The text informs the reader that the goals and objectives should be thought of first before the tactics, techniques, and lesson plan is created. In other words, one should know where he wants his student to be at the end of the unit before he even begins to create the lesson plan. This idea is proposed to show that teachers need to have a clear goal in mind for their students to reach and that their lessons should be based on reaching these goals. Too often is it that teachers pick an idea they want to teach and a book that goes well with this idea, but they never think about what exactly they want their students to take away from this lesson/idea and why they will benefit from it. Working backwards will make the goals much more clear and, thus, the lesson can be created to fit these goals rather than being created because they are interesting but have no clearly set goal(s). In my opinion this method of design makes much more sense than the common practice. 

        I also found figure 1.2 to be very helpful towards my future career. It was a diagram that provided a way for teachers to decipher their priorities in their classes in order to help with the first step of backwards designing. I could definitely see myself using this diagram to guide myself in the right direction when trying to discover what I want my students to learn and what I want them to be able do and understand. In this way I can help my students reach higher levels of thinking like analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. I also found the 4 filters to be helpful for my future as a teacher. It provided me with multiple questions to ask myself when trying to decide what is most important for my students to learn. Again, these are guidelines and materials I can use in the future to guide myself to becoming a better teacher. 

        In Module A, there were many things that I found useful and interesting, but I specifically liked the bullet points that summarized “the key findings that provide a conceptual base for UbD’s specific instruction and assessment practice”. In these bullet points the text emphasizes developing understanding of big ideas and key concepts. Thus, as teachers, we need to provide our students with models and schemas and other means of teaching in order to help them not merely memorize information, but to understand the information. 

When reading this I related it to an exercise that a health teacher had the class perform in 10th grade. We were learning about different mental disorders and their affects on those who have them. I can still remember one activity we did in order to learn about schizophrenia. The teacher broke the class into two groups: students putting puzzles together and students that were not. The students that were not were taken out into the hallway. The teacher told us secretly that we had to pretend to be helping the students put together their puzzles while secretly actually trying to mess them up by moving pieces or coaching them in the wrong direction. The students putting the puzzles together, however, thought that the hallway students were there to help guide them. The goal was to be the person to finish the puzzle first for a prize. What happened was every time a puzzler would almost finish the puzzle we would mess them up. The puzzle was supposed to be a picture of the food pyramid. When the puzzlers caught on to what the other students were doing, they started getting mad and telling the teacher. When the teacher came over he said “But that person hasn’t been doing anything to you. I’ve been watching them and they have been helping you the entire time”. He did this to every student that complained until students began to get mad and give up. Other students, while putting their puzzles together, actually started realizing that their puzzles were not of food pyramids at all but, instead, they were of random things like STDs and viruses. When they told the teacher they had the wrong puzzle, the teacher insisted that the puzzle they were putting together was of the food pyramid (even though they weren’t). In the end, nobody finished their puzzles and everyone gave up. He then asked what happened and proceeded to tell us that schizophrenic people tend to feel these experiences often: hallucinations, misperception, etc. While the world around may appear normal to others, schizophrenic people tend to see things that aren’t real. Thus, while the common misconception is that schizophrenics are “crazy”, they are not crazy, but, rather, they are experiencing an entirely different world than those who are not schizophrenic. 

In this way students were not simply expected to memorize symptoms of schizophrenia, but they performed an exercise that made them better understand the big idea and key concepts of the lesson. They felt what it was like to be in the perspective of a schizophrenic person, which is something that will stick in the head of the student a lot longer than simply memorizing facts. It definitely worked for me! This is the kind of teacher I want to be, and it is the type of teaching that this module is encouraging: Meaningful teaching. 

        Module F was also another section that not only was very interesting and useful, but it too reminded me of a previous course I took: SED406 with professor Kraus. The module talks about essential questions in language arts and how they must be driven at identifying the main topics for one to concentrate on. In other words, it is the big picture idea or question that needs answering. We learned about these questions in SED406, and I like to think that I understand the concept. While this is true, this section of the text identified some essential questions for all contents, and I found many of these essential questions to be useful in the future. I realized that I could steal some of these essential questions in my own classrooms in order to get towards what I want my students to understand after leaving my class. Again, it is another material that acts as a stepping stone towards backwards design. Once one identifies the essential question, he then can move on to plan how one will get the students to be able to answer these essential questions. 

        I also enjoyed the section about purpose overriding format when writing essential questions. I completely agree with this concept. The purpose of a question and what students are learning is always more important how the question is formatted. A teacher must always be able to identify the “why” of a question they are posing before he identifies the “how”. While this is true for posing questions, I do not necessarily believe that this is true for creating a lesson for students. I believe that in creating a lesson plan, both the purpose and the format are equally important. It is important for the lesson to have a purpose for being taught, but it is also important that the teacher formats the lesson in a way that the purpose can be executed well and be impressed upon the student. If the format is not well thought out, the purpose of the lesson can be lost. Thus, while I do agree that this may be true in writing essential questions, it may not be a good mantra when creating lesson plans. 

        Overall I found the text very thought provoking and enjoyed it a great deal. 

Interest/Learning Inventory Worksheet and Answers

Chapters 1 and 2 of Subjects Matter

     I really enjoyed reading these few chapters of the book. The book outlined why reading is critical to students and argues why it is such an important skill. It also talks about how to teach this important skill to students and sheds some light on some of the issues with current teaching styles.

    In today's world teachers typically teach students the way they were taught because this is how it was modeled to them and, thus, it is their strength. Teachers too often use their strengths to guide their classroom, but the teacher needs to be aware that this might not be the best for their students. It is much harder for teachers to teach their strengths because it came so easily to them. When something comes easy to someone, the steps to how the person became successful in this area are blurred, therefore making it harder to teach a student the process of skill (i.e. reading). Instead they expect products and they expect students to be able to read higher levels of literature than they are probably capable of reading. In order to provide students with the skills needed to read higher levels of literature we first need to teach them how to read. Students must first be given the tools and the ability to read before they are expected to find meaning and critically think about and analyze complicated literature. As teachers it is our job is not to first force students to engage in higher level thinking, but, rather, to provide them with the technical reading skills and background of the content. Reading is a skill that is taught not implied or inferred. This is one of the most common issues with teaching of today.

     In other words, one of the main ideas of this reading was to express to the reader that teaching "by the book" is common, but is not necessarily the best way to run a classroom in order to help students reach their full potential. Students are individuals and, thus, think differently. All students are on different reading levels and have different styles of learning. They are all unique and require special attention. Thus, instruction should cater to the students' unique style of learning and provide the special attention needed for success. If one teaches "by the book" the much needed individualized teaching style is forgotten and, thus, students will begin to fall behind and will not progress as readers. Only when a student has progressed and can grip the material comfortably can they begin to enjoy reading and move on to higher levels of thinking.

    I completely agree with this argument. In our previous reading Wilhelm talked about students that could not appreciate Shakespeare simply because they could not understand the language. This is a great example of what this reading was talking about. Students are expected to analyze characters, themes, and language of a play that they have not yet even been taught how to read. When any student first sees Shakespeare's writing it looks foreign and it, frankly, scares them. It scared me! I vividly remember my teacher assigning us a reading of Romeo and Juliet and expecting us to talk about it the next class, and I also remember nobody saying a word that next class because nobody had any idea what they had just read. This is a perfect example of a moment where reading became meaningless to the students because the teacher had not provided them with the tools and skills necessary to understand the content. Too often have I seen this occur in classrooms that I have been in, and this reading really stressed this idea to me. Thus, I will try my best in the future to avoid this type of teaching.

Responding to Wilhelm Chapters 1 and 2

     I really enjoyed reading these two chapters. There were many terms I recognized, and many teaching theories and concepts that I was not aware of. As for the structure of the text, I really find the author's personal experiences to be the most interesting parts that I read. I have already taken many eduction and English courses and have learned a lot of terminology and theory, but the personal experiences from the experienced educator was something that I don't get to read a lot of.
   
     I agreed with the main concepts of each one of her experiences. I especially liked the stories of Nate and Dr. Comer in chapter 1. Nate seems like the type of student that thinks he has teaching all planned out perfectly, but the teacher provides nice insight into how this is only his first phase on planning. He didn't have a purpose for teaching what he had planned other than the fact that it fit the curriculum. While it is important to teach what is required, it is also important to understand who you are as a teacher and even more important to have reasons for what you teach. Otherwise, why are you even teaching it? If you can't event think of a good reason to teach the information, then why would you teach it in the first place? It is part of a teacher's job to create their identity and decide who they want to be as teachers, and this is what the author was trying to explain.

     Dr. Comer's idea was also very informative. It made me think more about my major as a profession. Oftentimes teachers do ask students to just write the paper and turn it in to them the next day. We don't stop to think, "Hey, maybe these students don't necessarily know what I am expecting or have not been provided with skills to do so". If we as teachers do not notice and cater to these issues then what separates us from anybody else? Where do our expertise lie? Can't anyone who likes books just assign a student an essay and grade it? Thus, we need to not only have the expertise, but we need to teach it as a process, not a product.

     I also really enjoyed the practice exercises where you had to grade and rank scenarios. Not only did it act as a nice breather from the theory parts of the chapter, but it also made me realize what being a teacher means. It's not just about inspiring, mastering, or knowing the steps, vocabulary, and terminology. It's all of those things combined and more. These were great scenarios to try out on my own. I liked even more the explanations that the book gave for each scenario because it helped me think through each one on a more complex level.

     While I oftentimes find visual figures in texts annoying and redundant, I liked a particular figure that was presented. Figure 1.1 Learning Centered Teaching was the most simple and most helpful of all of the figures. It demonstrates how teaching and learning should work together in order to show and create progress. It makes sense that the teacher would first do the task while the students watch, then rely on the students to help me finish the task, then help the students to finish their task, and then to observe them finish the task on their own. This reminded me of my math courses a lot. We would always watch the teacher present the problem and the solution, then she would provide examples and have us tell her what to do next in each problem, then she would give us practice problems and walk around the room helping us, and then she would assign problems for homework to do individually where she would look at them and see if there was progress. If we had issues with the problem she would go over that problem and explain it and then repeat the process until we understood it. As a student I did not know that this was a strategy, but, as I am now an aspiring English teacher, I can recognize these strategies and internalize them for the future.

     On top of this idea, I also really loved the use of examples and metaphors in these chapters. I had always known what scaffolding was because I had to memorize the terminology for CEP315, but I never knew why it was called scaffolding. The text explained this metaphor through images and it made much more sense to me. I also liked the metaphor of teaching as coaching. A coach doesn't just throw the ball to the players and tell them to do what they want to. The coach teaches them plays, possible outcomes and how to prepare for them, the rules, technique, etc. Only then does he let the students play the game--after they are given the ability to take control and responsibility of their actions. Then the outcome of the game determines what the coach does next. Both of these examples were great ways for me to comprehend what the chapters were getting at.

     Another thing that stood out to me in these chapters was the poem that was written by Jack. It was, again, a good break from some of the more heavy material and helped make one of the biggest concepts of the chapter stand out: providing students with the means to do what you want them to. It was interesting because I think Jack is a lot like my younger brother. He has never liked reading and has always made fun of me for wanting to have my own library in my house one day. He always asks me "How can you read for three hours straight?" and  "Why do you want to be an English teacher of all subjects? It's so boring!" I don't think he has read more than 2 books that have ever been assigned to him for school. When I think more about this situation in terms of what I read in the text, I remember that he had to stay back a year in kindergarten because his reading skills were below average. Today, if I ask him to read something to me, he can read it, but he reads very slowly and has a hard time pronouncing longer and more complicated words. He used to love reading the Diary of a Whimpy Kid series when he was younger because they were at his particular level of reading, but now he does not find any literature enjoyable, and I think this is because he finds higher levels of writing hard to comprehend and does not have the patience to read something foreign (like the Wilhelm's example of the students reading Shakespeare). I think the issue here is exactly what was indicated in the text: he was taught some reading skills in elementary school and then, when he went on to middle and high school, teachers expected him to already know how to read an advanced classic novel and how to write a 5-paragraph essay with proper documentation analyzing this novel. The truth is that my brother can barely fill a page every time he writes an essay. This is not to say at all that my brother is incapable of doing so or is "too stupid" to accomplish this task, rather that he has not been given the tools and the skills to do so by his teachers, and this deeply saddens me. Due to this issue, my brother is a junior in high school and will probably never know the joy of reading a book. I'm glad that this text book brought this pressing issue up, but this is a huge issue that needs to be approached not just in text books but also in real life.

     Overall, I found these chapters to be very interesting and useful. I loved the mixture of experience, theory, poetry, examples, visual figures, and practice scenarios in the book. All were very helpful in given me information towards my future as a teacher. More importantly, I was able to connect my life to the text, and that was probably the most useful thing that I took from these chapters all together.