Purpose
 

The goal of this assignment is to enable you to be conversant about the two most important structures in your classroom:  the academic structure and the social structure.  The academic structure is how you manipulate various facets of your teaching to reach as many students as you can at any one time (Explanation of Academic Structure).   The social structure is the network of relationships among the children in your classroom. 

The course is grounded in the belief that learning occurs
at the intersection of the social and academic structures. 

The immediate objective of this assignment is to require that you be conversant about these two structures.  You will be asked to conceptualize and describe both of them as they interact in your classroom to effect learning opportunities for your children.  This assignment will teach you a specific way to identify the status order of the students in your classroom so you can organize and manage your academic strructure to provide learning opportunities for all your children.

1.  Learn to see and describe your classroom's academic structure.

Think about all the ways you select, modify, and deliver curriculum to your children.  There are so many ways this could be described.  For purposes of this assignment, we will use the following ways to get a handle on all the ways your academic curriculum is structured.  Following the link above will give you more detailed explanations of each category.

1. mind (cognition and thought)
2. body (physical self, needs to move)
3. spirit (feelings and emotions)

1. special education personnel
2. IST
3. other specialists

1. times for fun and work and quietness
2. open and closed activities
3. times when you have choice and times of no choice

2.  Conduct an inquiry to learn the social structure of your class. 

You will design a class questionnaire that enables you to identify the status order in your classroom.  The inquiry will also include questions you might wish to use as part of your community building, questions that could give the class a particular snapshot of itself.  Two examples are provided, one conducted in a 3/4 multiage (Rebecca) and another conducted in a 3-4-5 multiage (Gillian).

Research by Cohen and her colleagues (Cohen, Chapter 3.) has shown that a child's status among peers in school is jointly determined by friendship patterns and how well the child's achievement is perceived to be by his/her peers in high profile academic subjects, usually reading.  To obtain this information, you will design a questionnaire and embed two questions within it,  one that targets peer relationships and one that targets perceived academic status. 

A.  For Peer Status.  Who would you invite to your birthday party?  (Alternate version: Who would you like to sit next to on a field trip bus ride?  or  Who would you like to hang out with after school if you could have any choice?)

B. For Academic Status.  Who are the best readers in your class?  (Alternate version:  Who are the best math students in your room?  If you could read with some classmates who were really good readers, who would they be?  If you needed help with reading, who's the best reader in your class that you could ask for help?)

You can do this inquiry as a way of getting to know your class better.  Here are other questions you might ask.    I'm sure you can come up with more interesting questions.  Order, by the way, is important only for the reason that the embedded questions are not made obvious.

What pets do you have in your home?
Do you have any hobbies?
What do you like to do when school is over?
What's your favorite summer time activity?

What is your favorite time of the school day?
What do you want to be when you grow up?
Who's your favorite male singer?  female singer? favorite rapper?  favorite group?

The inquiry is best (most reliably) carried out individually, one on one.  This is especially true for the questions that target status.  Students should be presented with a class roster and you should have them circle their choices.  You could record their answers for the other questions.  Make sure the children can respond with more than one name.  Up to four names are appropriate for the status questions.   With younger children, you may want to have a class photo listing available so they can point out children whose names they've forgotten.
 

3. Compile the results of your social structure inquiry.

 Create or use a class list and note how many times each child was chosen as a close friend (column one) and as someone who was chosen to do a reading assignment with (column two).  Adding the number of times chosen for each child gives you a numerical figure for each child (column three) that in very rough terms allows you to gain access to the status order in your classroom.  Summing the number of times chosen as "friend" and as "best reader" gives you a status measure for each of your students.  Arranging the children from child with the most choices to child with the least choices (column four) gives you the status order for the students in your classroom.

Status order is a critical variable in your classroom's social structure.  High status children are seen by their peers as being capable.  Low status children are perceived by their peers as having little capability.  This has everything to do with how a child gets included by their peers in the academic work you assign and require.

4. Choose Four Interesting Children - Note Ac/Soc Behavior - Identify Strategic Instruction For Them

Later in the course you will be designing a strategic curriculum enhancement to increase the learning opportunities of your students.  Hopefully, this enhancement can be part of your interdisciplinary unit assignment and can also address the "Teaching Over Time" portfolio entry.  I am asking you to pay particular attention to the learning behavior of four children chosen by you, your choice being informed by what you now know about the social order in your classroom.  Make sure your group of four includes two high status and two low status children.

 After choosing your children, record anedotal information about their academic and social behavior.  I'd suggest using post-it notes in an anecdotal record notebook.  Do this for a period of approximately two weeks after you have identified your children.

Now that you know something more about these particular children, think about what you could do as their teacher to enhance their social and academic position in the classroom.  What strategic instructional strategies do you think would improve the learning in your classroom for these particular children.  Be sure to relate how the strategies combine social and academic concerns to effect learning behaviors.  These strategies will be reported in the final section of your structures paper. 

5. Write Assignment One:   "Narrative Analysis of Social and Academic Structure"

Write a narrative analysis that focuses on how your knowledge of the classroom social and academic structure affects howyou will design instruction for your identified children.  I'm suggest the following organization for your classroom structures assignment.

A. Introduce the paper

• What is the paper about?
• Grade level, school
• What do you intend to accomplish?

B. Demographics

• student numbers
• gender balance
• free/reduced lunch
• special education services in classroom (ieps, 504, speech and language help, etc.)
• intensity of services across children ie. does one child receive all the services in your room or are the services spread around across several children
• comparisons between your classroom averages and Vermont's classroom averages found at  http://crs.uvm.edu/schlrpt/

C. Description of your academic structure

• differentiation of curriculum
• teaching to the whole child
• the team
• use of time, rhythms of classroom activity, daily structure

D. a description of your social structure

• what is the status order in the classroom
  • how you assessed status
• your status order table
• a copy of the status survey
• comments on this process
  • did it go as planned
  • how did the kids react, etc.
• what does the classroom social order say about your classroom's social structure

E. vignettes for selected children

• who they are and how do they behave socially and academically
• how would you characterized how they are perceived by the other children
• how does their social and academic behaviorwork together to define their learning behaviors

F. Strategic instruction

• what are your instructional goals for these particular kids
  • social hopes
  • academic goal
  • where do you see an interaction between the two
• use the analysis of status order to inform your plans

G. Conclude the paper

• Summarize what you did
• What's different about your fund of knowledge about your class now that you've done this analysis of social and academic structures 

Eight to Ten pages minimum,  1.5 spacing, 12 font, 1/1.5 margins.  Please use headings to denote the various sections of your paper. Be sure to include status questionnaire. DUE OCTOBER 1, 2007