Module 5

Motivation is always an interesting concept especially in the classroom and today's world where it seems as motivation has depleted with the invention of technology in the hands' of all the students. I remember learning about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in my high school and college level psychology courses and never enjoyed this section of the course. Reading through it again this time around though I had a different perspective. It seemed that as I matured and have had more experiences in life this is more evident. Survival, safety, belonging and self-esteem are all needed to be met to travel higher in the pyramid, or hierarchy. Especially thinking in regard to the classroom, our students need to have all of these basic levels met in order to succeed within the classroom and be motivated to continue their learning. Going through multiple school report cards, it always surprises me the number of students that experience homelessness or receive government assisted lunches. I think this really shows the power of you never know who is in your classroom. Always being aware of the different life experiences we all have and bring to the classroom is important. When I think about this it reminds me of when I first read about students that would put their head down on their desk or fall asleep and instead of getting in trouble, a teacher would actually allow this to occur because he realized that this student did not get enough sleep at home because his parents worked and he was in charge of keeping his siblings fed and their homework is done. It is not beneficial to jump to conclusions and always act on a student's misbehaving because there seems to always be more to the situation than what is available to the eye at that moment.

Chapter 14, "Teaching Every Student" was one of my favorites to read in this text. Some important and interesting parts that stuck out to me was wait time and adaptive teaching. Wait time is something that I find to be extremely important because I think that is when we really get the most out of our students' answers. The ability grouping did not sit well with me but the idea of flexible grouping is something I could see working extremely well in the classroom. Adaptive teaching could be very strong when teachers begin to get to know their students better. I think this would be extremely beneficial in regard to students with disabilities and assessments for students. Not one way of assessing works best for all students. There are different assessments that work best for different students and switching these up depending on the student I could see be very motivating for the student and the ability to get the best answers out of them as well.

Grading which is discussed in Chapter 15, "Classroom Assessment, Grading, and Standardized Testing" is the topic I wrote my Research Paper on and found great resources describing standard based grading and schools that have implemented as such. There are pros and cons to any new process being implemented and standard based grading really seemed beneficial for the sake of the students. One aspect of this that I found the most interesting is the grading based on Behavior. In traditional grading, the behavior is usually lumped with the overall grade for the class, but that does not signify what was learned in the class which in all reality is what the grade is supposed to represent. With standard based grading behavior is its own category allowing for the grades to reflect only the learning that takes place.