[etni] Re: Reflections on the HOTS Course
- From: Amanda Caplan <amandacaplan@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: drjamesbacker@xxxxxxxxx, English teachers Network of Israel <etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:16:29 +0200
Dear Jimmy and any other high school teachers who don't know what jhs and
elementary teachers are doing
In your informative and interesting message you say *" elementary and middle
school teachers have stopped teaching grammar." *As a counsellor in junior
high schools, I can assure that, unfortunately, many junior high school
teachers teach TOO MUCH grammar. Because of misunderstandings of the
Curriculum, teachers don't know in what context grammar should be taught,
and therefore teach it out of context. Ask many jhs pupils or their teachers
what they are studying at the moment, and the answer will be something like
"past perfect" or "present progresssive and present simple". Grammar is
taught, drilled and tested ad infinitum.
There are a number of reasons for the drop in level, but please don't dump
all the blame on the teachers who came before you. The number of non-readers
coming into jhs has risen from 3-4 in a class of 40 to up to 10. And
actually many of the 'readers' are really only 'decoders', not readers. Can
I turn round and say that the elementary teachers aren't doing their jobs?
NO! There are so many other factors that affect the level of English. Here
are just a few examples.
Firstly, as you so rightly point out, the number of minutes allocated to
teaching English has dropped. And in addition, the discipline problems that
we deal with in younger classes are very different from those in the higher
classes. Therefore many of these precious minutes are spent dealing with
these issues. This year, for the first time, I have had to physcially
separate pupils who were fighting. And, fellow teachers, please don't tell
me that I mustn't. When a child has his or her hands around another pupil's
neck, my standing there and saying, 'Please stop' will not work. Jimmy, I
don't know where you live, but you are invited to my school, in a
prestigious area of Rehovot in September to see what we have to cope with.
Secondly, in the past ten years I have seen a very interesting change with
the weaker pupils. Whereas once they watched trashy TV series in English,
and therefore picked up both vocabulary and grammar, today the series are in
Spanish.
Thirdly, the stronnger pupils have also reduced their exposure to English in
the same ten years.Once they surfed the Net in English as there were few
sites in Hebrew. Today, they can find everything they need in Hebrew.
Fourth, I don't have figures to quote literacy levels in L1, but I would
hazard an educated guess that these have also dropped. If they don't have
basic literacy skills in L1, how do you expect them to use them in L2?
I believe that ALL teachers who see themselves as professionals work
very hard. Each age group brings with it its own specific problems. Don't
knock those who come before you.
I could go on, but I have to go to work today - yes dear high school
teachers, some of us are TEACHING till June 19th (we get an extra day off
this year!), and others, our elementary school colleagues, have to work
until June 30th.
Amanda
PS I agree with everything you say about HighLearn - it really is the worst
learning platform I've come across!
On 09/06/2009, James Backer <drjamesbacker@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> Greetings, all!
>
> I just finished the HOTS course and I would like to post my reflections.
>
> First of all, being a member of the Histadrut HaMorim, I had no union
> requirements to boycott the course, although I definitely sympathize with
> the boycott. Even though (or because) I have used HOTS in my literature
> lessons for many years, I was curious to see how the MOE intended to
> institutionalize the use of HOTS. Nevertheless, from previous ETNI
> discussions, I had some very strong reservations about the HOTS program
> before the course. Despite this, I really tried to learn about the HOTS
> program during the course. Unfortunately, as the course progressed, my
> concerns grew considerably.
>
> As a course, it was chaotic, poorly planned, and poorly presented. (I am
> not referring to the instructors, who were as much victims of the
> circumstances as were the participants.) For example, we were told at the
> beginning of the course that the MOE had not considered the issue of
> 4-pointers and that it was currently under discussion. A few sessions later,
> we were told that the MOE had indeed decided to include the 4-pointers in
> the HOTS program and that it would appear on Module D. Unfortunately, there
> were no instructions from the MOE about how to prepare for this. The entire
> course was basically for the 5-point level and we had no real preparation
> for using HOTS with 4-pointers. (I hope that no one thinks that the answer
> is just dumbing-down the material.)
>
> Part of the chaotic nature of the course stemmed from the creative
> nomenclature for which the MOE is famous. We were told about ?Personal
> Response? and practiced writing it right after reading a poem, but then we
> were told that ?Personal Response? was to be done during the reading, not
> after it. (I?m not sure how you can do this with a short Emily Dickinson
> poem, but that?s another issue.) The instructor told us that the MOE had
> discussed the matter and had chosen not to call it ?Personal Response While
> Reading,? although that would have avoided the confusion. Another
> interesting use of nomenclature was with the term ?Reflection.? Only after
> creating a number of exercises that were indeed reflective of the message of
> the piece of the literature, were we told that ?Reflections? must be
> meta-cognitive, relating to the learning process during the unit. Why not
> call it ?Meta-cognitive Reflections? to help people understand? I
> guess it?s the same rationale for calling reading comprehension ?access to
> information from written texts,? etc.
>
> For various reasons, our course turned out to be hybrid: mostly f2f, but
> supported by online material found on the ?HighLearn? platform. HighLearn,
> or at least how it was used in this course, was a very poor LMS (Learning
> Management System). The folders were generically named, Unit 1, Unit 2, etc.
> That would have been bad enough, in terms of trying to find things, but the
> online course was actually a mish-mash of two separate courses, each with
> its own set of folders. The repetition and resulting waste of time was very
> annoying. The forum section was even worse. There were ?units,? ?sessions,?
> and also ?S1,? ?S2,? etc. There were different fora with the same names. In
> addition, there was a ?bulletin board? system, which functioned pretty much
> like a forum, just adding to the confusion. In our class, some students had
> one profile in HighLearn and other students had a different profile. The
> result was that we could not all access
> the same files. In addition, there were many times when the HighLearn
> platform announced that we were not authorized to see material that the
> instructor had assigned. I have taught with many LMSs over the years
> (Blackboard, Vista-4, Jenzabar, First Class, NiceNet, Sachlav, Sulam,
> School-Life, and others), and HighLearn is definitely the worse that I have
> ever seen ? at least as it was used in this course. If I ever prepared, or
> presented, a course like this at one of the graduate schools where I
> currently teach, I would no longer be teaching there.
>
> Assuming the basic concepts of the HOTS program were valid (a major point
> that I will deal with in a moment), there is no time for teachers to meet
> the maze of requirements and use the various assessment rubrics:
>
> Ten literature pieces, each with
> Seven major components, containing
> Five stages of the methodologies, chosen among
> Three possible methodologies presenting
> Three HOTS for a play or novel,
> Two HOTS for a short story,
> One HOTS for a poem, and using
> Two or three different assessment rubrics
> And a partridge in a pear tree
>
> Make no mistake about it, the HOTS program will demand a great amount of
> time. The extensive HOTS requirements will be in direct competition for our
> time with:
>
> * The Bagrut Project, which requires considerable time in the
> classroom and the computer room
> * SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) because it?s theoretically good and
> because the kids don?t read at home ? even in their L1.
> * Book tasks, which must be done in class because the kids copy, or
> copy-and-paste tasks that are ?done? outside of the classroom.
> * Teaching grammar, because the level of grammar of incoming Yud
> students has dropped to zero. Thanks to the misunderstanding of the
> not-so-New Curriculum, elementary and middle school teachers have stopped
> teaching grammar. How are the students supposed to compose a sentence, let
> alone a paragraph in an essay without a basic knowledge of grammar?
> * Enabling skills (other than grammar) because the kids aren?t ready
> for the cognitive jump to the 5-point demands, and even the 4-point demands.
> * Practicing Bagrut formats (unseens, listening comprehension,
> essays, and the oral elements), and the strategies to maximize points
> * Making tapes for students with an accommodation for a pre-recorded
> version of the text
>
> This competition for time is within a diminishing number of minutes we have
> with the kids each week. When I started teaching for the English Bagrut, I
> had five sessions of 45 minutes a week. Now because of budgetary
> considerations, I have four sessions of 40 minutes a week. Inevitably, one
> session is at the end of the day, so it has officially been cut to 30
> minutes, but the kids are watching the clock much earlier than that.
>
> As I indicated before, using HOTS in teaching literature is almost always a
> good thing, but I seriously question the rigid and illogical demands of the
> HOTS program as presented in the course. Besides the silliness of
> nomenclature, mentioned above, there are totally ridiculous rules to be
> followed. For example, in a short story, which requires using two HOTS, we
> must use the same methodology for both of the HOTS, even if using different
> methodologies would fit better with each of the HOTS. For example, using
> prediction logically fits into the ?deductive #1? methodology. On the other
> hand, identifying conflicts and dilemmas logically fits into the ?deductive
> #2? methodology. Nevertheless, according to the HOTS program, they must be
> forced into the same methodology in a unit, despite the logic, or lack of
> logic. There are plenty of other silly examples, but this is quite enough.
>
> If you have been confused by the terminology, then welcome to the club. The
> HOTS program is a massive cognitive overload for the teachers. (Instead of
> bringing in SCABS from North America to teach English, the MOE should
> consider cloning androids whose brains can function like multi-dimensional
> Excel sheets.) Unless the program is streamlined, there is no way that
> teachers who took the course will be able to follow the requirements.
> Moreover, the concepts and requirements are so Byzantine, that without
> taking the course, a teacher will become totally lost in the gobbly-gook of
> the program.
>
> Considering the number of members of the Irgun HaMorim who boycotted the
> course (with total justification, as it turns out), there will be a great
> number of teachers and students stumbling through the dark towards Modules F
> and D. Rumor has it that the MOE intends to post all the material from the
> course online. Then the Irgun HaMorim teachers will have to sink or swim. We
> had better break out a lot of life-rafts!
>
> Finally, I must admit that I still don?t have the answer to a key question,
> with which I started the course. Does the MOE want us to use HOTS in support
> of teaching literature, or is literature the vehicle for teaching HOTS? The
> title of the final PowerPoint presentation of the course highlights this
> dichotomy: ?Infusing HOTS with the Teaching of Literature.? (Why a duck?)
>
> Jimmy
>
>
>
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