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Laura Williams
Professor Kinney Grossman
Teaching & Learning in Urban Contexts
August 14, 2015
Reflection Narrative
"This summer has been very challenging for me. It's forced me to reconsider my own
identity and some assumptions that I'd made about what it means to teach, what it means to learn,
and what the purpose of school really is." I've said these words several times during the past
couple of days to fellow students and faculty members. This summer has forced me to expand
my ideas and conceptions regarding the learning process and the enterprise of educating an entire
country. In my own mind, I have redefined learning as the acquisition of knowledge and the
building of comprehension instead of just "knowing stuff." Over the course of this summer I
have discovered the importance of using multiple techniques and teaching styles to be able to
help students who learn in different ways access content information. I have realized that, while
I personally found learning very easy, learning happens differently for each student. Most importantly, I have come to realize that it is my task as a teacher to tailor my instruction so that all
of my students have equal opportunities to learn. The goal of this unit plan is to address those
needs and to present my content in a way that is both accessible and interesting to students while
still meeting the necessary state standards.
In designing the framework of my unit and, in particular, the instructional methods used,
I wanted to make sure I didn't just lecture. Before beginning the summer, I often found lectures
boring and wanted to avoid significant time lecturing because I've always preferred learning sci-

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ence hands-on. However within the first week, I was given a formal explanation for why traditional lecture-style science instruction as taught in urban schools is bad. One of the first articles
assigned this summer described a "Pedagogy of Poverty," or all the instructional methods traditionally used in urban schools that contributed to students in poverty staying there (Haberman,
1991). The biggest take away from the article is that forcing students to learn does not work.
Students must be actively engaged in content and encouraged to participate, reflect, and relate
their knew understandings to their current lives. In my summer placement in the Upward Bound
Math & Science program (UBMS), I experienced a direct glimpse of the "Pedagogy of Poverty,
as Haberman described it, at work. Students were expected to take a quiz at the beginning of
every class, the teacher walked through canned PowerPoint presentations which students copied
directly word-for-word, then they did worksheets individually and then finished them for homework. They cycle repeated itself each day and was supposedly a mechanism for fostering college
readiness but, in my experience, college is not nearly so regimented. In the physics class, the
students would endlessly do worksheets but change the problems slightly and they wouldn't
know which equation to use. They learned the steps by rote but did not understand them enough
to apply them in slightly different situations. In preparing mini-lessons and class take-overs during the course of the summer, I struggled to balance wanting to teach the students with an instructional strategy I believed was better and actually fitting in with the structure of the program.
I hope in my own classroom I would have more control over how content curriculum is presented; I don't want to have to follow the same regimented structure every day. My unit plan purposefully avoids full-length lecture and worksheets unless it is to introduce vocabulary and key

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concepts - a technique we discussed in class as geared towards helping English language learners
and other students build familiarity with content-specific terminology.
In organizing my unit plan I worked around certain essential questions. In many of our
class discussions, we've tried to identify what learning means in the long term. Is it the retention
of facts and equations? Or is it understanding big concepts and ideas that cross subjects and hold
meaning throughout history, time, and in life? At this moment, and based in part on numerous
class discussions this summer, I would consider myself a successful teacher if my students were
able to see themselves as open inquirers in all their subjects. Maybe I can even get them to think
about using a scientific method approach to ask important questions in their lives. I plan to use
Carol Dweck's concept of growth versus fixed mindsets to inform students that their thinking is
not set in stone (Dweck, 2010). By showing them we can alter the structure of our minds, I hope
to push my students towards positive, growth-oriented thinking. In particular, I want to find essential questions that are broad and transcend subject boundaries ,with no clear answer. The essential questions for this unit include such "big ideas" as how knowledge is constructed, how we
identify organizing patterns in nature, and the role science plays in society and how it shapes our
lives. Hopefully these concepts will encourage students to look at science with an open "growth"
mindset and enhance their classroom experience.
One of the first activities I plan to do with each and every class is a sort of introduction to
science and chemistry/physics/biology (whichever class it is) in the form of a no stakes pre-assessment Know-Want to know-Learned (KWL) chart. In my unit, I devote the first day of
class to having students fill out their KWL charts, discussing it in small groups, and then discussing again as a whole class what questions they have (W). I plan to collect the charts to get a

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feel for what students are interested in learning and to see where they are in terms of concepts
and terminology recognition. After reading them, I will return the charts so the students can use
them to order their thoughts about different units and see what they learned over the course of the
year. Most importantly, the charts wouldn't be graded. I want to use the charts and our class discussions as a way to introduce the idea to my students that they can all be scientists. Many students come into science feeling that they're just "not science people," or "science is hard." What
I hope my class does is expose some of the stereotypes students might feel and then show them
evidence for how it's wrong. One of the authors we read for class, Claude Steele, discussed how
recognizing negative stereotypes about your abilities based on a group association (i.e. girls are
bad at science), what he termed "stereotype threat," can result in students underperforming
(Steele, 1997). I want to encourage my students to grow and believe they can be scientists. By
directly refuting the stereotypes and giving them data that shows they perform equally well regardless of race or gender, my hope is that it will encourage my students to perform to their
highest abilities. Ultimately, my goal is to provide positive reinforcement and encouragement
throughout the unit and the year. With enough support, it is my belief that students can overcome many of the stereotype threats they may encounter in the sciences.
Another important aspect of my unit plan is I build in class time to work on the performance assessment task. I don't want to assume that children have access to materials and supplies at home which, according to authors Lipton, Oakes, and Anderson in "Teaching to Change
the World," is something teachers often do (2012). This puts students who are potentially living
in poverty or are in environments with scarce resources the chance to finish their work at school
when they have access to the necessary supplies. It is also important to me to provide classroom

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time for students to work together and help each other complete an assignment or get help from
me or another instructor as needed. Many of the readings this summer in both of our courses
have discussed the impact that poverty has on learning and education. Poverty does not just impact children's material resources. They lack access to regular healthcare, regular nutrition, a
safe and comfortable space to sleep, and often a stable and routine home-life. Students in poverty change schools more frequently than other students as their families are forced to move when
they can't pay rent--they may even spend time homeless. Children experiencing this on a daily
basis are generally functioning in "survival mode" and experience a host of challenges that demand their attention outside of just learning. Poverty has a detrimental impact on learning but it
isn't easy to solve. I want to can create a safe and supportive classroom community where my
students feel comfortable so that they can focus on learning. By providing time in class to work,
I try not to place the burden on them of needing materials they can't access in order to complete
assignments. This helps both students living in poverty and other students in general.
Another important element to my unit plan is scaffolding information and offering differentiated instruction as outlined in one of our course books (Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006). Part
of my goal with the pre-assessment is to provide students a chance to evaluate for themselves
what they already know about a particular topic. Each day, I will introduce key vocabulary and
concepts in mini or moderate-length lectures that provide a clear and coherent informational narrative for students to follow. With my essential question about the role chemistry and science
play in society, I am pushing students to relate chemistry to their own daily lives. Following
Deweys constructivist approach, I want my students to integrate their education with their own
prior experiences so they can create a cohesive picture of the subject (Dewey 1938). Part of this

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technique is allowing students to scaffold information at the level theyre currently at. It has become very clear to me over the summer, particularly in my placement at UBMS, that children all
learn new information at different paces and levels. I hope that each lesson is able to meet each
student where they're at currently and then provide a framework to move up to the next level of
comprehension. In this way I can encourage students to think about how they construct their
own understanding, and how we, as a group, construct knowledge in a classroom. This is one of
my essential questions I plan to use throughout the whole year. To further meet students needs, I
plan to differentiate project tasks so that students have multiple options to choose from for their
assessment. While content standards will be the same, for their final performance task students
can play to their strengths and choose the form of their "mini-biography," as well as include a
visual component to their project. In all of my lectures and lesson plans, I plan to use a combination of visual, auditory, and hands-on instruction to offer students who learn different ways access to content. Following the idea of Gardener's Multiple Intelligences, the unit plan and lesson
plan hopefully offer students different ways of processing new information and synthesizing it
with their existing knowledge (Multiple Intelligences Oasis, 2015).
To conclude, I have spent much time this summer reflecting on how learning happens and
how knowledge is constructed, acquired, and synthesized by students. I hope that by trying to
reach students on multiple levels and using a variety instructional strategies I will be able to offer
interesting and exciting classes. I hope my students develop an open "growth mindset" and that
they acknowledge and actively combat any negative stereotypes they may feel regarding their
abilities. The biggest difficulty with this unit plan has been figuring out how pacing and implementation of it would work in terms of where my students are at. I fear that the timing of the

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plan is ambitious. Depending on the general level of background knowledge in my class, it may
take more than one day of reviewing key atomic structure terminology before my students are
ready to work on their performance task of building a periodic table quilt as a class. If I were
using this unit in a classroom, I would likely expand it and make it a 3 week unit. I would add
atomic structure and history and increase practice time reading elements off the periodic table.
This would provide more of a common context for students and would make their research for
the biographies more meaningful. It would also enhance our class discussion on shared atomic
properties. As a sample though, I think this unit provides ample opportunity for students with
different strengths and levels of knowledge to all participate in creating a classroom community.
Ultimately, I hope that this unit and the things I've discovered this summer about learners and
learning will continue to grow and change as I move into a real school setting in the fall. At orientation, we were told were joining a profession where it is important to always analyze your
practice and seek to improve your instruction so that you can constantly better meet your students needs. Hopefully this unit is a step on my path to doing just that.

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References

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience & Education. Simon & Schuster, NY.

Dweck, C. S. (2010). Mind-Sets and Equitable Education. Principal Leadership, 10(5): 26-29.
Gardner, H. (2015). Multiple Intelligences Oasis. Retrieved from http://multipleintelligencesoasis.org.
Haberman, M. (2010). 11 Consequences of failing to address the `Pedagogy of Poverty', Phi
Delta Kappan. 92 (2): 45.
Oakes & Lipton (2012) Teaching to Change the World. Paradigm Publishers, NY.
Steele, C.M. (1997) A Threat in the Air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. June, American Psychologist 52 (6), 613 - 629.
Tomlinson, C. & McTighe, J. (2006) Integrating Differentiated Instruction & Understanding by
Design. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, Virginia.