Creating High Performance Learning Environments

This is my assignment of Module 4, Unit 3, Activity 2

Roller Coaster Physics: The teacher in this video definitely holds high performance expectations for students. She gives each student a role in the assignment. She lets each team have their own team building and have a decision together. She doesn’t tell students what to do when they have disagreements in their discussion.  All students participate in this actively.

 As for behavior expectation, it is definitely high for students in this video. Because students are assigned into different roles, each one of them knows what they need to do in this project. None of them need to be reminded to do their job. Most importantly, it seems everyone enjoyed it.

This is the dream class style for me. Project Based Learning is the best way for students to learn. They won’t feel bored. They will get a target to work individually or in pairs or groups. Once you let students have a practical target, they will work hard on it.

3^rd Grade Chinese Math: If you only judge from video, the teacher in this video will not be considered to hold high performance expectations. Because we could only see the teacher teaching, with students are sitting down there and answering the teacher all the time. However, if you know the background of this style, you will understand that the teacher always holds high performance expectations for students. As I was one of these students in the past, I experienced this kind of education system. I know that my teachers always wanted to give more knowledge to students in the class.

As for behavior expectation, it is hard to tell in this video. But from my own experience, behavior expectations are really high for students in this kind of education system. Different from western style, Chinese teachers are really strict with students’ behavior in the class.

In this video, the teacher is using the memorization to train students. She used a multiplication table which is very popular in the Chinese Math class. Students just need to remember this table, then they can do the multiplication easily and quickly. I think this multiplication table is a good tool to use, but not a teaching target in the class.

Whole Brain Teaching: The teacher in this video holds high performance expectations for students, too. She just has to give the instructions and students give the response she expected. For the whole process, both the students and the teacher know what they need to do for the next step.

Behavior expectations for students are definitely high in this video. For the whole procedure, students followed the teacher completely. The teaching steps were just fluent.

This whole brain teaching is getting students to move. It’s a little bit like TPR. I am just a little bit surprised that for the students in this video at that age, they didn’t think this is a little bit childish.

Summary:

As for three videos above, they have different teaching strategies. The first one encourages students to apply their knowledge to real life, which is PBL. The second one encourages students to memorize everyhing the teacher teaches. The third one is quite similar to TPR.

As for me, I really want to have PBL as my daily teaching style. But it’s hard to practice this in my present class. As of now I am teaching in a primary school, Grade two. In China, exam scores are the most important criteria for students and teachers, which makes teaching and learning linked with one goal---the exam score. While most questions in the exam paper are concept related, higher scores achieved would be because of memorizing. Despite this, I will still try to make something different for my students, because I want them to not only get high scores but also to get the skills for the future.