I am beginning to work on my master’s thesis for Penn this Spring, and the inquiry question I am contemplating using for the purposes of my teacher research is presently ‘what strategies or practices do teachers use to assist students who have either missed significant time in school, or have significant gaps in content knowledge, and what are the advantages/disadvantages to these strategies employed by teachers.’ I am currently in the beginning stages of gathering data and evidence.
I want to know how I can best help students when they either miss significant periods of time in school or when they have significant gaps in content knowledge. I am considering editing my inquiry question to be, ‘‘what strategies or practices do teachers use to assist students who have missed significant time in school, and what are the advantages/disadvantages to these strategies.’ This version does not even mention the ‘gaps in content knowledge’ dimension, which I fear will be too nebulous to cover for the purposes of this project. I believe I will ultimately have to decide whether to consider ‘gaps in content knowledge’ or ‘absences’ for my teacher inquiry project. Presently, I am thinking that absences will be a less-daunting topic to cover. My Penn mentor, Sarah, was extremely helpful in a one-on-one meeting today, where she pointed out examples of what I might be able to use as evidence in my project. It was incredibly helpful to hear what evidence might look like, because I was having trouble imagining examples of evidence that I could use. Sarah made this look easy today, which has had a relieving effect on me. Now, I am on the lookout for more evidence, whereas before our meeting, I was not. She was able to point out numerous examples of evidence that are at my disposal just from my D band algebra 2 class this morning (this class will be referred to as ‘D band’ hereafter in this journal entry). Sarah observed D band this morning, where only a third of the class showed up on time. This is atypical for the school where I student teach, and to make matters worse, today was an extremely important day for students to be present. We have a benchmark projects coming up later this week, and the content we covered today (parametric equations) is necessary for this important project! To make matters worse, before today’s class (occurred January 10th 2018), D band had only met once since December 20th, 2017. Two consecutive snow days during the week we returned from holiday break caused us to miss 2 of the 3 total days allotted for school that week. We were also hampered seeing D band due to an early dismissal the week following the consecutive snow days. It has been a challenge to manage these breaks from school, as now our Algebra 2 classes are not in sync. How do we as teachers handle this? I feel pressure to move quickly through material now with D band, because they are a day or two behind A band.
1 Comment
Sarah Poncz
1/15/2018 12:21:19 pm
I agree that determining what significant gaps in content knowledge exist would be very challenging.
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Alex KoroljowStudent teacher at SLA @ Center City, Philadelphia. Archives
January 2018
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