Ms. Rodriguez's Classroom

Evidence is definitely required for this comparison of different sections of the same class doing the same Harkness discussion. Who: my students with whom I was not doing my action research. What: monitoring discussion equity with the same app I used for my other class. When: the same day I monitored discussion for my experimental class These students were naturally much more equitable than my experimental class. They had an equity rating of roughly 80%, while my experimental class had one of 67%! I think this happened because they are naturally a more equitible class, and since I wanted to promote equity in my other, experimental class, these were the results I expected from this section (periods 5 and 7, my experimental class was period 8) since we are done with Harkness discussions for the quarter, I shared this information with all classes by first asking how they think they did. They were all pleasantly surprised with their equity levels, and period 8 was not at all. We will...

This past weekend I gave my "Hot Topics" presentation on accountable talks. One of the things we focus on in high school is using sentence stems to ask good questions. However, I missed a perfect opportunity to use the sentence stem soccer ball I made for class. I Had a simulation where Cuba, the United States, and the USSR were all trying to figure out how the Cuban Missile Crisis started and who was responsible. It started out with small group research and then went into a full fledged debate. I tried to monitor and moderate as always but it got intense and some of the boys, who are more comfortable with one another, began to talk over all the female students. One even ran out crying and had a panic attack with the school counselor. I felt so horrible about how this spiraled out of control, and thought, in retrospect, if I used the soccer ball with appropriate sentence stems as our "talking stick" it could have gone much smoother and more equitable. All of my res...

This weekend we learned about the importance of brain breaks. These usually aren't employed very often in high school because we assume our students' brains don't need them! We are so focused on pounding them with content we forget that they are 16 year olds in adult looking bodies. Today I did a simple one: After doing a short reading at their own pace, I told my students to put their heads down and close their eyes until the whole class was complete with the task. They all did it no questions asked! To bring them back into the lesson I gently started talking until all heads were up. We then had a low-key discussion regarding the reading. I think it's really important to give students at this level a break because they are secretly not as developed as we think they are.