FOOT - Firestone Experience

                During my time at Firestone, I spent a lot of one on one time with my student, Jazmin. We were lucky enough to have some sanctioned time to work quietly together, which is more than I can say about last semester.  Last semester I still felt like a student because I traveled around with Jazmin and barely had any time to help her. This semester, although we only met a few times, was much more beneficial for me because it made me realize that I really can teach and I really can make a difference.

                I never really thought about merging several different modalities into test preparation. I suppose this is because test taking is one of those things that hasn’t changed in so long it seems like it never will. Also, the rules are very strict while taking the test. I can think of a few ideas that might be beneficial to students preparing to take tests through the use of different modalities.

                The first modality that I would incorporate into my classroom would be the use of music. I know that some students do not like any sound when they are studying or preparing for a test, but some do. I suppose I could let them bring in their mp3 players while in my class (not the OGT, I doubt they would allow that), or play classical music quietly while they were studying. Music has always been known to improve brain function as well reduce stress. Music also helps keep the brain stimulated and alert, and this could easily help students continue to pay attention when they were losing interest in the passage.

                Another idea that I came up with was to write their own ‘passages’ as they would appear in the OGT. They could write about whatever they wanted, and they would then create questions to go along with it. I suppose this does not infuse a new modality, but nonetheless it changes the cliché way of staring at a test packet to study. You could also have students act it out, which may be able to stimulate the students’ thinking into a visualization when they take the real test.

                When I was helping my student, we came across the word ‘irony’, and she knew what it was but she said she could not really put it into words. I was so caught off guard that I was having trouble explaining this to her. Sure, I know what it means, but she’s right; it’s hard to put into a definition! We decided to look the word up online on my phone and found a mutual definition that we both liked. Just by doing this, which you could do with a dictionary or thesaurus as well, we were able to continue on with our passage and make more sense of it together.  I know that Jazmin would not be able to use a cell phone to look up definitions while taking the real test, but being able to look it up then may have saved her a future answer on the real test. If we just breezed past the word and continued on, she would still not be able to say what it meant exactly. By looking it up, we have ensured that she will know the definition for next time. I would certainly allow my students to use tools such as the internet or text books to look up any word they did not know during test preparation.

                Another multi-modality that I could incorporate into my future teaching strategies would be to create a board game. I would have students get into small groups and make a board game out of an assigned passage. There would need to be multiple choice questions in the game based on the passage just like their practice tests. After this, I would have them go around and play the other games. They could do teams as well if they wanted to. I would make whoever answered the question say why they chose it. By doing this, the other students will get to hear their peers defending their answers, and maybe a new strategy could come up that might help another student out. There are even websites that allow you to create your own game online, so that could be an option too.

                One thing I would like to comment on is how unfair I think the OGTs are. I think that you could be a very intelligent person and do poorly on them, because sometimes the answers are designed to trick you. I don’t think that a test should be able to hold back a student from graduating. I believe that for the writing piece, the students should be able to submit their very best piece of work from an English or journalism class. Along with that, they would include the prompt/question/story that went along with the piece that they wrote. If America really wanted to test literacy, they would use my suggestion because the submitted pieces would have been written while the child was actually trying to do well for a grade, and not panicking or having an anxiety over a test that does a less than substantial job of testing the child’s real skills.

                In conclusion, test preparation could be updated and livened up through the use of multi-modalities. It was difficult to come up with ways to use modalities on something so traditional, but it was possible. I think that as a future teacher I will be able to use a variety modalities in all of my lessons, and be able to change them as needed if I feel that my students are not grasping the concept at hand. I think that by livening something so dull up, we will be able to increase the number of students who pass the OGT, as well as provide them essential skills that they will need as they progress through their educations.