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Monthly Archives: November 2020
Understanding Student and Teacher Abilities
Students and teachers all have various strengths and weaknesses. In this post, we will look at students’ mental skills and the cognitive complexity of teachers. Teachers need to be aware of the student’s mental skills, and teachers and administrators need to be mindful of their cognitive complexity and that of their peers.
For Students
Students are frequently judge and assessed for their mental abilities. Mental abilities can be defined in many different ways. Some of the mental abilities traits are fluency, memory, verbal comprehension, inductive reasoning, and mathematical/logical aptitude.
Some of these so-called mental abilities can be influenced by studying in a second language. For example, most ESL students struggle with verbal comprehension of other people’s words and fluency. Therefore, these students may be thought of as having weak mental abilities when, in fact, they are struggling to function academically in a second language.
This means that when trying to understand students’ mental abilities, it is essential to remember that assessing mental abilities is tricky in the best case situation and that there are unique factors for individual students that need to be considered.
For Teachers
Teachers also have the same mix of ability when it comes to mental capacities. However, because of a teacher’s added responsibility of managing and leading students’ instructional experience, teachers can also be further analyzed in terms of their cognitive complexity.
Cognitive complexity is a person’s ability to sort through information and organize it to be understandable. General, people, can be viewed on a continuum from low to high cognitive complexity.
Teachers who exhibit low cognitive complexity will only see one or two aspects of a problem or challenging situation. In addition, such teachers often rely heavily on stereotypes when dealing with students, causing them to miss each student’s uniqueness. Decision making is fast as the teacher is willing to move on limited information. Lastly, such teachers with low cognitive complexity have a low locus of control, which means they often are not convinced that they have control over external conditions.
Teachers with high cognitive complexity often have a less deterministic, stereotypical view of the world. This means that alternative solutions are sought to deal with problems. The locus of control is placed within the individual, which means that the teacher believes they have authority and influence on their environment.
Teachers with high cognitive complexity are often better at dealing with rapid change and complex situations. In addition, these individuals are better at obtaining and acquiring information for decision making.
However, there are some words of caution. Cognitive complexity is steeped in cultural values. In other words, the traits that are defined as being complex are traits that are valued in a western context. In a different context, such abilities may be seen in an opposite light. What this means is that high complexity is situational, not only cultural but also for a person. For example, a person might demonstrate high complexity in one situation and not in another, such as when going into a familiar situation or an unfamiliar one.
Furthermore, another related idea is that whether a person has high or low cognitive complexity depends on who they are being compared to. Among one group of people, a person may have the highest of the low cognitive complexities. Still, this same person would be viewed differently compared to a different group of people.
Lastly, to label some people low or high in cognitive ability is somewhat discouraging for people who may be labeled as low. The points above indicate that people’s complexity can change due to the situation or who they are compared to. Probably all teachers have exhibited all of these low and high traits at one time or another. Even students can shift back and forth at times.
Conclusion
Teachers and students all have different abilities. It is crucial to understand how people think and work around you and how you think and work to avoid confusion. Students are judge on their mental abilities, while teachers may be judge based on their management style. When this happens, there must be great care to consider the big picture and all the influencing people’s factors so that teachers and students are not judged negatively in an unfair way.
Product Rule VIDEO
Product rule for derivatives
Functions of School Work
Students in school need to work just as adults do but for slightly different reasons at times. This post will examine some reasons for school and or homework for students. For teachers, understanding some of the less traditional reasons for schoolwork may be beneficial when dealing with students and even parents’ concerns.
Common Reasons
Generally, students lack the experience and or training to make a living. Therefore, studying and completing class and homework is often one of the primary functions of a child or a young person. Just as an adult may receive an income from their employment/business, a student receives a grade for their academic efforts.
Class and homework also serve a social purpose for students. School provides a place for students to meet together and talk and socialize. In addition, there is also an opportunity to collaborate on various assignments and projects. It is relatively common for students to spend more time with their friends and teachers than with their parents. Since so much time is spent together at school, this time must be channeled into positive academic endeavors.
Schoolwork can also provide social status in either a positive or negative way. Sometimes students are commended for being excellent students, primarily by teachers. However, it is generally more common for students to be praised and commended for not working hard by their peers. Either way, a certain amount of social status is attached to how a student does at school, which can be perceived positively or negatively.
Concerning the last point, work can play a role in influencing self-esteem as well among students. For strong students, the school allows an opportunity to demonstrate mastery at something. Meaningful and engaging group work allows students to believe that they are doing something that contributes to a group effort, which is highly satisfying for some people.
It is crucial to indicate the difference between schoolwork and busywork. Schoolwork should be engaging and exciting so that students do not even notice as time goes by. Busywork is work for having points to put in the grade book and does not support the student’s intellectual or skill development. Work does not always have to be pleasurable, but it should also not always be drudgery either. If the school lacks engagement, it can lead to serious behavioral challenges and boredom for students.
Conclusion
The teacher’s job is to manage the learning experiences of the students. Schoolwork is just one of the classroom’s aspects that the teacher is responsible for as the instructional leader. Therefore, it is essential to be able to communicate why students work in the classroom.
Constant Rule VIDEO
Constant rule for derivatives
Management in the Classroom
In the world of business, management has often been described as achieving goals through people. This is highly similar to management in the classroom in which the teacher is trying to helping students achieve mastery of a skill and or a body of knowledge. With excellent management, students can achieve mastery and even beyond that. However, poor management can lead to poor performance of the students and perhaps limit their potential.
Management Responsibilities
Several responsibilities of classroom management include the following.
Mapping the big pictures-Teachers cannot only plan day to day. They must plan for several weeks and months in advance. No teacher can decide on a whim to have a field trip tomorrow. Such an activity must be thought and with permission sought weeks if not months in advance. This is crucial because people who struggle to plan will have a hard time leading a classroom as they do not know where they are going.
Supervising & controlling-Teachers must oversee the work of students, which is a supervisory function. In addition, if there are concerns with performance or behavior, a teacher must have the courage to take corrective action, which is more of a controlling function. Disciplinary action does not always mean discipline. It could also mean providing additional support or reteaching difficult concepts.
Coordinating-A teacher is also like a conductor in that they have to find a way to get different types of people to work together to do something. This involves being familiar with the characteristics and traits of the various pieces involved and finding the best way to achieve the desired results.
Managing Skills
There are also three primary skills that teachers need as borrowed from organizational management. These three skills are technical, people, and conceptual skills.
Technical skills are the manager’s knowledge, experience, and training. This means that a teacher must be knowledgeable in their field and know how to apply it in the real world in some practical way. For example, a chemistry teacher will naturally know chemistry. However, they must find ways to make this knowledge relevant and useful for high school students. Finding ways to make complex abstract knowledge practical may be one of the most significant challenges in teaching for an expert.
People skills is the ability to connect with people in a friendly manner and to motivate them. In addition, people skills involve finding ways to work through conflict as they arise. Friendly people are good at being friendly but often lack the strength to deal with conflict. On the other hand, confrontational people are often less friendly but can weather the fire of disagreement. A successful classroom manager is able t connect with people while still finding ways to deal with confrontations in a civil manner.
Conceptual skills are related to coordinating, as mentioned earlier. A classroom manager must plan and know where they are going before they get there. Students cannot follow a teacher who is lost. The teacher must know what they want and how to get there before leading the students to this destination.
Conclusion
Every teacher will have a different combination of these skills, and you must understand where your strengths and weaknesses are. This reflective process will help you to know better how to interact and motivate your students
Course Design Consistency in E-learning
It is common for schools to allow teachers a great degree of latitude in designing their online courses. Providing such freedom is good as many teachers are professionals and know what they want to do. However, when you scale this level of autonomy over dozens or even hundreds of teachers, it can lead to chaos for several campus stakeholders.
I say this because if everyone is doing what they want, everyone is adjusting to what everyone else is doing. Given that communication is more problematic over the internet because of the loss of body language and other informal means of communication, allowing everyone to teach as they see fit is administrative chaos often.
This post will look at how institutions need to have a general format for presenting and interacting online to reduce the variability inherent with human nature. One particular way of designing courses will not be encouraged. Instead, the point is that the institution needs to agree on a general way of sharing content online. When institutions have an agreed-upon general instructional design approach, it helps
- Students to focus on learning
- Teachers to focus on teaching
- Support staff to focus on supporting
Students can focus on learning
In the online context, the students may be the most vulnerable to stress and failure of all parties involved. It is their job to perform through passing assessments and completing assignments. Therefore, students should focus on the content and not adjust to every teacher’s unique instructional design style.
If every teacher has their online course setup in radically different ways, students have to spend time just figuring out how a course is set up. One teacher has a link for attendance; another teacher post videos externally on youtube; some teachers communicate through the LMS while others use Facebook. This teacher uses online quizzes, and another teacher has students take a picture of assignments they have taken (this is not a joke). With all the different ways, the students’ cognitive capacity is wasted on something that has nothing to do with learning and interacting.
Again, the stress of the student can be significantly reduced from merely having a general format for the course. The use of standard blocks and activities despite content could help. Having some basic order of the presentation of activities may be beneficial as well.
Teachers can focus on teaching
Sometimes freedom can be the enemy of efficiency. When teachers can do whatever they want in online teaching, they may struggle with making decisions about doing anything. If their options are limited in a helpful way for their own benefit and that of their students, it allows the teachers to focus on becoming familiar with this new context of online teaching.
Having a general format presented by the institution provides training wheels for inexperienced teachers and restrains experienced teachers from departing to far from a standard. Of course, we all want to support freedom and innovation, but the stress of a crisis may not be the best time to have the authority to do whatever you want.
A cookie-cutter approach to teaching online may not be exciting, but it is efficient, and it removes the strain of unnecessary decision-making when there are so many other things to be concerned about.
Support staff can focus on supporting
If all the teachers are doing whatever they want online, it can strain the support staff, such as IT. IT is now being forced to provide custom-made support for every teacher’s unique ideas. Having a general approach that is agreed to can allow IT to conserve resources and work with common problems rather than individual and distinct issues.
For example, I once had to check the course design of teachers at an institution. Fortunately, it was during summer school at a small university, but it was still about 50 courses, which was about one per teacher. If I had had to provide the same support during a regular semester, it could have easily been almost 200 courses. However, if all the teachers are sharing their content in a similar manner, it speeds up the supervision process because the level of scrutiny is lower. In addition, people can be trained the distinct university style of designing and can provide feedback and that of the support staff expert.
Conclusion
The challenges and concerns of teaching online mean that there is a need to streamline the process so that everyone involved can focus on what they need to do. Naturally, there should be some flexibility in the design of courses as different teachers, subjects, and students have different needs. The point here is to make sure there are agreed-upon boundaries to limit the variability from course to course.
Sum & Difference Rule VIDEO
Sum & Difference Rule
Distance & Displacement
This post will take a look at distance and displacement—two core ideas in classical physics.
To understand concepts such as distance and displacement, you first need to understand position. Position is the location of an object. When we are speaking of distance and displacement, this involves an object changing position. However, an object can only change position if it is relative to something else. For example, if a person walks 5 meters from their bedroom to the kitchen, this distance can only exist because there are two positions
- The bedroom
- The kitchen
The position of the person is defined by what we call a reference frame. The reference frame is a stationary object from which position is determined. In the example above, there are three positions
- The bedroom
- The kitchen
- The walking person
The bedroom is the reference frame. In other words, wherever the walking person goes, their position is measured in relation to the bedroom. The kitchen is simply the goal destination or where the walking person is going.
Distance
Distance is a measure of the length of the path between a person’s initial and final position. In our walking example, the person traveled 5 meters from the bedroom to the kitchen. This 5 meters is the distance.
bedroom walk 5 meters to the kitchen
Displacement is a little more complicated. Displacement is the net change in position. In other words, displacement compares your final position to your initial position and determines if there is a difference in these values. For example, if we use the walking example again, the displacement is the same as the distance. This is because the person walked 5 meters and did not move anymore. Doing some simple math, we can calculate the displacement as shown below
Final position – original position = displacement
5 – 0 = 5
The person traveled 5 meters to the final position of the kitchen. The original position is 0 meters because the bedroom is where the person started at and is the reference frame.
The value of the distance and the displacement are not always the same. For example, if the walking person goes to the kitchen and then returns to the bedroom, we get the following numbers
bedroom walk 5 meters to the kitchen
Kitchen walk 5 meters to the bedroom
The distance travel here is 10 meters as we went 5 meters to the kitchen and 5 meters back to the bedroom. However, the displacement is zero because our final position and our initial position are the same in that we left the bedroom and came back to the bedroom. There was a change in the distance but not in the person’s position when the walking was over.
Scalar and Vector
Distance is a measure of magnitude (amount of) length. In this situation, only the magnitude is being measured, so this is a scalar quantity. In the example above, the person walked 5 meters. We know the direction, but this is not needed to understand that the person walked 5 meters
Displacement is a measure of magnitude and also direction. When magnitude and direction are considered, it is called a vector quantity. In our example above, the person walked to the kitchen and then walked backed to the bedroom. Walking to the kitchen could be considered a positive distance while walking back to the bedroom would be regarded as a negative distance. This is why the displacement is zero in the second example. Walking back and forth essentially cancels the values out.
This examination of motion is called kinematics, which is the study of motion without being concerned with what causes this motion.
Conclusion
Distance and displacement are foundational concepts in physics on which many other complex ideas are built upon. Therefore, understanding how things move in relation to space is critical to appreciate for students studying this subject.
Power Rule VIDEO
Power rule for differentiation
Providing Feedback in an Online Context
Often feedback is automated in the online context. This can include the use of multiple-choice, matching, true and false, etc. Since there is only one answer, the computer can score it, and a highly ambitious teacher can even provide automated feedback based on the answers the students select.
However, a lot of assessment cannot be automated. This means that the teacher must provide feedback manually to such assignments. The purpose of this post is to provide strategies for providing feedback in the online context.
Feedback for Individuals
The ways to provide feedback for students at the individual level are similar to how you could do this in a face-to-face teaching setting. Here, we are going to provide online equivalents of standard forms of intervention.
After checking an assignment, a teacher can message a student to provide feedback. Most LMS have a form of messaging, so this should be possible. In addition, most LMS provide some way to provide feedback to all the assignments and activities in the system, which is highly convenient for most teachers. If this does not work, another option is to send an email. If email is used, you can also attach a rubric for the student. This is time-consuming but highly doable for the weakest at technology.
Among those who hate to type, recording short videos explaining how you marked the assignment can be highly practical. Often you can provide much more detailed feedback to the students. Of course, this is a little bit more technical challenge, so it may not be practical in all situations. However, you can show the assignment on your screen and do a play-by-play of the student’s progress.
Feedback for the Whole Class
Students often make the same or similar mistakes. Therefore, instead of giving individual feedback to each student, you can share feedback with the entire class. The tools mentioned above apply in this setting, as well. When marking assignments, you look for common mistakes and explain them to all students in one message or video.
General whole class feedback is highly time-efficient. It satisfies most students who are generally happy with a general idea of how they are doing rather than a detailed report of every shortcoming.
Other Options
Of course, you can do a combination of the two strategies above. For example, students who are doing well may only receive general whole class feedback. Then for struggling students, you may opt to provide more detailed feedback to help them pass the course.
Peer evaluation is also highly popular but challenging to do online. Just like teachers, students do not like to provide a lot of written feedback. It can also be challenging to monitor this process and make sure students are trying to help each other.
Conclusion
Providing feedback is essential, but it is highly time-consuming. Giving feedback can be even more tedious in the online context if you are trying to do it the same way as in a traditional classroom. However, making some small adjustments, such as giving feedback only to those who need it, can make this experience less painful.
Constant Rule VIDEO
Constant rule of differentiation
Natural Philosophy
In this post, we will do a brief history lesson on the term natural philosophy and the branches of sciences that sprang from it. From there, we will look more closely at the world of physics
Natural philosophy was a catch-all term for the study of nature. Some of the fields associated with natural philosophy include biology, astronomy, and even medicine. With time, as knowledge grew, various subjects began to be spun off from natural philosophy into their own separate area of expertise.
For example, the subjects under natural philosophy have been divided into the natural sciences such as zoology and botany, and the physical sciences such as chemistry and physics.
Physics
The term physics comes from the Greek word “phusis,” which means nature. Therefore, physics is the study of nature or reality because nature is what many people consider to be real. Physics, in particular, has been further divided into classical and modern physics.
Classical physics covers the topics and discoveries of physics from the Renaissance until the end of the 19th century. As such, classical physics covers what the average person encounters in their day to day life and can be understood intuitively. The explanations that classical physics provide must fall under the following assumptions…
- Matter must move at a speed less than 1% of the speed of light or about 3,000,000 meters per second.
- The objects dealt with must be large enough to see with the naked eye.
- Only weak gravity, like earth’s, can be involved.
Again, this is where life is for most of us. Classical physics must be understood before trying to understand modern physics. Modern physics throws out the three assumptions above with two main contributions, which are the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.
Einstein’s theory of relativity states that the measured length of an object traveling at high speeds is shorter than an object at rest. By high speeds, we are talking about faster than 1% of the speed of light (this is breaking the first assumption mentioned above). For example, time, which is a measure of change, moves slower for an object traveling above 1% of the speed of light compared to an object at rest. This means that if you could travel this fast, you would age slower than someone at rest. Gravity can also affect time as satellites in space have to readjust their clocks to sync with the earth. This is called dilation.
Quantum mechanics deals with the very small, which is breaking the second assumption. We are talking about objects on the atomic and subatomic levels. The rules at this level are often bizarre because these tiny particles can travel almost the speed of light, thus breaking assumption 1. As such, this area of physics has its own distinct rules.
Conclusion
Natural philosophy is perhaps a term that many people are not familiar with. This is because the term has been chopped up and divided into many different branches of science. Within the sciences, even physics has several subdivisions as people continue to learn more about the world around them.