AVID (Advancement via
Individual Determination) is a program that is designed to prepare students for
college. Many students in my class
struggle with the idea of critical thinking, these students do not really think
“outside the box” which causes some difficulty when they are entering the world
after high school. With this in mind I
chose a lesson centered on implementing technology to increase the skill of critical
thinking. The goal of the lesson was to increase students’ critical thinking
through the use of action mazes and blogs.
Students will participate in a variety of action mazes (action mazes are
best described as choose your own adventure) the student is presented a
situation and chooses between 2 options, each chose leads to another situation
which has its own set of options. They
proceed through this until they get to the final result. These cause the students to think outside of
their comfort zone and deepen their though process. This helps develop their thought processes
and become better prepared for the world after graduation. After completing the action mazes, students
will write reflection blogs that are posted to their Gaggle account (a program
through our school for students that is similar to Angel). Each reflection blog will have a series of
questions for the students to answer.
I was curious to observe
and discover what using a variety of technology would do for the student’s
learning. The technology I had chosen to
use was mainly the iPad; therefore, I incorporated a variety of apps into the
lesson. Gaggle was the central app
utilized. Gaggle is an online tool that
our school district uses that allows the students to have blogs in a safe and
monitored environment. Using this app, the students were able to blog about
their experience and create a record of their reflections.
While implementing
the lesson there were some changes that were made. These changes were due to various reasons;
such as technology issues and students writing skills. One of the changes made was the students using
the Gaggle app in place of the Gaggle site. Since Gaggle did not have a mobile version of
their website for the students to access we had to install the app on all the
school owned iPads as well as the student owned devices.
The implementation of
this lesson was very interesting. The
group of students that participated in this lesson were my AVID II
students. These students are sophomores
who are college bound and come from lower income or minority families. The
students were actively engaged in the action mazes and posted multiple
responses/reflections to the action mazes on their blogs. What I found most exciting was student
engagement and excitement. Each student
participated in a different action maze, and I found the students were sharing
their reflections and many wanted to do multiple mazes. This resulted in the students writing
multiple reflections for multiple action mazes, thereby increasing their
thinking in various situations.
Before teaching this
lesson I had some underlying assumptions about what the students would do and
what they already knew. One major
assumption was that students would already know how to use the iPad. This was not the case. I did not take into account the fact that
since a majority of the students come from lower income families they do not
have access to the same technology I am using to teach. As a result of this assumption I had to spend
the first part of the class teaching the students basic operations for iPad use. This also caused a constraint in
understanding because tasks I had planned for the students to start with needed
extra explanation, this in turn slowed down the overall pace of the lesson.
This lesson had some
constructivism elements in it because the students would work individually to
complete each action maze. They were not
asking each other what they thought but rather thinking for themselves. This
way they were making sense of the world around them. This lead into the lesson as being a way to
enhance current learning the students are doing. This is the 2nd year that I have
these particular AVID students and developing critical thinking skills is
something we have been working of since they were freshman.
While implementing
this lesson the various learners were taken into account, each student was only
required to finish one maze and one reflection.
They were not told this so that each would work at a pace that was
appropriate for them. Slower learners
worked at a slower pace and quicker learners at a quicker pace. It was whatever suited their learning
style. Analyzing the student learning is
a key factor for another teacher trying to implement this lesson. One thing also to be aware of is how to work
the iPad, Gaggle and action mazes.
Most of this lesson
is student driven. Using knowledge I had of Vygotsky’s learning theories I
wanted to create a lesson that would allow students to work in their zone of
proximal development. They are the ones who are discovering the critical
thinking skills and the teacher’s role is more of facilitator. Reflective blogging was used as a form of
accountability for their work. By using
a blog, the other students and I could access the blog quickly and leave
comments. Through this students receive instant
feedback and also make it easier for the class to have a discussion because it provides
an interactive venue where everybody had access to their classmates’ thoughts.
Technology had a major
role in my lesson, without technology it would have been difficult to complete
the action mazes. The advantages of having the technology could
also be found in access to blogs.
Instead of the students writing their reflections in journals we turned
the journal into an online document and caused the students to read multiple
people’s reflections at their own pace.
The student’s did not have to wait for someone to finish before they
read, they could just read the next reflection and comment. One expectation I
had in regards to using technology was that the students were going to be distracted. This was the first time that I was letting
them use the iPads and I was worried they were going to take photos or do other
things that would be off task. This did
happen but only for the first 5 minutes.
After the novelty of the device wore off they began to focus on their
work. Before we began working many of the questions were simple questions of
how to use the iPad. Since many did come
from lower income families who did not have access to technology, they were
confused on what to do. What really
amazed me was the few students who did know how to use it, really stepped up
and while I was helping one student, they would help another without me having
to ask them to.
By completing the
action maze digitally there was no room for them to cheat and skip a few pages
ahead to see what the result was or they could not go back and change a choice
that did not work out. They really had
to think about through the options and which choice to pick. While reading the reflections I could tell
many students were applying more critical thinking to a variety of scenarios
and thinking through all the options, thus becoming deeper thinkers and
learning to think past their current situation and push past their comfort
levels.
