I teach kids science in North Philadelphia. Over 90% of students at my high school qualify for free and reduced lunch. The majority of my students come from high-poverty neighborhoods.
I teach students in a highly-mixed neighborhood in North Philadelphia.
The community deals with a lot of challenges. Once a thriving housing district for industrial workers, our town has lost almost all of the industry that once sustained it. Its factories have been shuttered for decades, leaving generations of young men with few legitimate ways to support themselves and their families. Drugs and violence have filled this void. And my students spend their days navigating the economic wreckage of this community.
My Project
My goal for this year is to let students get comfortable creatively solving problems in groups. This is a real-world skill that will follow them long after they have left our town.
When students work with whiteboards, they are working together to collectively construct knowledge, explain their reasoning processes, and get feedback from the teacher and each other. Students are interacting with each other in small groups when preparing the whiteboards. Then they interact with the whole class when they present and field questions from the class and the teacher. At all times, the teacher can see and hear student thinking and challenge them with questions. This process is called “whiteboarding.”
In an age of high-stakes testing and yawning achievement gaps, it is more important than ever to engage students in becoming patient and persistent problem solvers.
It is just as important that students receive practice working in small groups.
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