10/5/06
I visited Mr. Borton's second hour class today and for the first time I got to participate in the application of mastery learning and the use of correctives and extensions. About half of the class worked on each. Mr. Borton first went through explaining the choices each student would have depending on their performance on the test. Then he let the students choose which activities to complete. Most of the students who performed well on the tests chose to look at slides of Daphnia and some other creatures and draw them. A few decided to draw giant pictures of a specific creature that they liked, such as a paramecium. I could really see them getting into this and having a good time with it. Two students chose other activities including a reading assingment and a yeast experiment requiring a fair amount of math. Basically all of the students doing correctives worked on the first corrective assignment choice, which was a large worksheet provided by Mr. Borton. They showed no real interest in any of the other corrective choices given them. I quickly found out that I was basically just in the way when I tried to help any of the students doing extensions, they are all pretty sharp. I then turned my attention to the students doing the correctives to try and find some usefulness for myself. I found a couple of students to help but most of the students were doing pretty well on their own.
As the class went on many of the students got tired of what they were doing and started talking and goofing off. Mr. Borton asked them a few times to quiet down and it remained noisy. Then he threatened that the next person who talked would go to after school detention and that quieted them down immediately. One particular student was goofing off and I went over there and asked him if he was done with everything. He said and that he was and I asked him to show me. He had completed the correctives worksheet and thought that was enough for him to pass so he refused to do anything else. I tried to get him to choose another activity but he just said that he would not do anything else, he had made up his mind. It seemed that I couldn't persuade him to do anything productive so I told him that if he wouldn't do anything then he needed at least to be quiet and quit distracting his neighbors from learning and completing their work. He seemed ok with that and didn't give me much trouble after that.
I visited Mr. Borton's second hour class today and for the first time I got to participate in the application of mastery learning and the use of correctives and extensions. About half of the class worked on each. Mr. Borton first went through explaining the choices each student would have depending on their performance on the test. Then he let the students choose which activities to complete. Most of the students who performed well on the tests chose to look at slides of Daphnia and some other creatures and draw them. A few decided to draw giant pictures of a specific creature that they liked, such as a paramecium. I could really see them getting into this and having a good time with it. Two students chose other activities including a reading assingment and a yeast experiment requiring a fair amount of math. Basically all of the students doing correctives worked on the first corrective assignment choice, which was a large worksheet provided by Mr. Borton. They showed no real interest in any of the other corrective choices given them. I quickly found out that I was basically just in the way when I tried to help any of the students doing extensions, they are all pretty sharp. I then turned my attention to the students doing the correctives to try and find some usefulness for myself. I found a couple of students to help but most of the students were doing pretty well on their own.
As the class went on many of the students got tired of what they were doing and started talking and goofing off. Mr. Borton asked them a few times to quiet down and it remained noisy. Then he threatened that the next person who talked would go to after school detention and that quieted them down immediately. One particular student was goofing off and I went over there and asked him if he was done with everything. He said and that he was and I asked him to show me. He had completed the correctives worksheet and thought that was enough for him to pass so he refused to do anything else. I tried to get him to choose another activity but he just said that he would not do anything else, he had made up his mind. It seemed that I couldn't persuade him to do anything productive so I told him that if he wouldn't do anything then he needed at least to be quiet and quit distracting his neighbors from learning and completing their work. He seemed ok with that and didn't give me much trouble after that.
posted by James Madsen | 10:50 AM
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