{"id":19617,"date":"2013-07-24T11:35:19","date_gmt":"2013-07-24T15:35:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/?p=19617"},"modified":"2013-07-30T11:37:45","modified_gmt":"2013-07-30T15:37:45","slug":"classroom-contemplations-helping-students-find-their-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2013\/07\/24\/classroom-contemplations-helping-students-find-their-voice\/","title":{"rendered":"Classroom Contemplations: Helping Students Find Their Voice"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_19621\"  class=\"wp-caption module image right\" style=\"max-width: 300px;\"><a class=\"fancybox\" title=\"A teacher's civics lessons inspired a student to create a consumer education club.\" href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/files\/2013\/07\/7-24-ActivityFair.jpg\" rel=\"\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-19621\" alt=\"A teacher's civics lessons inspired a student to create a consumer education club.\" src=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/files\/2013\/07\/7-24-ActivityFair-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/files\/2013\/07\/7-24-ActivityFair-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/files\/2013\/07\/7-24-ActivityFair.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">zappowbang \/ Flickr<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">A teacher&#39;s civics lessons inspired a student to create a consumer education club.<\/p><\/div>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><em>Editor&#8217;s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.<\/em><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\" id=\"docs-internal-guid-665a8e14-1135-b7ec-091d-3c9ad80438a1\">Henry Rodriguez had a lot of ideas as a young, energetic teacher. \u00a0He wanted to make his civics class relevant and to help his students be more aware of what was going on in the world. \u00a0One of his ideas involved requiring his kids to watch a brief news program every morning for the whole year.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">At first, students had to write simple summaries of what happened, but then the exercise got more advanced as the year progressed. \u00a0Rodriguez helped them start to build a narrative about the news, no longer just summarizing, but connecting the dots and predicting the effects of events. They wrote about how things were related, and more.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">But activities like that don\u2019t automatically turn students into engaged learners, no matter how well-designed, and some students continued to remain relatively unaware and uninvolved. \u00a0Rodriguez described one student, Carmen, as oblivious to the world around her.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cShe was just going through the motions of life,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><!--more--><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Rodriguez realized that his required civics lessons about democracy didn\u2019t appeal to seventh graders who are years away from voting.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">But, he always believed in the immediate relevance of the economics piece of his course. He tried to use economics as a way to turn kids on, particularly the oblivious ones.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cI would tell my students \u2018you guys can\u2019t vote politically, but you can vote with your money,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><div class=\"related-content alignleft\"><h4 class=\"related-header\">Related<\/h4><div class=\"links\"><h5>Posts<\/h5><ul><li class=\"link\"><a href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2013\/06\/18\/classroom-contemplations-the-most-important-day-of-the-school-year\/\">Classroom Contemplations: The Most Important Day Of The School Year<\/a><\/li><li class=\"link\"><a href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2013\/07\/08\/19443\/\">Classroom Contemplations: Little Books, Big Statement<\/a><\/li><li class=\"link\"><a href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2013\/07\/11\/classroom-contemplations-overlooking-the-value-of-veteran-teachers\/\">Classroom Contemplations: Overlooking The Value Of Veteran Teachers<\/a><\/li><li class=\"link\"><a href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2013\/07\/02\/classroom-contemplations-the-teaching-that-evaluations-ignore\/\">Classroom Contemplations: The Teaching That Evaluations Ignore<\/a><\/li><li class=\"link\"><a href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2013\/06\/25\/classroom-contemplations-the-worth-of-value-added\/\">Classroom Contemplations: The Worth of Value Added<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/div><div class=\"topics\"><h5>Topics<\/h5><p class=\"topic\"><img class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/files\/2013\/06\/jeremy-2011-117.jpg\" height=\"60\" width=\"60\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/topic\/classroom-contemplations\/\">Classroom Contemplations: Education Policies From A Teacher&#8217;s Perspective<\/a><\/p><\/div><\/div><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">He told the students that if they all decided, for example, that they didn\u2019t want to go to a particular kind of movie or buy a certain brand of clothes, it would have a real effect on the market. \u00a0It was this idea that began to wake Carmen up.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cIt really intrigued her,\u201d Rodriguez said, \u201cand she kept asking me about it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Rodriguez thinks these issues interested Carmen because they resonated with her daily life, the choices she was making and the things she was doing. \u00a0Using her purchasing power wasn\u2019t something theoretical, and it wasn\u2019t about a test. \u00a0It was about how she behaved in the world.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">According to Rodriguez, \u201cIt was something that made her think about why she was doing the things she was doing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The conversations about it between Rodriguez and Carmen continued through the rest of the school year. \u00a0Then, Rodriguez got an email over the summer. \u00a0Carmen &#8212; former oblivious student &#8212; wanted to start a consumer education club at the school and get other kids involved. \u00a0She wanted to help them share her burgeoning awareness of the implications of their economic decisions.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cWhat she learned changed her,\u201d Rodriguez said. \u00a0\u201cAs opposed to her going through life not thinking about buying decisions, now she\u2019s more aware.\u201d<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">He\u2019s reflective about how you\u2019d measure this effect.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cDid this new awareness make her FCAT Math score go up? \u00a0No. \u00a0But it is something extremely valuable that will be with her for the rest of her life.\u201d<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Unfortunately, Rodriguez won\u2019t be inspiring any more Carmens for the foreseeable future. \u00a0For a variety of reasons that we will talk about in a future post, he\u2019s leaving the profession.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">And, as he goes, I believe the story of his impact will be better told by Carmen\u2019s Consumer Education Club and her new awareness than it could be by the test scores Rodriguez\u2019s students achieved.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">This isn\u2019t something you can easily measure in the classroom, or in one calendar year. \u00a0But we cannot deny that his waking her up added value to her life that will pay dividends down the road, dividends we cannot predict at this point.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">It\u2019s a shame our policymakers aren\u2019t trying to figure out a way to recognize Rodriguez and the other teachers out there for these kinds of lasting accomplishments. \u00a0By opting for a simple, reductive, numerical formula to determine teacher value, the policymakers seem unable to engage in the very kinds of critical thinking they say they want to encourage in our students. \u00a0And this higher-level thinking is exactly what Henry Rodriguez helped Carmen develop.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><em>Jeremy Glazer is a Miami-Dade teacher writing about classroom issues for StateImpact Florida. Want to sound off on something Glazer has written? Want to suggest a topic for him? Send us an email at Florida@stateimpact.org and put \u201cClassroom Contemplations\u201d in the subject line.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Editor&#8217;s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. Henry Rodriguez had a lot of ideas as a young, energetic teacher. \u00a0He wanted to make his civics class relevant and to help his students be more aware of what was going on in the world. \u00a0One of his ideas involved requiring his kids to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":155,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[1170,841,857],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19617"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/155"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19617"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19715,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19617\/revisions\/19715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}