This week my group and I read about how test prep can have a negative affect on education. The article was written by Daniel Koretz who is an education professor at Harvard University. In the Article he starts off by going into detail about different types of test prepping. The first one that he mentioned was reallocation between subjects. This happens when an activity is restricted to make more time for another activity. This can happen when a teacher holds a student back from recess or gym. Also, if a student starts to fall behind in reading or writing, many tutoring sessions will happen during class time causing them to miss out on other material. This is reallocation between subjects. Another form of bad test prep he talked about was reallocation within subjects. This happens when there is one part of a subject that is more likely to be on the test than another. If the class is learning about biology, the teacher could spend an hour on cells and then only spend 10 minutes on evolution. This limits the students broad understanding of a whole topic. The last bad test perp he talked about was coaching. This method has students focus on the structure of the test rather than the actual content. One example of this is the students could be taught to start from the back of the test because that is where the questions are worth the most. Then they will have more time on those and less time for the simpler questions. Depending on the test and the student coaching could create a false sense of hope or give them an idea that they do not need to study as hard because they know all of the tricks to the test.

The next part of the article went to talk about Pythagorean triples, or how not to build a roof. Here he talked about how in most secondary school math tests the Pythagorean theorem was mentioned or used. With this topic, most students are coached on how to answer the questions. The goal of the coaching is to help the students get through the question without learning the deeper meaning of the Pythagorean theorem. This is where Koretz connects coaching the students on the theorem to building a roof. If the students was actually taught rather than being coached they could build a roof, but if they were simply just coached they will have no chance to build the roof because they only memorized it for the test.

The next part of the article was about memorizing arbitrary symbols.He explains this by saying that students are taught very early in secondary school about Algebra. In Algebra they teach the kids about linear equations with two variables. They have a focus on these equations because they can be seen all over society. This topic is easy for teachers to catch there students on because of the formula y=mx+b. The students are taught to memorize the different meanings of the variable in the equation. This allows them to speed through that question. Since this question is used so frequently, test scores become inflated. Teachers always know that the question will be on it and the student will always get the question right.

Koretz bridges the idea of the tests being inflated to whether test prep is cheating. Test prep really is not cheating because all teachers use these tactics and different companies sell books on how to do better in on the tests. He also says that some of the test prep methods show fraudulent growth on tests. The students are not actually learning anything, they are just memorizing facts that boost the students scores and make the teacher appear to be doing a good job. This then leads into that instead of teachers using the content, they teach to the test. Even though it makes them look better, the students lose out on learning about so much.

During our learning experience we focused on the different test prep methods and how they worked. Since we have to do all of our lessons online now it is more difficult to come up with more creative and fun lesson plans. We started with a video about test prep and then had a powerpoint lecture on the article. We then broke out into breakout rooms to further discuss the ideas of test prep. I was responsible for the slides on Pythagorean triples and Memorizing Arbitrary facts.

This week we read Unauthorized Immigrants Students in the United States. The article was about how immigrants, especially those who are illegally here in the country, struggle with education. When the children come to America from any country there are always struggles and problems. Some of the problem that illegal immigrants children face when they are here are a potential loss of their parents because of deportation, increased risk in mental health issues, psychosocial problems, and they struggle to preform in the classroom. If or when their parents are deported it affects the child in a couple of ways. Whether they only had one parent with them, they will have to take responsibility for their whole family if they are the oldest. Sometimes these kids are no older than 12. Outside of their family situation, the kids can struggle too well in school. This can either be just being able to perform or making new friends.Since the kids have immigrated to America, they are more susceptible to bullying.Also, most kids do not speak English that well so it creates a barrier for the kids when they try to learn the content in their classes. The kids have forged identities in super hostile environments. School is supposed to be the safe space for the kids, but it ultimately does the opposite. Teachers also have no way of knowing what the students issues and problems are. They are prohibited from asked students about immigration, so teachers can make assumptions, but in most cases making assumptions hurts the kids. All the teachers can do is support the student and give them everything they need inside of the classroom. In some cases, this results in the student sharing with the teacher what is going on. In that case the teacher can try and help the student.

The next part of the article talks about how there is a way to gain citizenship for the families. DACA and DAPA were created during the Obama administration. DACA protected undocumented children from deportation, while at the same time providing them work permits, higher chances of receiving a drivers license, a trust in the authorities and allowing them to seek preventative health care. Even though it is such a helpful tool, many undocumented families and kids can not afford it because the application costs $500.Also, there was a Supreme Court ruling on whether DACA should be expanded. The vote ended in a split decision.This ultimately resulted in DACA remaining the same. Another crucial part of that helps immigrant children succeed is the McKinney-Vento act. This act allowed students with no medical records or identification to enroll at school. Schools require many different immunizations and forms of identification to allow the kids to be there. This would mean that all undocumented kids would never attend school, but the act allows them to bypass having documentation, immunization, and identification.

Each of us in the Learning Community focused on our part that we thought was crucial to the article. Together though, we focused on the four main parts of the article. Separately, we focused on the specific part and within that part were more detailed sections of the article. When creating our lesson plan we were taking bits and pieces from other groups, but at the same time we wanted to be creative and do our own thing. So we did a spin-off of the four corners activity where each of us came up with a different question to have our classmates answer. This was like an exit ticket, but after they wrote their answers on the board we went over them and gave our thoughts on the questions.

My contribution to the learning experience was I created a slide on the families pathways to citizenship, a slide on what DACA is, and a slide on school enrollment and participation. I also created my question for the four corners activity and found a video to show the class, but we ran out of time so the video could not be shown. Here is the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItWweMVi41s. My responsibilities were to present my slides to the class and go over the question I had created as well. I used one source while learning about DACA. My source was https://undocu.berkeley.edu/legal-support-overview/what-is-daca/ .

John Dewey’s Pedagogic creed is his beliefs on how education should work as a whole. One of his major beliefs is that we are learning for the present and not for the future. Through this he means to have students learn about what is going on around them at the moment. Through learning about different things around them like how a business works in their community, they can not only learn different math skills, but they can learn different business strategies and life skills. Also, it means that teachers are just not teaching to the test at the end of the year. The kids will end up learning different lessons throughout the year and the material that they were supposed to end up learning as well. Another one of Dewey’s major beliefs was that learning needed to be experiential. Kids can not just learn form teachers lecturing or just talking to them, they need to go out into the world and experience it. I think that for me before the kids can go out and experience anything, they need to have some understanding of the topic before. This means the students will gain a grasp of a topic and once they see it in person they will be a lot more interested in it. He thought this was the best way of keeping students engaged with their learning. The last thing that he mentioned to some extent in his writing was that learning was a social and psychological experience for kids. While in schools kids will be engaging in different topics like math, English, or science. Although these topics are all beneficial to a students learning, they could miss a very vital part which is the social aspect of schools. Social learning is important at all ages, but especially at a younger age. At these younger ages kids learn how to communicate with other kids and with guidance, they learn how to do it right. Sometimes there isn’t that supervision and that is where they learn how to handle the situation themselves. Dewey mentioned how if a school is does not have both social and psychological learning, that it was not a solid place of learning.

In our discussions my group decided to focus on a couple of his main points and some topics that were related to his ideas. We focused on talking about the article as a whole, with all of his ideas and beliefs. Additionally we included lab schools into our discussion. We included lab schools because they are designed to create learning experiences for the students. Another topic we focused on was the No Child Left Behind act. This act try and helps schools by setting standards for the students to make on standardized testing. Even though they tried to do that, it ended up hurting the schools instead. If a school didn’t meet the standards after a certain number of years, they will give the kids vouchers to attend private schools, then they will start to take away more of the schools funding each year they miss the mark on the tests. The last thing that we focused on was Montessori schools. These schools are primarily for younger students around pre-school and kindergarten. At these schools they focus on what the kids want to learn about. If the student wants to learn about cheetahs that day, all the lessons will revolve around cheetahs. In the same sense if they don’t want to do anything that day, the teachers will try and convince them, but if they refuse they won’t do anything that day.

For our designs we used google slides to present our information and then we used a kahoot at the end of the experience to gain a grasp on the classes understanding of the material. I worked on the introduction, the preview of the information that we were presenting and the No Child Left Behind section. During the experience I was responsible for presenting the information that I had collected on the topics I wrote about. Also, helping guide discussion during and after the kahoot. The one reference that I looked at for information on the No Child Left Behind Act was edweek.org. They had all the information that I needed to know about to give a clear explanation to the class.The site also helped me gain a deeper understanding of how the government tried to help education, but in the end it hurt it. They later though reformed the law to help bring schools back to where they were before no child left behind.

Hi, I’m John Carey. I prefer to go by my middle name, Ambrose.I’m from Rochester, New York, which is about an hour away from Buffalo. The grade level I’m looking to teach is around first to third grade. One thing that I’m into is sports. I’ve grown up playing football, basketball, and lacrosse. Now I’m currently playing lacrosse here at John Carroll. A couple other things are that Harry Potter and Star Wars are my favorite movies and I play xbox all the time. I don’t really have an essay that means a lot to me, but I do have a quote from Micheal Jordan that Iv’e always looked back on when I’m struggling with something. He says this ” I’ve missed more than 9000 shots I my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over agin in my life. That is why I succeed.” This helps me coup with failure in my life I lose an important game or just something happens. For service this semester I choose to work at Thomas Jefferson International Newcomers Academy. I will be tutoring high school kids who English is their second. When I’m in class I have a fear of everyone laughing at me so if I feel comfortable with everyone then I will be good. For me one of the major issues in education is how a majority of inner city school systems have such I high drop out rates. One question for you is what do you do in your free time?

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

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