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Course Description and Goals

In this course, we will consider effective methods of teaching secondary students (with a name like the one above, I think I have no choice!). The concept of a general methods course can be somewhat tricky, because I am a firm believer in the notion that our teaching and our content understanding are highly correlated, which makes it uncomfortable for me to delineate what "any good teacher" should do. By the same token, there are numerous principles of good teaching which can be elaborated upon in the abstract as long as they quickly reach out to specific content areas, and this will be the approach for this class.

My notion of this class is that it will require quite a bit from you. It will be not only academically demanding, but a test of your integrity as well. My teaching philosophy is akin to tossing a baby out in the pool, quickly deciding whether or not she/he is drowning, and then doing something about it. No doubt, sometimes you will feel like you have been tossed out in the water without a clue as to how to swim. If that happens, please have the sense to call to me for help, but realize that I may jump in with you and show you how to dog paddle or do the crawl without necessarily taking you out of the water.

Our goal is to explore the following questions:

• What is effective pedagogy? Can I do it?
• Who am I as a teacher? What are my dreams?
• Who are my students? How can I best serve them?How can I make my curriculum and teaching multiculturally inclusive and responsive?
• What is constructivism? Once I understand it, what effect will it have in the classroom?
• How can academic technology serve teaching and learning in my classroom?
• How do I become a scholarly and reflective practitioner?

Artifacts

Weekly Journals (16%). I am asking you to write a weekly journal of responses to the readings or the lab experiences from which you will (hopefully) benefit in this class. My hope is that you will feel free to share your reactions, thoughts, and feelings as we go along., sharing them with me and with others. It would be wonderful if I - if we - could verbally share all that is percolating inside of us when we gather each week. However, not only is that impossible, it may not be all that good for all of us. Sometimes we need time to process what is going on around us, and we don't always have a ready response. I look forward to reading your thoughts, and getting to know you in this way.

Since we are only meeting once a week, I would like for us to share these journals in a class discussion group, where we can all see what you are thinking and respond to you. In order to promote interaction and discussion, I would like for you to make two independent responses each week to the journals or responses of others, and email a copy of these to Reuben as well. I believe this is a wonderful opportunity to extend the boundaries of the classroom beyond its four walls, and I believe it can be a successful teaching and learning strategy.

Teaching Resource Collection (30%). We have a unique opportunity to make a contribution to the Education Department that will endure beyond our academic careers here. The Department, in conjunction with the Stockwell-Mudd Libraries, would like to recreate our teaching resource collection. Well, instead of "recreate" maybe I should say "initiate." The goal is to develop a collection of teaching resources which will be useful to later groups of education students or other members of the Albion community who are interested in education. This collection can consist of books on the methods of teaching, psychology of learning, foreground and background content area knowledge, course design, unit and lesson planning, personal and interpersonal classroom management, assessment, multicultural teaching, etc. We can choose any media we wish - individual books, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, video or audio tapes, a book collection, etc. We have been allocated some money by the library for this project.

Each person in the class will make four recommendations for purchase. These do not have to be unique recommendations (i.e. more than one person can recommend the same item). Do not recommend a required textbook used in any of your Education classes last year or this semester. We will then meet as a group to determine how we will spend the money - some recommendations will be financed, some will not. We will spend an entire class period doing this, but we will have to consider how to conduct this give-and-take discussion. The library will make the purchases, and we anticipate allowing them a month to complete the process. Once the materials arrive, each person in the class will write critiques of two items in the collection. We will then build a web page which will describe the items in the collection, with links to the critiques. Building the web page is extremely simple - the hard part will be making the initial recommendations, creating the purchase list, and then analyzing what we have. As each of you is specializing in a different content area in your secondary education preparation, it is my hope that our efforts will be similarly diverse, and thus useful to as many others as possible.

As part of your own preparation for this project, you will learn how to create a web page, both from scratch using HTML and using a web editor such as Netscape Communicator.

Response Papers (21%). In this class, we will be reading three complete books by Brooks & Brooks, Palmer, and Nieto. I would like for you to write a response paper for each book. This is not a book report where you summarize what was said. Instead, I am interested in your visceral response - how did the book make you feel? Did it move you? Does it impel you towards being a reflective educator? Did it evoke hostility or apathy from you? Did it trouble you, or did it cause cognitive dissonance in you? I would also like for you to take up at least one substantive theme from each book and apply it toward one or more of the classes that you anticipate teaching next year. In other words, how would your understanding and internalization of (or profound disagreement with) that one theme play out in your classroom, with you as the teacher.

The response paper can take up any creative form you wish, and may be submitted in whichever media you wish. You may choose to write a letter to the author of the text or to someone else; you may choose to compose a poem, a song, or a dance; you may choose to make a painting or a sculpture; you may assume the identity of an educational columnist for a newspaper, magazine or e-zine in writing the review; or you may choose to create a board game. If you choose a non-textual format, please provide a brief (75 words or so) description of the response. If you choose a textual format, it should be between 850-1,500 words in length, and should have at least two external references (please include a full bibliography, using APA style).

Course Design (31%). As part of this class, we will experience the process of course design. You can think of this as a summative experience which addresses the majority of our course content for secondary methods. We will make use of the following scenario: the entire class is part of the faculty in a class B public school district in Michigan. Use last year's demographic information about the Albion Public Schools as a basis for determining the gender and ethnic composition of the middle and high schools. Use Albion's MEAP scores as well for your mythical district. You can also use this year's Albion Schools Academic Calendar to plan your semester.

You will each design a syllabus for a course in the fall semester which will consist of the following components:

• a metaphor for the course which both your students and your fellow teachers can comprehend
• an overview of the course which contains a brief description of it (as one might see in the catalog), how it fits in with the scope and sequence of what is taught in the department, and a rationale for why the course should be taught (i.e. what do the students get out of it).
• a description of the learners in the course; how old are they? how experienced are they in the content area? how academically motivated might they be? what is their probably gender, ethnic, or socioeconomic makeup? what impact will that have on how they learn?
• a graphical map (some of you are smelling PIViT already, but you don't have to use it) which shows all of the concepts and curricular objectives (from the Michigan Curriculum Framework for your content area) that you will "cover" in class. It should include all of the artifacts and assessments that the students will use to demonstrate their understanding of the course content. You should also show all the plausible links between concepts, objectives, and artifacts.
• a calendar which lays out when you will "cover" the concepts and when the artifacts are due or assessments given.
• a piece of software or an internet site subscription which you "must have" for the class; which you will either use in the class for background content knowledge or live classroom use. You may select anything under $100, or pool your money with someone else to make a joint purchase (for now, don't worry about site licenses). You should provide a cost estimate and a suggested source for the software or site, along with the title and the publisher.
• an assessment scheme for keeping track of students' progress and attendance and issuing quarterly and semester grade reports; this should be done using a spreadsheet program in conjunction with a word processing program. Possible combinations are Word/Excel, WordPerfect/Quattro, ClarisWorks, or MSWorks.
• A statement describing your philosophy and means for working with the students in your class. It should describe your general outlook on the roles and responsibilities of both yourself and your students. It should also lay out steps for intervention should your students abrogate their roles and responsibilities.

Links of Interest

Here is the latest version of the Michigan Curriculum Framework for all the basic content areas (Art, English/Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, and Technology). The web interface to the standards is pretty clunky, but the site is quite useful. There is a separate link for International Education and World Languages because there is no state standardized curricula in that area. Michigan does not have a standardized curriculum for physical education, but the National Association for Sport and Physical Education has some national standards for P. E..

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has a nice set of web pages which act as a partial guide to the APA style. You may find that reading from the actual book would be easier, but you can certainly see some of the conventions.

Recent results for the MEAP and HST tests for each private and public school in the state.

Demographic statistics by school district from the 1990 census are available in the Michigan School Distruct Data Book. At the time I am putting this together, there is a slight bug; when you get there, you see the data for Battle Creek automatically, so you have to click on "select school district" over on the upper left to get the index of all districts.

Here is some additional information that you will need for the course design assignment. You will need version 3 or 4 of the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view and print these files. If you are in one of Albion's public labs, the Reader is already installed so you can proceed. If you are at home, your computer probably has it, but it may be an older version. If you need to download it, follow the link above and then the directions; when you are done, come back here.

• The daily schedule; please ignore the different schedule for Wednesdays and assume all days are the same.
• Graduation requirements for students in the high school.
• Courses offered in the English department.
• Courses offered in the Foreign Languages department.
• Courses offered in the Life Management Education department.
• Courses offered in the Mathematics department. Go ahead and assume that Integrated Math I covers at least some of the material traditionally associated with Algebra I.
• Courses offered in the Physical Education department.
• Courses offered in the Social Studies department.
• Courses offered in the Science department.