What Underachieving
Middle School Students
Believe Motivates them to Learn
Middle School Students
Believe Motivates them to Learn
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Middle School Students Believe Motivates them to Learn |
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Chapter 1: The Challenge to Educate Everyone Chapter 2: A Review of Literature Chapter 3: Methods Chapter 4: The Results Chapter 5: Discussion
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A third reason engaging instruction is not more widespread may be that educators, parents, and community members don’t see some effective teaching models as being legitimate. A colleague’s principal who came into her classroom to conduct the annual observation. Students were actively engaged in creating their research products for a unit, and the teacher was moving between groups of students, checking the academic and mechanical integrity of their work, making suggestions, answering questions, and helping students find additional resources. The principal said, "I’ll come back to do the observation when you’re actually teaching." One of my undergraduate education students interviewed her grandmother about what her education was like. The grandmother described her classes and the student asked, "so it was mostly lecture?" Her grandmother became indignant and angry and barked back, "it isn’t lecture, it’s teaching!" When I do field service work with education majors, they are often concerned that I might observe them when they aren’t actually presenting new information. The view that teaching is teachers presenting and students reading and doing book work seems very deep rooted. Teachers who use other strategies seem to raise the suspicion of their colleagues, administrators, and parents. For example, several communities are battling over their math curriculum. There is controversy around the Connected Mathematics Program (the same program Mrs. Jacques uses). The Connected Mathematics Project (CMP) was developed at Michigan State University with support from the National Science Foundation (Connected Mathematics Project, & Michigan State University, 1996). The over-arching goal of CMP is to develop student and teacher knowledge of mathematics that is rich in connections and deep in understanding and skill. It attempts to achieve this goal by using interesting problems and contexts to develop understanding of concepts and skills. But parent groups and school boards are trying to keep CMP out of schools. In one Louisiana district, the school board refused to adopt the materials. The excuse they used was that the books were not hardcover, but teachers report the real issue was that the program didn’t match what parents and community members had experienced when they took math. One Texas parent group has created a web site devoted to helping parents keep CMP out of their schools (Plano Parental Rights Council, 1999). One of their major arguments is that parents have a hard time helping their students with the homework. Perhaps their objections come from the fact that they don’t see the work as familiar, and therefore not legitimate. This is happening despite the fact that the curriculum is very well reviewed by educators. Recently the U.S. Department of Education announced that CMP is one of five curricula (from 61) to achieve exemplary status and that CMP is the only middle school program identified as exemplary (U.S. Department of Education Mathematics and Science Expert Panel, 1999). The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) rates CMP the highest of twelve middle school mathematics curricula, stating that it "contains both in-depth mathematics content and excellent instructional support" (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1999). |
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Send questions or comments to wilder@somtel.com Last updated April 25, 2001 |
Assistant Professor of Education University of Maine at Farmington 104 Main Street Farmington, ME 04938 207.778.7179 wilder@somtel.com http://violet.umf.maine.edu/~mmuir |