Dr. Arrastía-Chisholm: Professor Mom

I follow the chapter order of the textbook I use in my EDUC 2130 class. Chapter 8 covers instructional strategies so you would think that the following chapter covers assessment strategies. That would be too logical. Instead, the subject of creating a safe learning environment is inserted between these two chapters. In reality, I am 100% okay with this detour because it makes certain that we cover this topic before the very end of the semester. Although I didn't get to attend the session, I was inspired by the work of Christy Galletta Horner, Kristina LaVenia, and Oluwatobi Ishola of Bowling Green State University . They presented their study, entitled "'Why Don’t We Talk about This?': Preservice Teachers’ Perspectives on School Violence." Before sharing the results of their study with my students, I had my students reflect on their own feelings concerning school violence/safety, their training concerning this matter, and how all of this potentially affected t...

Despite the massive attendance and endless relevant sessions, I believe that I had a productive time at the AERA conference this year. My objectives were to reconnect with colleagues, meet new ones, and learn more about some of my areas of interest. Here are the highlights in chronological order: Because I have a dataset of college students, a subsample of which were in gifted and talented programs, I attended a session on the Gifted after K-12 . I learned about some really neat opportunities out of the University of Washington which allows students to skip high school all together with other options involving only 2 years of high school. This was personally interesting to me because I decided to leave after 3 years of high school and my school counselor tried to discourage me (and my mom) because it limits the options of universities (no Ivy League). At any rate, there are pros and cons to these programs, as evidenced by researchers at UW and even Dr. Mammadov  at VSU. I ho...

I do a lot of experimenting in my 2000-level educational psychology course because I teach it every semester and it is a medium-sized course. Here are some examples: I’ve compared using writing assignments vs. lecture only for covering behaviorism (not my favorite learning theory). No surprise here... Writing about the relevancy of behaviorism helps students understand the concepts.  Using case studies with and without quizzes compared to lecture only. This was interesting because case studies did not help students better understand the concepts in educational psychology, even with the added extrinsic motivator of a quiz.  Various ways to conduct in-class exam reviews, including collaborative study guides, crossword making, Kahoot games made by me, Kahoot games made by students, no review, Q & A style review session. I am still collecting data on this so I am not sure yet which review is most effective. I want to try all the varieties of each unit so if will take me ...