I have chosen to explore this critical incident as for me it is an example of "an incident that had been particularly successful, unsuccessful, surprising or revealing" (Hammerness et al, 2001, p. 6). This incident was, for me, all of the above. My success was in making history interesting and engaging for my students. I was unsuccessful, however, in assessing whether my students really learnt what I intended; and in managing their behaviour. The incident was surprising in that it revealed to me the extent to which I must focus on providing high quality scaffolding, even for senior students; and revealing in that on reflection, it has shown me both my strengths and my weaknesses.
My mentor teacher taught a senior (years nine and ten) elective History class called “Medieval Life” and asked me to design a three-week unit to teach between units on castles and food. This gave me the opportunity to determine what content I believed was important to an understanding of medieval history, but that was missing from her semester-long course. I elected to construct my mini-unit on Medieval Medicine, in which the students learnt about the Galenic theory of the four humors, common medieval illnesses and remedies, and the Black Death of 1346-51. This unit would address the following outcomes, taken from the placement school's course outline:
"The student:
- Understands the relationship between geographical context and particular world issues and events
- Identifies sources and collects data and information in systematic ways
- Manages, organises and evaluates data and information in order to draw conclusions consistent with this data"
The unit also worked towards standard outcomes including:
"6.LA.1: routinely use ICT to enhance their ability to research and learn through inquiry, with an understanding that using ICT can enable broader inquiry and access to a wide variety of information, opinions and perspectives
2.LA.11: draw conclusions that are consistent with the data or information and provide evidence or supporting details
23.LA.5: the relationship between geographical context and particular world issues and events"
(ACT DET)
My critical incident took place in the second week of the three-week long unit. To see the lesson sequence, click here.
The content was intrinsically interesting for most students in the class, who were particularly interested in the many implausible medieval treatments. As the class was made up of many verbal and kinesthetic learners (Gardner, in Krause et al., 2003, p. 201), I designed two role-play activities in which students took on the role of a medieval European. The first, which I entitled "Medieval Medical Marketplace", is the focus of this assignment. Roughly one-third of the class were given the part of various healers, including surgeons, nuns, apothecaries, blood-letters and the like, whilst the other two-thirds played patients with bubonic plague, St. Vitus’ Dance, leprosy, an injured arm, St. Anthony’s Fire, and so on. I distributed the roles strategically, giving the healer parts to the most engaged students in order to extend them.
The students were given two lessons of research time in the computer labs in which I presented a short-list of recommended websites on the class’s homepage and a list of "Research Goals" (questions based on their character in the role-play, such as "How did I learn my profession?" and "What are the selling points of my approach?"). I collected the students' books after the research lessons in order to assess the depth of their research, before returning them for the role-play.
For the next lesson, we rearranged the classroom furniture into a U-shape to create a marketplace in which each of the patients spoke to each of the healers, gathered information on each healer’s practice and recommended treatments, and judged which healer they would prefer to treat their affliction. The patients then reported to the rest of the class which healer they chose and why. I took a tally of the business gained by each healer, and the most successful healer was rewarded with a small toy.
The Medieval Medical Marketplace activity was, I believe, valuable for illustrating to the students the nature of medieval medical knowledges. The requirement for all patients to speak to all healers meant that every student was exposed to many medical traditions and methods, much like in an “Expert Groups” style cooperative learning activity. The patients were required to report to the class at the end of the role play, with the healer they had chosen to treat them, and their reasoning. This report functioned as a formative assessment for me, in the same way that the various healers’ diagnoses and prescriptions demonstrated the depth of their understanding.
Mentor Teacher's Feedback
My mentor teacher provided feedback after the first of the research lessons, intimating that there was a lack of appropriate scaffolding in my preparation of the lesson. Many of my recommended websites were text-heavy, which proved to be a challenge for the students. Some prior discussion about appropriate reading strategies for websites would have been beneficial, to remind students to skim their websites, assess the importance of elements of the text and focus only on those areas they deemed important. Instead, many students focused on only one website's information, when my aim was for them to visit many sites and therefore gain a much broader picture of medieval medicine. For this reason I booked a second research lesson in which I further refined my instructions and highlighted for the students that they would not need to read everything on the websites. During the second lesson I also provided more explicit information on the purpose of their research, giving them specific questions to answer rather than the first lesson's overly simple instruction to take notes on their role.
My mentor's feedback on the role play lesson itself was brief but encouraging. She focussed on the behaviour management challenges which I will explore later in this assignment, but did not discuss my pedagogy or assessment strategies, which are the focus of this assignment.
Interpretation of Critical Incident
My initial reflection on this incident is represented here (click to view larger):
The class were predominantly white students from middle and lower socio-economic status families, and, being aged between fifteen and sixteen years old, were in transition between Piaget's concrete operations and formal operations stages of development (Krause et al., 2003, pp. 47-53). My decision to use a role play activity was based on the knowledge that a large number of my students were what Howard Gardner would call verbal/linguistic and kinesthetic learners (Krause et al., 2003, pp.201), and several also had strong interpersonal intelligence. We also had one student with an undiagnosed learning difficulty and one student from a language background other than English; my intention was that the activity would provide these two students with a 'break' from what had been a fairly listening and writing intensive unit, with plenty of new vocabulary to digest. I took care when distributing the roles to give these two students roles that would link to their existing knowledge. The first student's low literacy level impeded her research somewhat, but I feel the role-play exercise benefitted her as she was exposed to the results of all the other students' research as well as her own, and her verbal/oral processing is sound, meaning she learnt more effectively from the other students' presentations than she would have done from her own research. The second student had an opportunity to talk about our content matter with his peers, in a safe and supportive environment that allowed him to show his understanding without the impediment of written language to slow him down.
I chose the role-play activity with an eye to exploring forms of cooperative learning. I was influenced by methods such as Jigsaw and Expert Groups, which require all members of the group to have completed their individual contribution for the good of the whole group (Krause et al., 2003, p. 185). I felt that this approach would be an efficient way in which to cover a very broad area of knowledge, since the content could be stretched in a number of different directions. Specifically, I intended on covering the medieval Catholic Church's beliefs about illness and healing, the similarities and differences between medieval and modern-day healing, the barter system, the range of choice available to the ruling classes and the lack thereof for peasants. This widely varying content could fill much longer than my three-week unit, so I elected to present it in this Jigsaw-style role play activity to allow students to become 'experts' in one area, and receive other experts' knowledge about the other areas.
My school subscribes to the "Learning By Design" theory of learning, so in an effort to ensure consistency for my students, and expose myself to a new theory of curriculum design, I approached this learning activity with the Learning By Design principles in mind. Our prior discussion of superstitions, as well as our "Noisy Round Robin" brainstorming exercise on medieval medicine, linked to the students knowledge in what Learning By Design refers to as "Experiencing the Known" (see the Learning By Design planning placemat here). This involves creating links to what the students already know about a topic to "switch them on" and prepare them for new information. I found this was particularly important to this unit of work, since medieval medicine is far removed from the students' everyday lives in many ways, and their previous exposure to it was almost non-existent.
My research lessons were based on the Learning By Design "Experiencing the New" principle, as students' research goals were grounded in finding out new information about their profession or illness. There was an element of linkage to their prior knowledge built into this lesson, since the patients were instructed to research the modern-day treatment for their illness as well as the medieval treatment, and for many of them that treatment was somewhat familiar.
The role-play activity was a combination of "Applying Appropriately" and "Analysing Functionally and Critically". The healers applied what they had learnt in the research lesson by acting out their role, employing the knowledge they had gathered in the research lesson to explain to patients the advantages of their treatment, their personal history of how they came to know their profession (for example, "My father was an apothecary and I worked with him from when I was eight years old") and to "sell" their services. I framed the exercise around the need to "sell" their services in order to highlight the credibility or validity of the various medical traditions. The students had hitherto been highly critical of medieval treatments, to the point of derision. Asking them to identify at least three benefits of their profession's approach therefore required them to think more positively about their topic - akin to them donning de Bono's yellow hat (see de Bono Thinking Systems).
The patients analysed the new information presented to them in the process of evaluating their healers' services. At the end of the activity they were required to explain to the class the healer they had chosen and why, based on the "sales pitch" that the healers had presented. This choice required evaluation of the effectiveness of the various healers' approaches, which the patients based on their understanding of both medieval and modern-day medical treatments, which they had learnt in the research lessons.
Although the lesson was relatively successful, I identified plenty of room for improvement, most importantly in the areas of assessment of learning and behaviour management. The lesson was under-scaffolded and lacked accountability measures. If I were to conduct this lesson again, I would provide the patients with a proforma on which to record their consultations and to help them evaluate the healers. This could then be submitted at the end of class, allowing me to assess the depth of their thinking during the activity, and also communicating to them that there is an element of accountability. This would then, hopefully, motivate them to stay on task, and give me tangible proof of their learning.
Behavioural Theories:
My mentor teacher advocated use of Glasser's "Choice Theory" for behaviour management, and also recommended low-intensity responses to misbehaviour, but I found neither work very well for me. I think part of the reason may be that I lack the requisite Referent and Position Power as the teacher (Olsen & Nielsen, 2009). Over the course of my placement my students responded less and less to my low-key responses and two individuals were engaging in attention-seeking behaviour that escalated to power struggles with me. Stepping back to consider what had gotten us to that point, I believe there are actions I could have taken at an earlier stage which may have prevented the deterioration of our working relationship.
As a humanist teacher, I place great emphasis on attending to students' needs (Krause et al., 2003, p. 173). I believe my greatest challenge in teaching is behaviour management, and I see clear links between the behaviour of some of my students and my inability to cater to their needs. Specifically, I believe a number of my students required greater attention to their need for belongingness and love (see Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, in Krause et al., 2003, p. 174). According to Maslow's hierarchy, this need is more basic than the need for knowledge; meaning until a sense of belonging is established, learning cannot take place. Below are a couple of examples of how I saw this theory evidenced in my classroom.
Z* had recently moved to our school after leaving two local independent schools (I suspect for behaviour-related reasons). This was the first time that Z* had been in a co-ed school, and the novelty of being around the opposite sex had not worn off. But in addition to the novelty of a co-ed school, and I believe more importantly, Z* was still establishing his sense of belonging both in the school and in our classroom. If this fact had occurred to me earlier I would have made more of an effort to help Z* establish his place in our class.
On the day of the activity, Z* and two other students in our class were involved in an external issue which caused a significant distraction. This issue resulted in the removal of one of the other students, which was unfortunate as she had previously been quite engaged and had compiled very useful information during her research. She would have been a valuable contributor to the group activity had she been able to stay. This issue created for me a feeling of powerlessness. It reminded me that I only see my students for one twenty-fourth of their day; and that much that happens in their lives is out of my control. I have struggled to identify any measures I might have taken to minimise the impact of this scenario, save removing the students, which works against my wish to promote their sense of belonging, and also precludes any chance of them learning from a "live" activity such as this. Thus I find myself caught between pragmatism and idealism - according to my ideal, I would rather keep the students in the class and foster a safe and secure environment, however when the need arises to take action against a behaviour concern, my options in terms of practical measures clash with my ideal.
B* also could have benefited from a stronger sense of belonging. Unlike Z*, B* had been at the school for some time, but did not value education as being relevant to his life. B*, with support from his family, was "riding out" his time in compulsory education and was as a result chronically disengaged. That said, since this was an elective unit B* must have had some interest in the content to have chosen the unit in the first place. I would have liked to have connected to his interest more effectively and hope that would have gone some way to re-engaging him. Unfortunately, he seemed to have developed an active dislike of me, which my mentor teacher suspected was rooted in his need for predictability and stability, which my arrival had upset. Perhaps with more time to establish a relationship and get used to each other, B* and I could have had greater success, but in three weeks that was not to be. In the context of this learning activity in particular, had I taken greater care with my distribution of roles, B* might have been tempted to engage with the activity. As the distribution fell, B* received the role of priest, which did not interest him. Had I given him a gorier role such as blood-letter or surgeon, he may have been more interested in his part.
The "Medieval Medical Marketplace" activity, or my implementation of it, also had an effect on the class's behaviour. Ordinarily the class is arranged in a teacher-mandated seating plan, which my mentor had implemented prior to my arrival. Under the seating plan, the students were arranged at desks of four, separating gregarious or disruptive students. By contrast, on the day of the activity I had the furniture arranged into a U-shape, to be more reflective of a market environment and more conducive to student movement around the "market". Unfortunately an unintended side-effect was the sense of freedom that the lack of a seating plan seemed to give the students. This freedom, combined with the fact that the class was the last for the week, at 2pm on a Thursday, led to a general air of frivolity. Had the task been more heavily scaffolded and required a greater measure of accountability, I might have counteracted this atmosphere; but my own lack of scaffolding undoubtedly led to a general feeling that the lesson was not "serious".
Assessment of Learning:
My assessment of the students' learning during the role-play was based on their verbal interaction. I roamed around the classroom during the entire activity, systematically working my way around the room to ensure I overheard every student. R*, who was the most successful healer, illustrated his grasp of his role well, prescribing treatments for patients that were generally realistic, though perhaps too closely related to modern day treatments to fully demonstrate his understanding of the medieval apothecary tradition (for example, applying ice to an injured arm).
T*, a boisterous and distractable student, was unfortunately absent for the two research lessons, but still managed to display some evidence of his learning from the previous week of the unit during the activity. When I asked T* midway through the lesson how he was going, he said "I've got my roof fixed and dinner cooked for a week!", by which he illustrated his understanding of the economic system in which a medieval apothecary operated. He had bartered these services as payment for his treatments of two patients. I found this a very encouraging comment, as it illustrated his grasp of the commercial nature of his profession. Considering he had missed out on the research lessons, I was pleased at his performance and his understanding, if not of the methods an apothecary used, then at least of the bigger picture.
Overall, I felt the "Medieval Medical Marketplace" activity was a useful critical incident for me to analyse because it was a combination of success and failure. Although the transformation of my content knowledge into a teachable activity was a success (Nilsson, 2009, p. 241), the incident illustrated for me the practical results of my own weaknesses, such as how a lack of scaffolding and accountability risks behavioural challenges that can threaten to sink an otherwise effective lesson plan.
Attachments:
Lesson Sequence
Mind Map
Powerpoint for "Body Count" narrative exercise
Example of student's creative response to "Body Count" exercise
References:
Australian Capital Territory Department of Education and Training, (2008) Every Chance To Learn Curriculum Framework http://activated.act.edu.au/ectl/resources/ECTL_Framework.pdf
Hammerness, K., Darling-Hammond, L., & Shulman, L. (2001) 'Towards Expert Thinking: How Case-Writing Contributes to the Development of Theory-Based Professional Knowledge in Student-Teachers'. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, 10-14 April 2001
Krause, K., Bochner, S. & Duchesne, S. (2003) Educational Psychology for learning and teaching. Southbank: Thomson Learning
Learning By Design (2008). http://newlearningonline.com/learning-by-design/
Nilsson, P. (2009) 'From lesson plan to new comprehension: exploring student teachers' pedagogical reasoning in learning about teaching', European Journal of Teacher Education, 32:3, 239 - 258
Olsen, J. & Nielsen, T.W. (2006). Holistic Discipline . Pearson.
Ritchhart, R., & Perkins, D. (2008) 'Making Thinking Visible', in Educational Leadership, February 2008, Volume 65, Number 5, pp. 57-61
Shulman, L. (1987) "Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform". Harvard Educational Review. Vol. 57, No. 1, February 1987.
William Glasser Institute. (2010). http://www.wglasser.com/
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