Post #3 Hypothesizing

My clinical last week was very busy. I finished my unit on Tuesday, had a review on Wednesday, and gave the test on Thursday. I was nervous to give my students a test. I jump from one extreme to the other in my classes. One class is full of IEP’s, there are only six students who don’t have an IEP. My next class is full of intelligent and social students who love to answer questions and do very well on their work. I was nervous for first period, because I didn’t want to have to fail anyone. On Wednesday, I made sure to review extensively with first period. I felt that most were pretty knowledgeable in what I was going over. Most of the students were answering questions and getting them right. My second period class did excellent. They answered the questions so well I made them “hypothesize” on some. For example, we were discussing the gold rush, I had them tell me if the gold rush was a good thing or a bad thing and why and yes there were many bad things about the gold rush. Marzano speaks of this in chapter nine of his book. He talks about how important it is for students to hypothesis about information. That is what I was having my students do. It was more of a deductive approach, because they already knew the material, but I was allowing them to hypothesis why they thought something was good or bad. This type of learning is allowing the students to make their own decisions about a topic or event. It is also a perfect way to cross disciplines. For example, if we were talking about the gold rush, I could have a science teacher come into the classroom and teach to the students how gold is formed. Hypothesizing and crossing disciplines is a great way to use co-teaching or a thematic unit. This is allowing students to get the best of both worlds in one classroom. This is also a great way to allow students to make decisions about what there are learning in the classroom. From this, students could generate other ideas and further their learning process. For Example, they could go into reasons why the gold rush happened, how gold is formed etc… As for the tests, the students did really well. I had one student receive a “D” and this student was one of the students in first period that didn’t have an IEP. I was glad to see that my students did well on the test in both periods. I’m also glad that I am finished with my unit!