Review of material written by Christine Sleeter Presented by Alison Murphy

 Research has shown there is a difference in teacher expectations of different students – with the most underserved students (students of color and low-income) having the least expectations asked of them in schools.  A teacher’s expectations affects what type of lessons she will create, relationships she will build with the students, and the general climate of the classroom.

 It was found that both high achieving and low achieving students are most likely to fail lower level classes than higher level classes – most likely because low level classes are boring, providing little student interest.  It is therefore necessary to provide higher level, stimulating and challenging classroom content, and students will be more likely to ‘rise up’ to meet the standards.

 Preparing her 2 nd grade classroom for college through publishing projects.  In her publishing unit, student learned to use computers, including Word, scanning and how to do research on the internet.  She valued interactive and engaging activities, and therefore integrated them into her classroom.  She bases her lessons around key standards, and then goes into depth – drawing out high level thinking from her students, often exceeding the required skills for her grade.

 Sleeter recommends using the levels of Blooms taxonomy as a basis for curriculum planning and asking the following four questions:  How does the unit as you have planned it so far, or as you have taught it before, address each of the six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy?  How do the curriculum standards for the unit you are developing address the levels of Blooms taxonomy?  How doe the textbook address the levels of Blooms taxonomy?  Using Bloom’s taxonomy as a guide, if your students were to be prepared for college, what should they be learning to do in this unit that isn’t listed above?

 Mona developed a multicultural science unit around the solar system linking the unit with literature and language arts to allow for higher levels of thinking and analysis for her students.  She intentionally constructs parallels between her classroom and a college classroom to help her students anticipate how college could be a part of their futures.  In planning her unit, she plans for hitting at least 5 of the 6 levels of Blooms taxonomy to ensure that the unit will be challenging and engaging for students.

 Enabling strategies are ways to help students learn to think more complexly and to help them succeed at difficult challenges.  Ex 1. Modeling: showing students how to do something while talking through your thinking process,  Ex. 2. Scaffolding: providing temporary support for students as they learn to do something new and complex.

 Hierarchical perspective: teachers believe students need to learn facts and skills before going on to complex ideas.  The con of this perspective is that often, students never move past these ‘skill and drill’ type lessons and are bored with the class.  Developmentalist perspective: focuses on the process of knowing, with an emphasis on the students’ ability to work meaningfully with content.  These teachers often use enabling strategies to incorporate complex and challenging curriculum and often get their students further academically than if they waited for them to acquire particular skills before challenging them.

 Uses scaffolding in her Spanish classroom to help students do comparative character analysis of a required Spanish novel.  Students generally come into her class with below level vocabulary and comprehension, but Gina has found that working through a complex higher level task has worked to increases their basic Spanish skills as well as their ability to analyze literature.

 Those with the biggest to lose from a low level of academic challenge are those who already receive poor intellectual stimulation in the classroom.  Providing stimulating and challenging work for those students who are below grade level standards is the best way to motivate them to engage in the classroom as well as the best way of helping them meet those standards.

 Use Blooms taxonomy as a guide to ensure a range of intellectual challenge in a unit.  Incorporate college level expectations into your expectations for students (even in the elementary level!) and explicitly tell students you are doing so.  Keep high expectations of students, but provide students with means of reaching those expectations by means such as models and scaffolds. But be cognizant of the appropriate time to remove them.