Home » Articles posted by Concetta Vinciguerra-Orsini
Author Archives: Concetta Vinciguerra-Orsini
Session 1: September 27, 2016 The Portfolio and Honors Students
For this session, we continued our discussion of last semester’s reading of John Zubizarreta’s essay, “The Learning Portfolio: A Powerful Idea for Significant Learning” with specific emphasis on: Reflection + Documentation + Mentoring = Learning!; Levels of Blooms Taxonomy and the distinction(s) between “complexity” and “difficulty”; and the successful use of Learning Portfolio.
As a group, we decided to encourage one or more students in one of our classes to take up the Zubizarreta portfolio project. We would: 1) mentor students in the process, 2) engage them in “thinking about thinking,” 3) build a portfolio, 4) provide all our students an opportunity to present their work, their thinking, their experiences at our last FIG Honors meeting (with faculty and students engaged in our Honors FIG group); and mentor students in their writing of a meaningful extensive reflective essay crafted with care and from a metacognitive lens. Though our students are not initially “Honors” students, they are given the opportunity to opt for an Honors Enrichment Component (HEC) of our class and given an Honors notation on their transcripts if they successfully complete HEC requirements.
Without being overly prescriptive and using Zubizarreta’s ideas, we are interested in seeing/observing what kind of REFLECTION his method encourages. We are asking, “How does Zubizarreta’s portfolio work/concepts help students grow, move forward, value education all the more, and become lifelong learners? ” In addition, we want to know how students “think about their thinking” and how it changes them.
Session 2: We will discuss where we are as a faculty in this process with students.
Session 3: Students will present at their forum.
Additional Readings Handed Out:
John Zubizarreta’s essay, “The Learning Portfolio: Reflective Practice for Improving Student Learning” (2004)
Jack Rosenthal’s New York Times essay, “150th Anniversary: 1851-2001; So Here’s What’s Happening to Language” (14 Nov. 2001)
Session 3, May 31, 2016
This third session focused on John Zubizarreta’s “The Learning Portfolio: A Powerful Idea for Significant Learning.“
The author asserts that student portfolios are still very much in use and should continue to be utilized in all areas of school, as well as out of school contexts, as a method for “displaying and judging evidence of best practice and samples” of someone’s “full range of talent.” Portfolios, as artifacts, “showcase a representative breadth of acquired skills or professional success and career.” Zubizarreta provides the reader with a learning portfolio model, though he reminds us that portfolios take may forms. One model he proposes consists of three fundamental components: Reflection, Documentation, and Collaboration. He goes on to describe these and explain carefully their use and purpose. He says, “The learning portfolio, then, is a flexible tool that engages students in a process of continuous reflection and collaboration.” He encourages flexibility and adaptability through the portfolio process and reminds the reader that “purpose” drives the final decisions about reflection and documentation. Ultimately, this author is in search of an “authentic” and meta-cognitive process—students/people engaging in self assessment, and thinking critically.
The Group decision:
For the next Honors Ed. FIG session in Fall 2016 to:
- (re)read of the article and further the discussion on portfolios
- decide on a portfolio project with one or limited students
- update each other on the process and student progress
- invite involved students to our last meeting for a conversation (perhaps a presentation of their project)
- to read more by John Zubizarreta.
We will attempt to meet by the second week of the semester, giving ourselves an early start on the project, if all are still on board.
The group found this reading both challenging and interesting.
Session 2, May 3, 2016
The discussion for Session 2 centered around “Promoting Critical Thinking through Sequenced Activities” by Barbara J. Mills. This article is valuable from several points of view: 1) from a theoretical one and 2) from a practical teaching perspective.
Mills focuses on:
I. Deep Learning (the outcome of teaching for critical thinking)—
She says that we can structure effective learning with an understanding of the following: 1) prior knowledge, 2) deep foundational knowledge (concepts), and 3) metacognition (reflection). Students who are encouraged to build these areas learn to deepen thinking and grow in critical awareness. She says that if the teaching/learning experience involves 1) a motivational context, 2) learning activity ( doing + metacognitive reflection), 3) interaction with others, and 4) a well-structured knowledge base connected with prior experience, one has “integration.” To “THINK INTENTIONALLY” is of utmost importance for the instructor: What is taught?; How is it taught?; How is learning assessed? Mills encourages, as fundamental, structured group work/cooperative learning: student heterogeneity, a problem to solve, processing activities (skills + metacognitive reflection).
II. Practice through Pedagogical Strategies:
The following strategies support deep learning and critical thinking—
- Double Entry Journal
- Cooperative Jigsaw
- Cooperative Debates
(See the article for a full description of these teaching techniques—examples of sequencing for deep learning.)
III. Group Discussion Based on the Issues above and the Following Questions:
- What do we assign, and what do we exclude in our courses? Why?
- How does the instructor decenter him/herself and yet structure/construct the framework of a class?
- Do we listen to our students? Do we change our minds? Do we support “opposing” or “multiple views”?
- How do we encourage/discourage student voice?
- How do we empower students to stop thinking about being sure or right?
- Is it possible to be neutral in our teaching?
- What do we think and feel about what we teach and our teaching?
- To what degree is our purpose to develop community and democratic space?
- Is all pedagogy political?
Session #1: April 5, 2016
Spring 2016
The Reading:
This semester the group picked up where we left off in the fall with a discussion of “Democracy Lab” (see Session 3, Chapter 4, Fall 2015). This section of the chapter discusses how to involve students in Democracy Lab Forums. Though James Knauer presents the pedagogical construct as an online experience among students of diverse backgrounds, clearly, it can also be adapted in our own diverse classroom. Knauer focuses on how dialogic learning is structured and facilitated. The idea is that through student-to-student specific learning, opportunities arise—in tandem with structured teacher guidance. The article reminds us that students can find their way(s) to learning through a teacher’s framework if the latter is fluid. Students, guided by a trained facilitator who makes “announcements” and provides “instructional modules,” develop deliberate, intentional dialogue groups in order to lay out broad social issues and work to understand them from multiple lenses. James Knauer’s project is one type of experiential learning involving: specific tasks, methods, practice, skills, process, metacognition/reflection, identifying action possibilities and taking action. (For specifics of the project and process, see James Knauer’s article, “Dialogue, Politics, and Pedagogy: Lessons from Democracy Lab.”
Questions Discussed:
- Is all pedagogy political?
- What do we assign and exclude in our courses?
- Is it possible to be neutral instructors?
- Do we as teachers listen, change our minds, and support ‘opposing’ viewpoints/multiple lenses?
- What do we think and feel about what we teach?
- Is the purpose of the classroom to develop community and reinforce democracy/democratic structures and beliefs? Is Democracy Lab a moral/ethical project?
- How do we encourage/discourage student voice?
- How to we empower students to stop thinking about being ‘sure’ or right and bifurcating language and thinking?
Comments:
The group discussed the importance of collaborative work but how difficult it is to relinquish power in the classroom, especially if the students are not highly skilled at analytical work and ctitical thinking. This might be the case even for honors students at our community college. On the other hand, if students don’t practice the process of learninbg, how are they to develop skills? Perhaps it is fair to admit that if we don’t think of projects as a product but a ‘messy’ experience we might be able to relinquish to students what they can so often take up themselves. Are we product, time, text driven? Or, are we student driven? After all, a dialogic project, as well as all classroom activities, never throws the teacher by the side of the road. Knauer call the instructor an “intentional, trained facilitator” who guides through “announcements and modules.” The content of a course is important, but the emphasis lies on the “how” of learning; the instructor must be adept at content and pedagogy—pedagogy which shapes intentional students who can do metacognitive work. In the case of the Democracy Lab project, the work revolves around significant social issues and the taking up of action.
Session #3: December 3, 2015
A Continuation of Chapter 4
and
Chapter 5
This session 3 ran way too quickly for us!! I raised the question several times that Chapter 4 both implies and directly handles:
Is an Honors class the terrain for social justice, civic engagement, and democratic undertakings—dialogics and the politics of?
Jim Knauer, the author of Chapter 4 (see session 2 for title) seems to hang his hat on this focus. Next semester, we as a group, committed ourselves to looking specifically at what constitues his “Democracy Lab.” We need more time to look at the specifics of his pedagogy.
As for Chapter 5, we began to discuss motivational issues related to the academic performance of Honors students, though Larry Clark, the author of this essay (see session 2 for title) admits that there is very sparse work on this topic on/at the post-secondary level. He notes that “motivationally gifted students”: show higher achievement, self concept, and post-secondary educational progress. Clark looks at 4 trajectories that gifted students might follow:
- intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
- developing sense of self
- personal qualities of gifted learners
- special issues—performance among females.
Different faculty members in the group were going to expound upon the core of the sections above, but time ran out. Here is where we will pick up the discussion next semester after catching up on the “Democratic Lab.”
A productive Honors Education FIG group!!
Session # 2: November 5, 2015
The discussion revolved around Chapter 4— “Dialogue, Politics, and Pedagogy: Lessons from Democracy Lab” by James T. Knauer
This chapter focuses on: 1) the purpose of education, 2) the nature of learning, and 3) “dialogue” as a teaching strategy. Knauer says that the classroom is a political space where dialogic strategies have political value. In this classroom, honors students have powerful learning experiences throughg a particular kind of movement: that which is visible, organized, and committted. What the essay seems to ultimately focus on is: democratization in the classroom through dialogic strategies. Knauer states, “Learning skills of democratic discourse and developing a taste for commitment to deliberation about the common good requires development beyond epistemologically inhibiting assumptions of dualism” (44). The author provides an exhaustive conversation on what creates democratic educational spaces through dialogic strategies: team work/collaborative learning, student-to-student dialogue, teacher-directed Socratic dialogue/student at the center, the elimination of lecture and passive note-taking, personal experiences and concerns (not narrow cognitive understanding of learning), connecting thinking and feeling, etc. (Read the essay for a comprehensive discussion.) “City as text” projects (see Bernice Braid’s work), for example, can produce what Knauer is talking about. What matters is what interests participants in an educational setting, not what “causes political polarization and alienation” (Wells 1999, qtd. in Knauer, ix). Dialogic learning, according to Knauer, supports a co-construction of knowledge, a kind of “empathic thinking” which requires a willingness to suspend disbelief in order to “understand truly.” At the heart of this education is Liberal Learning.
The FIG Group discussed the following:
Questions:
- Is all pedagogy political?
- If so, then what we choose to teach and assign must be political?
- Are all spaces political?
- Is anything neutral in the classroom?
Comments:
- We have to learn how to listen to students.
- To change one’s mind and to have divirse views is valuable.
- Thinking from multiple perspectives should be encouraged.
- Feeling is important to thinking.
- A democracy lab means the development of community, even if it’s ‘messy’.
- Honors students have ability but not always confidence.
- We need to help honors students (all students) voice themselves
- It is important to empower students to stop thinking about being sure or right.
**Session 3 will deal with the rest of Chapter 4—the actual strategies for encouraging/actualizing a democracy lab.—and Chapter 5.
See “All Posts” for Session 3
- Isn’t what we leave out of a course as telling as what we include?
Session #1 October 1, 2015
♥For Session 1: our group discussed three readings from the NCH Monograph Serie– Inspiring Exemplary Teaching and Learning: Perspectives on Teaching academically Talented College Students.
We read, reflected, and responded to —
Chapter 3: ” Engagement in Learning, Liberal Education, and Honors” by Bernice Braid
The focus of this chapter is on intentional active learning which produces critical thinking, expands students’ horizons, engages them in reflection, and creates greater responsibility and citizenship.
Honors students can be helped to think beyond borders when they engage in: multidisciplinary work, research, and engage in presentations of their work. Students should have practical opportunities for independent investigation, develop autonomous expertise, experience deep immersion, expertise, and changing perspective.
The FIG HONORS Group discussed how important it is to frame our teaching but to work against scripting and prescrition, that our students need to be guided by depth of thought and experience and that we have to nurture pride in them. We have to encourage them to work against the fear of showing their “smarts,” to challenge them to do interdisciplinary work, to take courses they would not normally take, and to foster curiosity in a context that is alive, passionate, energetic, organic and safe.
***
Chapter 1: “Pre-College Experiences and Characteristcs of Gifted Students” by Anne Rinn
In this chapter, Anne Rinn discusses: healthy and neurotic perfectionism in honors students(p.12); how their high self concepts can decrease, depending on contex (pp.12-13); and the reflected-glory effect (basking in the reflected glory of other successful students) (p.13) which helps students succeed. Rinn also broadly talks about academic and social factors that help students succeed.
The FIG HONORS Group pointed out that honors students: may get bored quickly, that they can exhibit passion which moves into curiosity, love, and desire to know more. Our challenge as teachers is to always push for growth over a fixed mind. One of many ways to do this is to use language in particular ways that creates an HONORS CLIMATE: “You really worked it!” instead of “You’re so smart.” We need to point out intelligence through hard work.
***
Chapter 6: “Six Habits of Highly Inspiring Honours Teachers” by Marca Wolfensberger
Marca Wolfensberger lists and describes the six habits of an inspiring honors teacher.
S/he is: 1) authentic, 2) courageous, and 3) challenging; this educator 4) invests in relationships, 5) walks the talk (as a symbol), and 6) lives the dream.
Each of these habits are described as follows (more detailed in article):
- curious, open, forthright, observant, appreciative, honest, ethical spiritial—fosters habits of thought, mind, and heart
- encouraging, analytical, rigorous—has high expectations vand dares to be “critical”
- creative, deep, challenging—offers alternate assessment, thoughtful feedback,, shows genuine interest in students’ success and abilities, challenges predictable dcomfortable learning.
- values curiosity, enthusiasm, interdisciplinary work, research, theory, publications, and relationship with students (see article for more specific definition of “relationship”). S/he speaks, listens, and attends to the voice of the inner vision and creative imagination.
- knows her/his own passion and vision and shows them to students; values substantive work, clarifies expectations, has a positive attitiude, as well as good work habits. This teacher makes a commitment to self and society and supports this commitment through a student-centered approach to the classroom and deep engaged learning
- experimental, innovative, flexible, authentic. This teacher shares personable qualities with students, relates to them, and challenges students to give their best.
The FIG HONORS Group was highly responsive to M.W’s ideas. We valued the qualities of the honors teacher as discussed in this chapter. The content seemed to invigorate and challenge us to think further/beyond to other important qualities needed to be successful inspiring teachers. We all agreed that it is necessary to: 1) offer many opportunities to our students—places and spaces where they could find themselves in successful productive ways; 2)embrace “relationship” effectively; 3) be role models; 4) take students off campus, to the larger world—where experiential education is a powerful force beyond the traditional classroom frame. Our reflections on experiential education expanded to a discussion of “city as text,” as we went beyond the limitations of time—a one hour prescription of meeting time (nice when we don’t have a class to go to or other wordly demands).
*****
See “All Posts” for Session 2
