Claire+Ferguson


 * Record of Assignments**
 * Name of Student: Claire Ferguson**



** Pre-Adolescence **

** W : What you want to know (curiosities) **
__**1. How can I adapt a classroom in order to deal with the rapidly developing attention spans of students?**__

** 1. Physical **

 * R (Review):**
 * Playing is an essential act for the growth of children of all ages. Even if kids are playing in organized sports teams, is it still necessary for them to participate in informal play?


 * A (Apply):**
 * 9-year-old Billy is more interested in playing video games than playing outside with his friends at home or even participating in games on recess. What are some ways that his parents and teachers could encourage him to back away from the video games and get the more social play time that he needs?


 * R (Reflect):**
 * If you played on a sports team when you were in middle school, how involved were your parents in these activities and how did this affect your performance and attitude?

** 2. Cognitive **
From ages 7-11 children are entering what Piaget describes as the **concrete operational stage.** This means that they are thinking in more logical, flexible, and organized ways. Students can now understand things in more than one dimension, understand large-scale spaces, and put things in multiple categories according to relationships. Chapter 9 has a section on **attention** which is very helpful in answering my inquiry question. It explains that middle schoolers have much better attention spans than they did before they were school age. These students can be flexible in task requirements and are starting to plan ahead. As a teacher, it is important to figure out where students are in their attention skills and work to improve on them. If I notice that my students are struggling to pay attention to the material than I should do activities in order to improve these skills.

** 3. Emotional **
When figuring out how to an adapt a classroom for individual needs, it is important to try to figure out where students are in their **identity achievement.** It is extremely important for kids age 6-11 to define who they are in this world and how they are fitting in to our society. This is often linked to a child's self esteem because while some kids are excited about their new identity in the world and want to do as best as they can, others may experience **role confusion** and have low self esteem. Children with low self esteem are less likely to focus in class or participate in activities. It is a teacher's job to help students discover themselves while learning. To help keep all students attentive, teachers should help all students find activities that they like and give them a purpose in the classroom.

** 4. Social **
Students social development really is focused on not only making relationships, but on their moral development as well. We have learned that pre-adolescent children are often concerned with rules and what is fair. **Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development** describes the levels at which students develop morality including "The Pre-conventional Level," "The Conventional Level," and "The Principled Level." These levels of moral development help us understand how students will interact in the classroom and how they interact in play. They start to understand what is right or wrong for themselves and why it is that way instead of just simply knowing what they can and can not do. These stages help me answer my inquiry question by helping me to understand the reasoning behind students actions and how to mediate conflicts that come up between students who may be at differing levels of moral development.

**Observation Site Information**
I work at Skyline Chili and on Sunday's we have "Kids Eat Free" Day. We see tons of kids from various ages interacting with friends and family. Here I will observe the differences in individual development and attention span.

** A. Site details: **

 * Name of site: Skyline Chili in Wyoming/Woodlawn on Springfield Pike
 * Link to site: skylinechili.com
 * "Kids Eat Free" Day

__** B. Setting **__
Our Skyline Chili store is a very family friendly store. There is an open and carpeted floor containing various tables and booths. The store has a fireplace and TVs so customers can feel comfortable while enjoying their food. Family-friendly music plays in the background. The steam-table where employees make the food is open so that customers can feel free to watch, ask questions, or chat with the employees. There are coloring sheets and crayons are available for children to take. If the kids choose to, they can write their name on their colorings and we will hang it up on one of our walls for all to see. For observing, I chose to stand by the counter that looks out over the dining room floor. This way I could observe and interact with the kids who are their with family and friends for "Kid's Eat Free" Day.

__** C. Describe what you did at the site (free-write) **__

 * __1st visit (2 hours):__**

On my first day of observations, I was surprised that I noticed a lot of things that I never had when simply working and doing my job. There was one girl specifically who was learning her role and responsibilities in the family as an older sister. She looked to be about 9 years old and as her parents were talking to relatives, she noticed her little brother was starting to wander around. In my three years of working here I have seen this family almost every week and times before, she would have gotten up and played with her brother who is around 3. Earlier in the year I noticed that she would just tell on him and interrupt her parents' conversation. However, this time I noticed that she got up and brought her little brother back to the seat to eat his food.

I think that this is part of reaching identity achievement. She is beginning to understand how to be a role model to her younger brother and feels confident in herself enough to take care of the issue by herself. She also knows that she is not supposed to wander around the public place because it could bother the other diners and she knew they needed to stay with her family. I think this is a good observation to help in teaching a classroom. It shows that middle school children like to have responsibilities because it gives them a sense that they really do belong and can have some control of the way the classroom works.


 * __2nd visit(2 hours):__**

This Sunday I noticed the gender differences in young children. One group of families that come in almost every Sunday brought almost 20 people this time. It was interesting to notice the separation of the boys and girls. The kids, ranging in age from 6 to 12, often sit at different tables than the parents. 5 girls sat at their own table and 4 boys sat at another. The girls were showing each other things like what was in their purse or their newly painted nails. They also loved to joke around and play with their waitress who have gotten close with them throughout her years of waitressing. The boys also interacted in a very gender specific way. Two of the boys had Pokemon cards that they were playing with and the others were playing some sort of hand-held video game. I was glad that they still were interacting by talking to each other and messing around instead of just focusing on their own thing with the games they brought.

This relates to my inquiry question because a lot of differences in attention span may come from the interests of students. These gender differences show that teachers need to include activities that interest both boys and girls at the same time. It is also important to mix boys and girls together in seating and when picking groups because at this age they tend to pick to stay with their own gender.

I also talked to one girl who was in about 4th grade who was starting to learn Spanish at school. She was very excited about it and was glad to tell me all of the words she was learning. I think it's great that she was learning a second language in school and she was excited to do so instead of bored by it.


 * __3rd visit(2 hours):__**

This week I noticed a couple of different main kids that really stuck out. One boy, about 8 years old, who comes in every week, sat at the counter and talked with us after eating with his family. After a couple minutes his older sister, 10, joined him. Let's call him George and her Marie (not real names) We always have a good time joking around with them. Today, another family came in and George, usually very outgoing, grew very quite. Marie noticed and told us that this girl was in his class and he had a crush on her. George got embarrassed a little, but he said that he did have a crush on her. It was very cute so we poked a little fun and him laughed and grew back to his outgoing self. A few minutes later, the family that had come in called George over to talk to them. George went over and it was so interesting to see how shy he got when he is usually so loud when talking to us. He talked to her brother and her parents a lot and only spoke to the girl when she asked him questions about class. It was so interesting to noticed this interaction between the two young kids who "liked each other" at such a young age.

Since this was my last observation, I was glad that I finally noticed some physical development of these kids. There must have been a soccer game nearby because a couple families came in with 9-10 year old girls in their soccer uniforms. The girls must have won their game because they were telling their parents about some of the points scored and high points of the game. I think this is important because these girls are finally at the age where organized sports can really become competitive, where as before, kids are playing on local teams because their parents put them there and they mainly just ran around and tried out the new sport. Now the girls were physically developed enough to have fine skills in games such as soccer. This is another way that I can relate my observation back to my inquiry question. Kids from age 6-11 need to be active and play. Adapting lessons towards sports will keep students interested in the lesson and actually getting up and being at least a little bit active will help students be more attentive because they are not just sitting and listening to lectures.

** Physical **
Many of the kids I observed came from sporting events and it was obviously fun and important for them. Chapter 9 (pages 225-231) explains the development of Middle Childhood and how both gross (p. 228) and fine motor development (p. 229) is improving at this age. Kids are becoming better at performing different tasks which makes team sports more fun because they are finally really developing their skills. Also, kids from ages 6-11 find games with rules (p. 229) very important and are starting to play what the book calls "rough-and-tumble play" (p. 230).

** Cognitive **
In regards to the girl in my second observation who was telling me about her Spanish class at school, I noticed that the language development section in Chapter 9 (pages 246-248). She was "learning a second language after mastering the first" (p. 247). There is a "sensitive period" when it comes to learning a second language (p. 247). Children are more likely to become successful in mastering a second language the earlier that they learn it. I think it's great that she was learning it in the 4th grade, which was a new addition to the curriculum at her school, because she will be more likely to master it. It is interesting that when learning English as a second language, ethnic minority children are basically thrown into classrooms that speak only English (p. 247). We expect these children to learn that way, but we would never expect English-speaking students to be thrown into a classroom that only speaks Spanish in order to have them learn the language.

** Emotional **
The girl in my first observation that was taking care of watching her younger brother, was developing her self-concept while going through the stage of Erikson's Theory of industry versus inferiority (p. 257). The stage of industry versus inferiority is a "conflict of middle childhood, which is resolved positively when children develop a sense of competence at useful skills and tasks" (p. 257). She knew that her brother was supposed to be sitting at the table and instead of telling her parents, she took care of him herself. This was refining her self-concept because she knew this was a positive behavior that was helping out her parents. She wanted to do the right thing and so she was becoming a big sister who cares for her younger brother by going what she has seen her parents do and knowing what they expect from her (p. 258). She felt good about herself for doing what was right which affected her self-esteem because of the value she saw in being responsible (p. 258). This also leads to child-rearing practices because it seemed that this girl had "authoritative" parents who help their children feel especially good about themselves (p. 259).

** Social **
The group of kids in my second observations really relates to the "gender typing" category of our book which can be found on pages 267-269. These kids had certain traits in their interests that were separated into categories that were either boys OR girls, not necessarily both. It is important as teachers to watch out for students who may have different traits than the stereotypical boys or girls characteristics. Sometimes these kids feel pressure to conform to gender roles so it important that we teach them that it is okay to be yourself and that it is not right to stereotype certain traits as solely for boys or girls (p. 268). This also goes along with the development of their social skills. Children are often developing their social skills which deals a lot with communication (p. 246). They are learning to relate their likes and dislikes to those of others kids their age as well as sharing their emotions and seeing how these emotions affect relationships (p. 246).

** Revisiting Your Curiosities **
Through my observations and research, I have found that attention levels in 6-11 year-olds are always developing. They are in Piaget's concrete operational stage, which means that their thought processes are "far more logical, flexible, and organized than it was earlier" (p. 232). Younger children can pay less attention than older children so it is important to understand this in a classroom setting in which children are in the same grade, but may be up to 12 months apart.
 * 1. How can I adapt a classroom in order to deal with the rapidly developing attention spans of students?**

There are many ways that you can vary lesson plans to make it more useful and interesting to young kids. Physical activity is one very effective way of engaging students throughout the day. "Only 42% of school-age boys and 11% of girls are active enough for good health" (p. 231). In regards to this fact, not only will physical activity help students to pay attention and remember what they have learned, it will also help make sure that children are getting the activity that they need to stay healthy. Another way is to add examples to lectures or math examples that are relevant to students lives because they will bring their attention to a subject if they find it is useful to them. Group work is very helpful in helping students to learn, but it is crucial that students are grouped with others who are different than them so that they can broaden their way of looking at certain problems. During middle childhood, students advance in "perspective taking" which is the "capacity to imagine what other people may be thinking" (p.262). This means that while students are working in groups they will be learning information and paying attention more closely while also seeing the different qualities and opinions that their classmates have. Group work will help in the development of their social skills as they can relate their emotions and opinions to help aid in group work (p. 246).

It is important to test out the waters to see how well your students can pay attention and go from there. If a class has a higher attention span, less variation in lesson plans is needed, but if a class has a lower attention span it is important to change up the lessons to help them keep up instead of being drowned in lectures or individual assignments. It is extremely important to teach students at all levels new skills to pay attention, retain information, and learn more. Two important memory strategies at this age include rehearsal, repeating information to yourself, and organization, grouping related information together (p. 235). As a teacher and role model, it is crucial to not only teach students textbook materials, but also to teach the necessary skills needed to succeed in life.


 * 2. What new questions emerge for you as a future teacher?**
 * How much do individual learning styles influence attention span?
 * How can technology both positively and negatively effect the attention levels in a class room?
 * What are more ways to teach skills along with textbook materials?
 * How would I go about teaching a student(s) with ADD or ADHD?

= Poster =

Research Articles:
Deviney, D. E., Crawford, J., & Elder, K. L. (2013). Classroom antics: Fun with a purpose. // Journal Of Management & Marketing Research //, // 12 //161-166.
 * Article 1**

This article summarizes that humor can be helpful in keeping the attention of students in a classroom. However, you have to make sure you are using it appropriately. The article reviews guidelines on how and when you should use humor. This is very important because some things are not always as useful as you think and it is not always the right time to be funny. It also gives tips on when to use funny videos or how to use illusions and magic properly.

I found this article very helpful to answering my inquiry question because it is a good way to keep the attention of students, especially during lecture. Humor can help students with varying interests to focus on a lecture and also remember what you are teaching. It is important to use it wisely however because if you use it too often then students may loose interest or no longer take you seriously.

Wilson, K., & Korn, J. H. (2007). Topical Articles: Attention during Lectures--Beyond Ten Minutes. // Teaching Of Psychology //, // 34 //(2), 85-89.
 * Article 2**

This article explains that students' attention levels vary throughout lectures. It declines significantly after the first ten minutes. Attention then fluctuates depending on how the teacher is presenting the lecture. This study was done in a college setting, but I think it still very much applies to middle school students. The times may even by smaller because attention spans are much shorter in younger children.

I found this very helpful in answering my inquiry question because it shows me that lectures will not be an effective way of learning on a daily basis. It is important to change it up and add humor in order to keep their attention. We know from the book that it is also important that young students move around and get hands on in order to keep their focus and attention in class.

Sagan, L. L. (2010). Students' Choice: Recommendations for Environmental and Instructional Changes in School. // Clearing House //, // 83 //(6), 217-222.
 * Article 3**

This research shows us that "traditional" classrooms are not the best way to teach our students. The traditional classroom is described as the set up being in rows facing the teacher and the teacher lecturing to the students, has them do individual work, and answer questions from their assigned seat. This article suggests that we should use feedback from our students in order to shape our classrooms so that students may get the most out of learning.

I thought this research article was very helpful in answering my inquiry question by telling me how to shape a classroom, both physically and content-wise. I can ask previous students or even current students how they prefer the classroom to be set up and how to learn and shape my lesson plans according to these needs. If students feel that their needs are being heard they will be more willing to learn and work with me as their teacher.

JACKSON, N. (2013). End on a High Note. // Instructor //, // 122 //(6), 61-62.
 * Article 4**

This article on lesson ideas show ideas on how to keep middle school students engaged by doing year-end projects. Nancy Mann Jackson provides 7 examples in how students can work together and review material they have learned throughout the year. Most of the projects use a lot of creativity and openness to individual change. Others use group efforts to show the class how far they have come since the beginning of the year.

Although this Scholastic article was not really a research journal, I thought it provided great ideas on how to keep middle school children engaged, especially as the end of the year comes near. These projects are a great way to keep students engaged, which is important at the end of the year because this is often when attention fades the most. Students can review what they have learned and work together in a collaborative effort.

Boller, B. (2008). Teaching Organizational Skills in Middle School: Moving toward Independence. Clearing House, 81(4), 169-171.
 * Article 5**

This article describes the challenges that Middle School teachers and students face in regards to organizational skills. It explains how high expectations are of students once they reach middle school, but they might not have the skills that are necessary to meet these expectations. Middle School students have a wide range of organization and time management skills that vary from student to student. Boller explains that teachers need to help students build the necessary skills for organization in order to be able to independently plan their time and get all of their assignments done.

Although this article does not address the different learning styles, interests, or attention spans of students, I found it very helpful because it explains that all students are on different developmental levels in regards to organizational skills. It is important to understand this as a teacher because although it may seem that a student is not putting in the amount of effort needed to pay attention and succeed in class, in reality it is because they have not yet developed the skills that are necessary to do so.

Kim, J., & Deater-Deckard, K. (2011). Dynamic changes in anger, externalizing and internalizing problems: attention and regulation. Journal Of Child Psychology & Psychiatry & Allied Disciplines, 52(2), 156-166.
 * Article 6**

This research study focuses on the correlation between attention skills and anger problems. Their hypothesis was that children with low attention spans would have more issues with controlling their anger. This proved to be true because these students did not learn the appropriate skills in how to regulate their anger issues. There were some problems with this study because they had trouble measuring how children internalized their anger, which is also very important.

I found this interesting in relation to my inquiry question because as a teacher of young children, anger may be an issue within a classroom. This study showed how students improve their anger regulation as they grow from early to middle childhood which goes a long with the progression of our book. As students are growing up, they are improving their social-emotional skills. A lot of social-emotional problems may stem from anger issues. As a teacher, I need to figure out which students have trouble paying attention in class and then externalize their anger in a negative way. These kids not only need help to focus in class, but also I need to help teach them the skills to control their anger.

Partner Review
Written by: Alyssa Erbes


 * 1) Take a look at chapter 10. It informs you on children from the ages 6-9. It describes types of development, ones that pertain specifically to role advances which you mentioned with the little girl and being able to take care of her brother. specifically on page 235 we see how she uses memory strategies for more organization which may be a way the little girl was able to make decisions of how to care for her brother based upon what she has seen her parents do in previous situations.
 * 2) On page 246 we see the more refined conversational strategies kids around the ages you described in you second observation. This strategies are among ways kids develop and further expand their ways of conversing. In these ways, children develop different friendships as well as how to communicate their likes and dislikes.
 * 3) Look at pages 267-268. In this section you learn more on gender stereotypes and the effects it has on children of this age. You mentioned how the boys sat at a table and talked over stereotypical boy stuff and girls did the same but with their own type of materials. This is a time where children are identifying what is their role in society and how that effects them emotional as well as what they are considered to like and dislike. This also expands their self-evaluation leading you into more gender identity through conforming.
 * 4) I am so glad you were able to observe a physical development point because during this age many students are having growth spurts. On pages 225-229 you see the growth in motor skills and obtaining better coordination. These show how children are gaining motor performance that helps build a foundation for growth in cognitive development as well as emotional and social development.