Module 11

Focus Questions:

2) According to our text, page 430, class time is evaluated by three terms: allocated time, engaged time, and academic learning time. Form what I read in the book and what I observed during my field experience, although the state mandates that students attend school for 1,080 hours per year, these hours can be used very differently from school to school and classroom to classroom. In one of the classes I observed, the teacher made the best possible use of her time with the students. Students were always actively engaged in something and none of it was “busy work.” There were suggestions on the wall for activities to do if EVERYTHING was finished, but there were also suggestions on the board for what to work on if certain assignments were already finished. These suggestions reflected longer-term projects that the class was working on, like a book report. This enabled the students who had completed their math assignments to know exactly what to do next and why. Academic learning time is engaged time with a high success rate. This refers to the time the students are working independently and without the teacher available to correct their work. Classroom management can play a large part in the success of academic learning time. Where there are poor classroom management skills, the students will not have a high success rate when working independently. They will be off task and easily distracted without the teacher readily available.


6) Teachers can increase student achievement by employing good questioning tactics. John Dewey said, “To question well is to teach well.” As a teacher it is important not only to ask good questions, but to provide students equal and ample opportunities to answer them. It is important to keep the pace up and not allow students too long to sit and wait between questions, but it is also important to ensure that the students have enough time to process and give a thoughtful answer plus give enough time following the answer for the other students to process that information. Bloom’s taxonomy, which proceeds from low-order questions, stating basic facts, to high-order questions, that demand more thought and, generally, more time to answer. Research shows that teachers ask higher-order questions infrequently and these are the questions that are shown to increase student achievement. There is a time for lower-order questions, such as when being introduced to new information or when working on drill and practice, but this type of questioning does not challenge students to manipulate pre-established information to create more sophisticated thoughts. In my observation, the teacher did not ask too many higher-order questions during class time, but much of the work on the board to be done when the class work was completed had to do with higher-order thinking.