Dr. Arrastía-Chisholm: Professor Mom

In case you have been following what my EDUC 2130 students have been doing at the Southside Library , here is another update . Last week was the last time the preservice teachers met with the K-12 students at the Southside Library. On the very last day, families and volunteers celebrated with food donated from a local Chick-fil-a and custom certificates for each participants. Over 100 kiddos were tutored in the 20 sessions at this semester with over 80 tutors volunteering as part of their field experience. Now I am reading all of the VSU students' reflections about their experiences. Every single student has admitted to having a positive experience. They noticed things about their own learning and the learning of the kiddos they helped. They noticed social processes and peer relationships forming. They also noticed the impact of socioeconomic status, food scarcity, and relative poverty in the Valdosta community. I think it is really telling that every student, faculty, staff, ...

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 ...

This week a new group of VSU students participated in the Helping with Homework program at the Southside Library in Valdosta. The 16 kiddos that attended yesterday ranged from grades Kindergarten to 10th grade. To protect the identities of the minors involved, I have blurred their faces, but here are a few pictures of their hard work. I look forward to guiding a new batch of VSU students tonight.  Even though it was their first time meeting, all the groups clicked and I could hear laughter and chatter by the end of the evening. All the students finished their studies and homework, had a snack, and some even got to play legos or a game or two of Uno to reward themselves. My students got some experience tutoring reading, math, social studies, science, and English language arts. From what I have heard, the first group that just finished their field experience really enjoyed the hands-on experience. Some can easily see the concepts we discuss in educational psychology in...

It's the 5th week of school and by now we have covered behaviorism and operant conditioning in all three of the classes I teach. I teach that we reinforce productive, desirable behavior before punishing undesirable behavior, and that removal punishment (taking away a privilege or object) should be used before resorting to presentation punishment (scolding or a negative consequence). This is counterintuitive, especially because many of us were raised in environments in which corporal punishment was normative. Discussion is always freeform in my classes and comments are encouraged. I present concrete situations from real life, like my daughter drawing on the wall or a student not being able to stay seated during on-task time. Inevitably spanking comes up in these educational psychology discussions. "If you just pop them, then they will stop immediately... If I got hit, I never did the thing again... little kids are too young to understand other consequences..." As a mot...