Final Exam!

If you have a moment to relax, check out the Stop-motion videos from our 5th graders.

Reminders:

Complete your blog/portfolio postings. For a reminder of the specific expectations for posts that you are required to complete for the semester, you can review them on the Meta-Blog here. You may skip the posts about your best work so far. Campus life activities you might consider attending if you still need one are the BSU party tonight and the Mass of Our Lady of Guadalupe at 7pm on Sunday.

You must submit your "Rubric of Me" on the day of the final exam in order to get credit. You can download the form from the campus portal if you need to.

Studying together... well, I don't really have to remind you, do I?

I have office hours tomorrow (Friday), 11-12:15.

The final exam will have three parts: (A) map id plus history; (B) research review; and (C) reflection.

PART A

For the final exam, you will need to be able to locate the following places on a map outline:

1. Mesopotamia (Iraq)
2. Athens & Sparta (Greece)
3. China
4. Aztec Empire (Mexico)
5. Medieval Universities of Europe (e.g. Bologna, Italy) 
6. and Africa (Timbuktu, Mali)
7. NAPOLAs (Germany)
8. American Public School System (e.g. Massachusetts)

In addition, as on the midterm exam, you will describe, in a sentence or two, the last four education systems and the purposes they served in their societies.

PART B

You will need to be able to briefly define/summarize the neuroscience concepts we have explored since the midterm exam:

1. Cooperative/Collaborative Learning (all-class research project);
2. Self-Affirmation of Values (and its relationship to stereotype threat, stress, etc.); 
3. How Reading Fiction Affects Behavior; 
4. and the American Public Education controversy of your choice.

Strong summaries will include an example of an experiment described in the article or talk. (Remember that you can find links to many of the readings and videos on this blog.)

PART C (take home or in class, your choice)

A reflection on mission, values and engagement experiences you have had in your first semester. You can download the prompt from the campus portal and write the reflection ahead of time, or you can write the reflection during the exam period. This is an assignment shared by all nine of the First Year Seminar sections.

Wrapping It All Up with a Bow

For Tuesday's special all-pod meeting in 113 St. Mary's, you will need to take the Values in Action (VIA) Free Survey—http://www.viacharacter.org/www/Character-Strengths-Survey. You must register to take the survey, but it is free. It will take about 15 minutes to complete.

IMPORTANT NOTE FROM VINCE FITZGERALD: "Be completely honest with yourself!  Don’t take the test based upon how you wish you are but upon how you truly are.  Have the courage to be honest with yourself!"  

Please print out a copy and bring it with you to class. In addition, please bring an updated copy of your Winding Path to class.

Welcome to American Public School

UPDATED Reminder: Blog posts are due for your responses to (1) the research conference and (2) the Social Justice Speaker Series talk. These need to be completed before the final exam on Tuesday, 12/13. If you missed the conference, please see me ASAP about an alternative post. If you missed the social justice talk, you can make it up by going to the next one on 12/1, at 7pm, in St. Joe's Lounge.

⇜⇜⇜⇜⇜⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝

This week we are exploring the history of American public schools and current controversies around public education in  this country. You can check out today's video here. I asked you to focus on the agendas and intentions of those providing or advocating public education as we have for the other education systems we have looked at this semester. Consider the importance of education for a democratic citizenry for example. 

Your assignment, due before class on Thursday, is to find a strong on-line article on a current controversy of public education from the list below, or one you come up with, and write a précis (summary) of the article. Please send me the link and the summary by email, or post them to the comments here.

• Common Core
• Standardization Conspiracies
• Bussing/Segregation
• Costs (~$10k/yr)
• Charter Schools (which ones work?)
• Bilingual Education
• Home Schooling
• Vouchers
• Religion/Prayer in Schools/Creation-Evolution, etc.
• Discipline/Violence/Security

National Political Institutes of Education

Update: For Thursday's class, read the excerpts posted as NAPOLA under handouts on the campus portal page for this class if you didn't get a copy in class today. Write a 15 minute free response and bring it to class with you. We're going to discuss empathy, literacy, and fiction, and look at ideas of Steven Pinker and others. Here's the Elif Shafak Ted Talk.

For Tuesday's class, please download from campus portal and read excerpts from All the Light We Cannot See, the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Anthony Doerr. You can also watch Disney's cartoon, "Education for Death."

Values and Vocations

Congratulations on your research project and last Thursday's conference. If you haven't already done so, please post to your blog, reflecting on the following questions:

What did you learn at the Conference? To what extent did you learn from the content of your peers’ presentations? …from their example as presenters? …from the communal act of supporting them as a member of the audience? 

Today's Self-Affirmation of Values exercise follows on the topic of Stereotype Threat that we explored last month. You can review some of the research in this article. A more extended video than the one we watched in class can be found here.

For Thursday's class, please complete the Windy Path Exercise found on the All FYE Blog as discussed today in class. Please bring your path to class with thought and questions to share.

IMPORTANT: Attending the Social Justice Speaker Series on Thursday, November 17th, at 4:30 p.m. is mandatory. Rose Jacobs-Gibson will be the invited speaker. In preparation, please read “A High Price to Pay: The Economic and Social Costs of Youth Gun Violence in San Mateo County.”

Research Project Due Thursday (Conference Mandatory)

The class research project on Collaborative/Cooperative Learning is due in class on Thursday. We will spend the class session on Thursday smoothing it out and preparing the presentation for Thursday afternoon's conference (3-4:40 in the Cafeteria).

Our greatest challenge is to coordinate with each other between now and Thursday and allow for everyone in the class to have access to the shared documents. Therefore, I am calling for the links to the google-docs that your groups are making public and anything else you think would be helpful. I will post them on the blog today.

If you were absent, please review the class blog, where I have posted the tasks and members of each group. The email message contains the NDNU email addresses of every student in the seminar so that you can connect if you haven't already.

Looking forward to another lively session with you all on Thursday!

• Google Docs for Intro
• Google Docs for Group 1 (Local schools that claim to use cooperative/collaborative learning)
• Google Docs for Group 2 (Connecting with teachers and others using it)
• Google Docs for Group 3 (Background and Sources)
• Google Docs for Group 4 (Neuroscience behind cooperation in humans)
• SLIDES

Small Group Research

Our research conference is a week from today (Thursday, November 3rd), in the Cafeteria, from 3-4:30 p.m.

In today's class we clarified our research topic and created small groups with specific research tasks to accomplish before we meet next Tuesday. The topic is cooperative learning at the elementary school level.

Group/Task 1: Web search for Bay Area elementary schools that claim to use cooperative learning models. Collect website addresses and capture relevant quotes from their websites. Expand or refine the search as needed.

• Xavier
• Yahaira
• Kimberly
• Jamie

Group/Task 2: Contact teacher staff at Marine Science Institute and 5th grade teacher Nicole Shelly to interview them about their explicit or informal use of cooperative learning in the program or classroom.

• Jose
• Kobe
• Kelly
• Joseph

Group/Task 3: Re-review the sources and summaries posted on this blog for relevancy to our new focus on elementary education, and determine if there are obvious gaps to fill. Look especially for hard data that supports cooperative learning methods.

• Monica
• Angelina
• Sabrina
• Sergio
• Moises

Group/Task 4: Find empirical data (experiments) about the cognitive science of cooperative behavior/learning in humans, specifically elementary school-age humans. A good place to start or to assign to a group member is the sources from the posted articles on this blog.

• Julie
• Onica
• Alissa
• Larissa

If you were absent today, you have been assigned to the following groups:

1. KIMBERLY (check in with Xavier)
2. JOSEPH (check in with Jose)
3. MONICA (check in with Angelina)
4. ALISSA (check in with Onica)