Threaded Discussion Question (Teasing)

Question: 
1. Is there a difference between teasing and bullying?
2. How can teachers determine when their intervention is necessary?
3. How can teachers determine when a student is being bullied?
4.When should teachers report bullying to parents?


Answer:  
1. Yes there is a difference between bullying and teasing. The difference is that teasing generally involves a sense of play and mutual joking around. It rarely, if ever involves cracks about religion, race, or appearance. Bullying on the other hand does not involves play or mutual joking around. It often involves jokes about religion, race or appearance.

2.  Teachers can determine that their intervention is necessary immediately. There should be a strict zero tolerance policy and the teacher should not stand by and wait for a good moment to get involved. If it is being witnessed, it should be confronted.

3. A teacher should be able to determine when a student is being bullied when they notice that the "joking around" is not at all mutual and only one student is laughing and making the jokes.

4. Bullying should be reported when the behavior does not improve or gets worse over time.

Threaded Discussion Question (Television)

Question: 
     1. What kinds of challenges do these children face? How do they deal with them?
     2. What kinds of things challenge these parents? How do they respond?
     3. To what extent do the children's activities and behaviors seem to result from their parenting?


Answer: The Tanners from Full House
    The adults associated with the Tanner family (Danny, Jesse, Joey and Rebecca), represent a authoritative parenting style. They set clear rules, enforce them and also expect mature behavior from the kids (DJ, Stephanie, Michelle, Nicky and Alex). When the adults give certain rules, you can expect them to follow through with explaining why those rules are in place, but they are also very good at listening to any concerns the kids may have.

     1. One challenge that these children could face is that they don't get the opportunities to go out and explore the world and make their own mistakes. They will learn a lot more by making their own mistakes rather than being monitored 24/7. They deal with this challenge by either just following the rules or they sometimes try to find ways around the rules, that way they can have fun and break the rules without the adults knowing.

     2.  The adults are challenged in the household because they have to be strict enough to stand by the rules they have created, but they also have to make sure they aren't too strict and make sure they take into consideration the children's needs and concerns. Another challenge could be dealing with the children not listening all the time like they should and trying not to be overly mean about how they address the situation. They tend to respond by sitting down with the child and discussing why they did what the did and why they won't do that certain thing again.

     3.  It seems like the activities and behaviors of these children are directly related to the parenting style.  This specific parenting style expects to see mature behavior and that is exactly what they get. The children act accordingly and when they think they are unsure about what they are doing, they question whether or not it is a good idea and if the adults will be mad with their actions. Although sometimes they do bad things anyways, they always maturely resolve it and never do it again.

Reflection about Qualified Teaching

Questions:  

            1.    What does it mean to be a qualified teacher?

2.     How do you assess qualifications?

3.     What is good teaching, and how is it measured?

4.     How do qualifications make a difference? What knowledge or skills would a qualified teacher possess that an unqualified teacher does not?

5.     How do school systems that may have a paucity of qualified teachers (such as rural and urban schools) work to meet the requirements established by No Child Left Behind? 

Answer: 
          
         A qualified teacher can differ among people but according to the NCLB (No Child Left Behind), a qualified teacher is seen as someone who hold a bachelors degree from a four year institution, has teacher experience, has the content knowledge to teach core academics, a teacher certification, and a state teaching license. 
        I personally assess qualifications of a teacher by how knowledgeable they are regarding the subject they are teaching because if they don't really know what they are talking about, how am I suppose to learn? My geometry teacher in high school did not understand what he was teaching at all, so as a result, I didn't do as well as I wanted to in that class. Also I assess qualifications by how enthusiastic the teacher is to be in the class, teaching and making sure we succeed. When they have a good attitude coming to work, I will have a good attitude to come to class. 
        Good teaching is the amount of knowledge a teacher has about a topic and will go out of their way to make sure their students learn it and are successful in the end. and it is measured by how successful the students are and how much they are able to achieve based off of how qualified the teacher is in the subject that they are teaching and also by the effort the teacher puts into his or her teaching. 
         Qualifications can make a huge difference when it comes to the achievement of students in school. By teachers having to meet certain qualifications, you can guarantee that the students will achieve a lot more than with a teacher who doesn't meet the qualifications.  If a teacher got a degree in a specific subject, they are automatically so knowledgeable about that topic, that they can focus on making sure their students are just as knowledgeable. 
         Because of the shortage of teachers, some states have restored to recruiting nontraditional candidates and offering them alternative, temporary or emergency certificates to fill empty classrooms. In order to make sure these candidates meet the federal definition of a highly qualified teacher, they have to go through 3-8 weeks of pedagogical training which is  training in learning theory, teaching methods, classroom management, curriculum, lesson planning and other activities. 

Jigsaw

I would love to work with the age group of  2-6 years of age.

Physical Development:  Physically children in this age group the muscles grow, their brains develop to better understand information, their balance improves,  and their center of gravity moves lower so that they are able to run, jump climb and hop. By age 2, they have perfected this walking skills. By the third year, most children have learned to throw, run and jump but arent well controlled until about age 4 or 5.

Cognitive Development: The first form of cognitive development according to Piaget is the ability to form and also use symbols like words, gestures, signs and images, which is called the preoperational period. From ages 2 to 4, most children enlarge their vocabulary from 200 words to 2,000 words.

Sociocultural Perspective on Cognitive Development:  This applies to early childhood in the sense that they are very limited, they are limited to language development.

Putting it into perspective:  For a teacher, they should look for the improvement in language mainly because they will be learning and gaining more ways to communicate and will put it into practice but they should also look for the small  physical changes.

Threaded Discussion Question #2

Question: What are efficacy implications for teaching students inside the zone of proximal development?

Answer:
     When teaching students inside the zone of proximal development, the child is at at stage where the they already know as much as they can through independent problem solving, but there is still plenty of space for them to achieve more knowledge with the help of adult guidance or by working with their peers. So the expected results for teaching them during this stage is that they will start to learn how to interact with others instead of independently problem-solving and will start to progress in their learning and capabilities to retain new knowledge presented.

Threaded Discussion Question #1

Statement:  "Adolescents appear to need more intense emotional stimulation than either children or adults."

Question: What implications does this have for instruction? Peer-to-peer confrontations? Student-to-teacher confrontations?

Answer: 
     The implications that come from this statement when it comes to instructions for adolescents, could be that adolescents need to be motivated more often then adults and children because they are at the stage where they just don't want to go do certain things. Peer-to-peer confrontations might be hard for some who need the extra emotional stimulation and a peer just can't give that to them. Student-to-teacher confrontations might be the best options for adolescence because the teacher keep them motivated and in the right direction of where they need to be.