Kohlberg

Kohlberg is a very interesting fellow.  He lives along the same line of Piaget but with a slightly different approach, looking more at the moral development of a student.  He breaks it down into three different levels, with two sub levels on each.  The first being preconventional, or before rules.  The two sub levels here are obedience vs punishment, good or bad action is determined by the physical consequence.  The other is personal reward, what do I get out of the situation.  The next stage is the conventional stage, AKA rules.  The sub levels here are good boy/nice girl, good means 'nice'.  The other is law and order, laws are absolute.  The authority must be respected.  The last stage is the postconventional, abstract rule breaking.  The sub levels here are social contract, what is good according to the society it is associated with.  A groups definition of good.  The other is universal ethical principle, what is right and wrong is individually decided and thought in the abstract.

Here is a youtube video that you can check out to double check your understanding of Kohlberg's stages that I briefly went over.

With this background of Kohlberg, I now take a look at the students that I observe each week.  I would say that most live in this preconventional-conventional stage.  Some touch in the postconventional, but for the most part the students are staying in those beginning stages with their moral development.  They are very concerned about what the results of a choice will do for them and there grade.  Another group of students are concerned about meeting the rules of the class exactly, even if the situation deems it to be changed.

For example, one week I was observing my teacher's theatre 3 class learn about viewpoints.  It was a hands on lesson and the students had to get up on the stage and move around to learn about the different viewpoints.  Some of the students showed a conventional moral development.  The teacher would tell the students that whenever they walked between two students, those students were a door that you had to move through in a fun and different way.  Some of the students took it very literal and every single "door" that they past through they jumped or dove or did something big and different because those were the rules and they needed to be met (law and order).  Other students however would only go through the motions.  Slightly raising an arm or not even doing anything but walk around the room.  The lacked to see any reward from this because there was no punishment for not doing the task.

Now with this type of activity, it is hard to be watching every student the entire time to make sure they are doing what is being asked, so helping the students develop that moral reasoning as the teacher is a bit harder.  However, rules could have been laid that allows the students to help motivate each other to participate, since they are all walking around each other.  But that can be tough because you don't want the students to be distracted looking for those not participating rather than fully engaging themselves.

Piaget

Piaget was a very brilliant man for coming up and discovering his understanding of cognitive development.  His theory breaks down the developing of cognitive thoughts and actions into four different stages, sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.  These different stages evolved into the next one as one grows up and the brain develops.  With everyone's brains changing and growing differently, there are no set ages for these stages, but it is still important to look at this and recognize what a student is able to process and understand at different stages in their lives.

In my observations this semester, this is something that I didn't even know I was looking at with each lesson.  I first want to show this video that my education psychology showed us while she covered this lesson on Piaget.  It is evidence of one of the stages, concrete operational, that shows that a student can recognize that the water levels in each cup may vary, but the amount of water doesn't.  Here is that brief video to watch.

I like this video because it shows the student is thinking through what she is seeing and expanding upon that.  Now take that knowledge and expand it further to abstract thoughts and you are reaching the next level, formal operational, which is where we want our students to be.  We want students to start thinking outside of the box to understand a concept.

The teacher that I am observing is teaching film studies for one of her classes.  They tend to watch a lot of movies to understand the time period and study the evolution of movies.  She hands out an assignment of the students to fill out while they watch the movie, like most teachers tend to do so students don't sleep or goof off.  However, rather than it just be busy work, at the end of the assignment is a space for the students to ask follow up questions or concerns about the movie or the time period that they wish to learn more about.  Then she will pick some of the good questions and next class ask them to the class to discuss as a class.  I really like this because to me, I see it reaching that abstract thinking and helps the students, who don't see that part of history in person, they are able to take what they see, think about it from that time periods perspective, and then ask even more questions to try and answer more questions about that time.

With the students asking these harder questions, it creates disequilibrium, an unease about the subject because it is new and the student doesn't know how to fit this new information into their schema.  Schema describes a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information.  By then having a classroom discussion, the teacher helps the students to assimilate the new information and helps the students come up with ideas and connections to accommodate the information into their schema.  It really is fascinating.

If you are still struggling to understand what this final stage is talking about, the formal operational, here is a youtube video that I found to be very helpful!

M&M&M Analysis

            I have been observing my teacher for four weeks now and have already learned a great deal about teaching and the relationship between teacher and student.  Each student is different and learns differently and we need to prepare our lessons so that we can effectively teach our students and motivate them to keep learning in other classes.  Those skills that they learn transfer from one class to another and we need to be uniform as teachers so that we are giving the students the best opportunity they can get to achieve greatness.

            Many different needs that need to be met for student success.  One of those things is pertaining to metacognition.  Metacognition is the process of thinking about what you think.  Partnered with that is self-regulation, or reevaluating what you are learning and thinking through it, checking for self-understanding and clarity.  There are different steps with metacognition, declarative, procedural, and conditional.  Declarative is how you learn best, your strengths and weaknesses.  Procedural is strategies that you have at the ready to help you learn.  Conditional is skills you have that help you accomplish a task and help you accomplish it the best way possible.  Knowing these different approaches can help us understand how students can implement metacognition into their everyday use.  I want to plan lessons that create a safe environment for students to show their strengths and weaknesses and that they can feel like they can try new things and approaches based off of different conditions that they are faced with.  I want to push each of these different knowledges to increase metacognition.  Structure lessons and goals for the students to see how they plan, monitor, and then evaluate the results.  Have students plan out what they are going to do to accomplish their goal and then monitor how they are doing as the process is going on.  Do things need to change?  Are they getting the outcome they are expecting?  If things are going good, then they can evaluate the results and plan again for future success.

            We then need to look at a student’s mindset.  Are they a fixed mindset or a growth mindset?  Fixed mindset is the thought process that “something” is measurable, either they can or cannot do the task.  They believe that if they failed once, they will never be able to accomplish the goal and frankly won’t try again.  I plan to steer students toward a growth mindset.  Growth mindset is this incremental learning.  That knowledge can be learned and obtained through practice and believing in one’s potential to expand.  Growth mindsets use all the resources available for them.  I want my classrooms filled with resources for the students to use and that they can get help from one another and from me.  Having posters on the walls that explain information taught throughout the quarter/semester are great tools.  Students are constantly looking around the room and those little reminders help them to grow. 

            Motivation is crucial to student’s learning.  They need to be motivated to want to learn and grow.  But each student is motivated differently, so we need to make sure we are prepared with different approaches.  I personally love the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  This theory addresses that students need to have certain needs met in order to motivate them and have them in a place ready to learn.  They need to have their physical needs met and then need to feel safe.  Those are the two beginning levels of this pyramid and I completely agree with them.  I also plan to implement self-determination theory.  There are three levels to this theory, autonomy, relatedness, and competency.  All of these things boil down to fun and our brain craves to have fun.  Having something that we choose to do (autonomy), that we have this sense that we belong (relatedness), and to feel that we are effective in what we are doing (competence).  Making sure that students have options when it comes to assignments (unless they need to do a certain project to obtain a certain understanding), but making sure that they feel they can express their knowledge in a variety of ways.

Motivation

Motivation is a funny thing when you look at it.  Motivation is defined as the reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way (Google definition).  So there are reasons that make us act or behave the way that we do.  When it comes to theatre, if you want to perform, you're going to have that motivation in you already to do a good job.  I have met many actors that aren't motivated to give a good performance.  Everyone wants to do well when they are put in front of other people.  So the question stands then, can theatre teachers really motivate their students if you need motivation to perform well already?

Obviously the answer is yes!  Theatre teachers are crucial to giving motivation to the students to perform their best.  For most students, middle/high school is their first taste of theatre and performing and they are easily scared of getting up in front of their friends and peers, in fear of looking foolish on stage.  So that's where us teachers come in and can help instill that confidence and motivation to try.

When we look at motivation, we look at both extrinsic and intrinsic motivators.  What are those you may ask?  Intrinsic is motivation that comes from the individual because they are wanting to expand their own knowledge or understanding for their benefit.  Extrinsic is motivation that comes from out outside source and the individual will get some type of reward for the action asked.

I have talked to my cooperating teacher and asked her what she feels is useful when it comes to motivating students.  She told me that since theatre can deal with a lot of emotions and that one's own personal life can become attached to a piece of work, that making sure the students feel safe and their needs are met is a big factor.  This is connected to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs theory, which states that we each have these specific or "deficiency" needs that must be met in order to allow growth to happen.  We need to make sure that our physiological needs are met first, and then that we are safe where we are.  Those are the beginning blocks for this theory and they grow but I want to focus on these two facts.

Making sure that a student is physically stable to perform the scene or task at hand is important because acting takes so much energy and requires a lot of energy.  Students need to make sure that they are taking care of themselves physically in order to grow.  Then they need to feel safe.  Our classrooms need to foster an atmosphere of safety and that no mistakes can be make in order for students to perform well.  If a student is physically well and feels safe in their environment, motivation grows and they are willing to try something they wouldn't normally feel like doing.

Another motivation factor my teacher suggested is helping students understand why these acting techniques are important and relevant to life, even outside of the auditorium.  This is the theory of self-determination.  The students find their own determination/motivation to learn the subject matter.  If we help the students see how what they are being taught applies to their life and how they can use this in different areas of their life then the obvious one they are being taught, they are motivated to understand the topic better and try it out to see how it affects them in their life.  This can be an example of intrinsic motivation because the student is wanting to expand their knowledge to expand a part of their life.

There is an article about a study that talks about what motivates people to go to a theatre and see a play/musical.  I love this article because it shows different reasons that motivate people to go to the theatre and I would want to share this with my future students so they understand the importance of what they do.  Give them motivation to perform and connect to the piece because what they perform can motivate another person to do something important.  You never know who you can impact or motivate in a performance unless you are motivated yourself to give something worth seeing.

Motivation is something that is very big in theatre because every character that we perform has some motivation in the scene.  The thing that they are wanting from another character.  We need to treat that motivation in a play as the real thing and apply it to the teacher/student relationship.  We need to have motivation to get something out of a student and they have to be motivated to get something out of us teachers.  It's a two way street that we walk and we need to be able to motivate one another to be better.

Growth Mindset

Growth mindset is something that we really need to consider when it comes to teaching Theatre because I feel that students can have this mentality that they either can act good or they can't.  They do it for fun, but they either believe they can't do what is expected of them or they don't have the confidence to try and push themselves.  Each student and human being has it inside of them to perform and we need to help our students improve that growth mindset that things are not set in stone ever.

Observing the teacher that I am following for this semester is a real eye opener in what us as theatre teachers can really do for our students and what works and doesn't.  I observed one class where she was teaching the students about viewpoints and how to connect to everyone in the room to achieve an end goal.  The class was on stage moving around at a fairly fast pace and were told that they needed to feel the room and that collectively they needed to all stop at the same time without any type of signal or noise to stop them.  They just had to suddenly stop.  As you can probably see, this caused a lot of frustration with students that it is not possible to all stop without some type of signal.  So they would try and kept failing.  Students believed that it was not possible and started to try and force the stop.  Only that that caused more problems.  The students were forced to expand past their mindset that it was not possible and tried to feel the room as instructed.  Though it wasn't perfect, as everyone started to really try and feel the room, you could start to feel the room more and about 95% of the students actually stopped on their own.  It was really amazing to watch this happen in a high school setting because it showed a lot of maturity and patience for this kids.  It also helped them get past this mentality that they either could or could not do it (fixed mindset) and forced them to try a new approach and reached an even better outcome than expected.

I really like this process of growth mindset and that we have options as teachers to help students grow and expand that part of their brain.  It is so crucial to have this mindset because it creates a place for students to try new things and feel that they can accomplish stuff they wouldn't normally do.  I learned a lot for myself from the assessment and I didn't even do it!  Students learn best when they can get past their own expectations of themselves and continue to grow past what they believe they are worthy and capable of.

Here is a link to a PDF of the The Viewpoints Book by Anne Bogart & Tina Landau that explains a lot of different viewpoints to do and includes the viewpoint that I observed (PDF page 20, Page number 27, Exercise 6 title twelve/six/four)