kelly+patton

Here's the link to my prezi: [|Building Self-Esteem and Reducing Fear in Math]

Hi, Kelly here.

I just graduated from Middlebury College in February, and I spent the spring in Berkeley, CA, where I tutored math to high schoolers and was an "estate liquidator" which is my fancy name for helping my landlady shovel her mom's junk out of the house. This summer, I'm taking four classes here at UVM, two of which I have already completed (Psych 1 and Learning, Cognition & Behavior). In addition to this class, I am also taking Digital Storytelling this session. I'm thinking about going into grad school for psychology a year from now at the earliest.



It is dramatic and it would absolutely freak me out! ch.

And here's an interesting link: [|Real Philosophy] Check out the philosophy pickup lines!

Kelly - Below is the link to our Voicethread! Love Susan and Devon

[|First Steps]

Kelly I like your narrative on your voicethread and actually the way you seemed to use back to front learning in it.

Poverty and Working Memory Article:
With my familiarity with statistics, I was unsure of how significant the differences in working memory for children in poverty and children not in poverty were. However, I will take the researchers' word for it that this difference was statistically significant, since I found their methods to be very thorough. They made sure to point out that this is a correlation and does not prove causality. But the results are striking, and they suggest a real problem in our society.

The difference in how many items people can hold in their working memory if they grew up in poverty compared with those who didn't doesn't seem big, but it amounts to one less item, and that can make a huge difference over time. Based on what we've been reading in Zull, not only does this mean that one has one less thing to work with, one will have one less piece of information to incorporate into abstract ideas, one less piece of information to use when making plans, etc. The impact will only compound itself over time as the person goes through the learning cycle.

I also found it interesting that people who usually have a higher allostatic load burden will have more difficulty turning off their psyological reactions when stressers are low. This means that when kids who live in poverty come in to school, they //can't// just leave it at the door as they are often expected to do. Their bodies are used to reacting to high-stress environments, and it takes time for their bodies to calm down.

A Baker's Dozen of Good Teaching Practices

 * 1) Instead of asking specific questions, have students come up with their own hypotheses.
 * 2) Insist that students write out their steps.
 * 3) Give examples first, general information second.
 * 4) Allow students to understand what something does or what it is before giving it a name.
 * 5) Insist on accurate language when students speak and use accurate language as a teacher.
 * 6) Have students generate a plan for what they would do, even if you are going to show them how you will do it (e.g. when you are doing a proof or solving a problem, have students think/write about how they would solve it or make an outline of the big steps needed).
 * 7) Don't underestimate the value of having students copy a proof but with slight modifications to fit a slightly different situation.
 * 8) Be flexible: change your lesson plan if you sense that your students need something different even if doing so will "set you back."
 * 9) Have students estimate answers, //then// calculate them.
 * 10) Give students a choice of final project, and make the choices creative.
 * 11) Have students teach each other. Make sure each student has a turn to teach.
 * 12) Keep each lecture to three main points or pieces of information, and make sure the students know which points are the most important ones.
 * 13) Have students draw pictures wherever applicable.

Mentor idea: Mary Cover Jones