1) What is your essential question, and what are your answers? What is your best answer and why?
- EQ: What is the best way to ensure that middle school students retain what they learn in class?
- Answers: My first answer is being able to reach a teaching method that appeals to every student's learning method. My answer number 2 is providing students with more stress outlets during school hours. And for my final answer I believe that educators need to treat all students equally. I believe that my best answer is my final answer. Students are treated equally for the most part, but educators tend to have their "favorite" students, and this is okay up to a certain point. What I'm saying is when we walk into a different classroom whose students are know as the lower performing class. Educators can be known to make snap decisions on how this class is most likely to behave and students catch onto how teachers feel about them. So when they're already "judged" the students think why should we even try if their not even giving us a chance.
- My mentors played a major part in my senior project with everything. They helped me in the process of getting hands on experience and being able to see how they teach from a new perspective. It is because of my mentors that I was able to come up and find my answers. Mr Alvarado recommended me some books that he was kind enough to lend me, that helped me come up with my final answer. The book is called "Pedagogy of the Oppressed". Ms Medina helped me with finding my first and second answer by having me work with different kids in the study groups that she has weekly during her final period.
- Some problems that I had faced came when I was researching my topic for answers. A lot of what I was finding at first seemed to just be tips for new teachers. For example, there were a lot of articles that went about saying 'here are ten tips for classroom management' or "top five things every new teacher should know/do'. And these were helpful at first, but after the third research check these articles seemed repetitive and began to look less and less professional and reliable. What I did to overcome this was I began to change my word searches and started looking at articles from newspaper sites. I also asked my mentors what authors they thought were very helpful in the field of education.
- Two of the most significant sources that I had used were the books recommended to me by Mr Alvarado called "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed." by Paulo Freire. This book helped me with my best and final answer. My other source that had helped was basically a lot of TED Talks. They had so much to offer me and gave me so much to consider when it came to thinking about students and how they learn and the quality of the learning.
