The question I am going to ask is whether male or female students are engaged more in math class. Throughout years of education, there has been speculation that males perform better in math than females, even when science has proved this notion to be false. Engagement can be defined as student participation in math activities, answering teacher questions, and participating in class discussion.   I find this important because there are two different theories about both genders in math class that need to be investigated. I believe it will be important to my teaching because it will allow me to teach with different strategies. Both genders can achieve great things in math, so there is no need to have bias favoring one gender over the other. There is no reason to why such an ideal exists, but it has carried on as years have passed. It is the job of the teacher to ignore such notions and to teach all students equally and with equity as well. My research question will dive into student engagement in math because it is of interest to me. I conducted a similar research question in my teaching science class, and the results were intriguing.This study could be helpful to not only pre-service teachers, but teachers who are currently in the field. Also, educational research is important to advancing the field of education.

The place where I will conduct this research will be located at an urban public school with a heterogenous population. There should be enough evidence to collect from the plethora of students that attend the school, I plan to record ten pages of field notesand a full time on task chart. Students from all backgrounds attend the school, so the data that will be collected should be diversified. Students that are Black and White, and from various ethnic backgrounds are in the school. However, I do not need this factor when doing my research. I am not looking at the ethnicity of the participants, just what biological gender they are. I foresee no problem in the data not being quality enough because of the sufficient amount of data that can be collected. Students will be male or female, and their identities have not been decided yet, but it will not matter because they will be omitted anyways for the sake of privacy. In terms of a description of the physical setting of the school, it is two floors. There are a lot of colors in the school and the colors are warm and happy. Why this aspect is important for my project, that remains unknown, but none the less it is discussed here. The teacher is White male, so that is a change up from the usual teaching demographic of having a women teacher. The teacher teaches math, social studies, and Spanish. The fact he teaches Spanish is unique to me. I did not learn Spanish when I was in fifth grade, so that is a change in education that has occurred in a span of 20+ years. The school may have a large Spanish speaking population, which may explain why the teacher is teaching them to speak Spanish. However, this is just speculation, because I do not know for sure if there is a large Spanish speaking population. A lot of this information is not vital to my project.

How I plan to collect my date is by going to my field placement fifteen visits for two hours a piece. It would be hard to do interviews with students because of my limited time, so I will listen to student discussion and jot down their discussions. My field notes will be my own thoughts on the teacher’s teaching and the engagement of students in the classroom. I will be creating a time on task chart that will focus on two students; one male and one female. Out of a span of 30 minutes, I will observe how long the students are engaged. If the student is engaged, I will put a 1 (1 for 1 minute on task) or a 0 (0 minutes out of 1 minute on task). I did a similar method of data collection in my teaching science class and found it to be an interesting way to go about collecting data. The classroom artifacts could be three male’s assessment and three female’s assessment and comparing the two. The only flaw with this is that the performances of students on different assessments could influence the data, which could create a problem. More specifically, there could be outside factors that effect the students willingness to be engaged on that particular day, which could influence the data. That is why the best way to go about collecting data for this project would be using multiple participants that are either male or female. In the next draft, I will be discussing other forms of data that will be important for this project. Looking at scholarly articles would be important to this topic. As discussed earlier in the draft, this is a topic of debate. It is tough to collect a lot of data at field since I want to build a relationship with my students. By sitting at a table just collecting data, it is difficult to build a relationship with the students of the class. Also, it is important to foster positive relationships with students in field as a pre-service teacher, because you are only there for a short time. Especially when you have to plan and conduct a lesson, if the students have no idea who you are, then it makes for an odd lesson. Getting to know the students and then collecting data could be an appropriate course of action.

1. The comments influenced my writing process to fix the errors I had committed and rethink the focuses of my drafts. The girls in my group were essential to me fixing my drafts because they added perspective on the topic that I had no viewed before and made me think about what differences there are in the engagement of males and female students in math class. Also, I had a lot grammatical errors or information that was not needed that they corrected me on, and I therefore took it out. For example, I was providing information about the teacher that was no needed and probably took away from the quality of the draft. The feedback I received helped me narrow down the focus of my research question and make it more specific. I found their input invaluable because they gave me a ton of great feedback that allowed the draft to take shape.

• The theory, when laid out, is that boys do better in math because they are naturally better at it. When I researched this topic, the article Current Research Gender Differences in Math by Colleen Ganley and Sarah Lubienski highlighted the discussion I want to research.

There were a lot of factors that influenced the performances of males and females in math, but those can be discussed in the limitations part of my project. The stereotype is that boys perform better and math and the article highlights this by stating “Recently, researchers found that girls’ math achievement is lower if they have a female teacher who is anxious about math. This may be because these girls are picking up on gender stereotypes. In addition, some of our own research suggests that when boys and girls have the same math performance and behaviors in math class, teachers perceive that the boys are better at math, and that this “differential rating” of boys and girls contributes to gender gaps in math performance” (Ganley & Lubienski). By diving into this stereotype, I am doing myself a service in enlightening myself on what stereotypes exists and how I can combat and eliminate such issues such as anxiety and self-esteem in math.

Ganley, C., & Lubienski, S. (2016, May 9). Current Research on Gender Differences in

Math. Retrieved October 22, 2019, from https://www.nctm.org/Publications/Teaching-Children-Mathematics/Blog/Current-Research-on-Gender-Differences-in-Math/.

• The limitations of a time on task chart is the ability to seriously focus on two students from each gender. To counter this limitation, I plan on being zoned in on those four students. The other limitation could be outside factors that influenced the engagement of those four students. To counter these limitations though, I plan on choosing students who have consistently shown either being on or off task. I conducted a time on task chart for my teaching science class last semester and actually had to do 8 students total (4 males; 4 females). The project was identical to this one, so I really have no problems with picking two male and two female students. By using a Time on Task chart, it is an effective way to put engagement into a quantitative representation. I would not know another way to find a strategy that is similar in terms of predicted success and actual effectiveness. Also, when I looked up Intervention strategies for one of my course assignments, one effective intervention was giving students feedback on a strategy being used to aid in their development as a student, so a Time on Task chart would provide such feedback because a student could see how their correlation in their engagement connects to their academic success in that particular class.

There are a lot of great things one can do to scaffold learning in terms of creating a classroom of disciplinary learners. Helping them engage with the necessary skills would be extremely helpful in developing their skills. For example, we have discussed the various skills in the different content areas that are used for disciplinary literacy. In math, having students use the many different strategies to help them go on a journey of self-exploration. Breaking down problems and going through the various parts is key in figuring through disciplinary literacy in math. In English, breaking down texts and going through the various literacy techniques is a focal component of disciplinary literacy. The disciplinary literacy skills used in English can be used in all subjects. Such tools are vital to other content areas, but students may not understand that they are using the tools. It is the role of the general education teacher to make students aware that the tools are being used in the content areas. In Science, there are disciplinary skills needed to conduct experiments and being truly engaged in the class. The problem I have had with this class and this curriculum is that I do not understand why I am now learning about disciplinary literacy in one of my last classes in college. Whether it is poor planning in terms of the school of ed faculty or just how it is set up, it seems a little ridiculous. Such a skill should have been taught earlier in my collegiate journey, so in my field experiences I could have focused on the disciplinary skills my host teacher was using. For example, I was in a mid-Atlantic charter school science class, and I am 100% convinced the teacher was using many disciplinary literacy skills. However, I am sure I was completely unaware he was teaching them. It seems to be that there are a lot of positives with teaching disciplinary literacy, but they are highlighted so little in pre-service teacher education. Unless I went looking for them in published articles, there would have been no way I would have found it.

After reading the article, “We Real Cool” by David Kirkland and Austin Jackson, I developed my own observations about ways to incorporate such a specific dialogue into the world of education and using it to teach disciplinary literacies. Understanding and respecting all cultures is vital, not because it is politically correct, but because it is right in the meaning of fairness to all individuals. Young Black males, regardless of where they are from, need to be empowered while in the early stages of their academic career, because it can inspire in them a vision to succeed in avenues in life, they may not have thought of before. There is no need to discount any individual because they are “Too energetic” or “Do not care about academics”. They may have things going on in their personal life that may cause them to lose sight of their academics. It is not they do not care; it is because they have bigger problems in their life that need to be accounted for when making a lesson. In the world of pre-service teaching, we talk about accommodation and differentiation for students who are exceptional, but never about students who may be tired from not sleeping at a broken home or so hungry they are unable to focus on what is going on in the classroom. Too many times in my own field experience have I seen young Black males be discounted because they are not as academically successful as their peers. The teacher never looked inward and said to themselves “Maybe I am failing the INDIVIDUAL” instead of “How come the student is failing me?”. I was in a mid-west charter school on a career day when the most shocking admission came from the teacher. An elevator operator came in to discuss his job and how he did not need a college education. When he was finished, I approached the teacher and said, “Wow that career day was fantastic!” with the upmost enthusiasm and appreciation for all the careers I had witnessed. The teacher said to me “Yea, it is great! I am happy someone without a college education came into class to let students like (Name Omitted) know that there are avenues for individuals like them.” I was stunned because the teacher was referencing one of the more energetic, young Black male students in his classroom. He was already casting the student out as someone who may not have what it takes to become someone who is “Successful” from a perspective who defines success like the rest of society; college educated and making a lot of money from a high paying job. I am just a pre-service teacher, but I understand the importance of all human life and the basic civil right that all individuals deserve a free and appropriate public education. The best teachers in the world have recognized the differences of their classroom and taken a multicultural approach that accepts and embraces all people and inspires the minds of the classroom, regardless of the color of their skin, their culture, or their gender. To tie all this into the article, it is vital to bring all cultures into the classroom and make lessons and activities that are culturally relevant to the students of the classroom. Use the societal discourses the students use in lessons and embrace what they discuss. Not only will it increase their interest but will show them that you care about their lives outside the classroom and are in the loop with what is going on in the world today. Students find it pathetic when teachers have no idea what is going on in modern society, because they find the teacher to be dated and out of touch. It is not the worst thing in the world, but definitely can be the beginning of a loss of respect for a teacher. Building a positive relationship with students can allow the teacher to have personal conversations with students that may be going through a tough time. There is no need for students’ troubles to continue over into the classroom, but they do. The classroom/school environment needs to be a safe space for all individuals and all students need to feel they can come to the teacher and discuss personal things with them or point them in the direction of someone who can. There needs to be shift in education from testing and grades to teaching the necessary disciplinary skills in content areas so students can talk control of their education and be put in the best position to succeed. Students will need help, but it is the role of a public educator to do whatever they can in their power to provide all students with equal opportunities to achieve success and maximize their potential. Every student has the willingness to succeed and have the genuine hunger to achieve great things, but when they are discounted, then they become discouraged and give up.

Article: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1254&context=colleagues

This article highlights why disciplinary literacy is vital to education. Obviously, we have discussed this over the past six weeks, so there needs to be an emphasis on it in the classroom. The skills taught in content areas is vital for the dissection of the content they are being taught. In my own academic experience, I believe my teachers did a good job of breaking down the content and giving me the tools to go about the information I was being taught in order for succeed. When is it bad to tell too much or too little? When you load students with big words, theories, and higher cognitive methods, then they become overwhelmed and lose interest in what they are doing. There needs to be a gradual increase in the cognitive level of content that a teacher teaches students. A foundation needs to be built in order for any student to succeed. When a foundation is built, then start giving them the “tools” so they can properly engage in the content. It is amazing when teachers think they are doing the students a justice by giving them higher cognitive information, but the students have no idea how to do it.

I think both videos are great, but the first video seemed to be more hands on than the second video. The teacher in the second video did a lot more teacher led instruction than the teacher in the second video. There is nothing wrong with her approach, but it is not as inquiry based as the teacher in the first video. The reading rocket video seemed to be a more effective method to teaching than the second teacher. In my own academic experiences, especially in English classes, the teacher in the first video mirrored how I was taught. A lot of group work and figuring out problems by bouncing ideas off of peers. I think both videos are great, but the first video seemed to be more hands on than the second video. The teacher in the second video did a lot more teacher led instruction than the teacher in the second video. There is nothing wrong with her approach, but it is not as inquiry based as the teacher in the first video. The reading rocket video seemed to be a more effective method to teaching than the second teacher. In my own academic experiences, especially in English classes, the teacher in the first video mirrored how I was taught. A lot of group work and figuring out problems by bouncing ideas off of peers. As a teacher, you want your students to work with the other students because not only is it an effective means of teaching, it builds a sense of community in the classroom. The reading rockets website seems to be an excellent resource for developing student literacy and fluency, while the Tedd website seems to be good for overall teaching strategies. Both videos could be used for teaching disciplinary literacy. To maximize my own teaching ability, I would probably use both of the websites. It certainly would do no harm in doing so. Scaffolding questions that challenge the student to think deeper are perfect for effective inquiry. In my teaching science course last year, the professor stressed using inquiry based learning because of how effective it is and how it is being stressed in today’s world of education. The only question I have with inquiry based learning is how much is too much? Is there a point to where there needs to be at least some teacher instruction, so the students are not sitting there completely lost? I understand it seems like a stupid question, but there are teachers now that merely introduce content and then give the students a bulk amount of time to go off on their own and practice. I believe that there needs to be a healthy amount of time spent in actually teaching the students what they need to know, and then letting them take control of their own learning. Also, with standardized testing being so prevalent in today’s world of education, does inquiry based learning conflict with what the students need to be able to do for such tests? It can be discussed and looked into that if students are given free rein on their learning and given the ability to conduct self-exploration, the tests will not reflect kindly on the teacher. This brings me to my next thought; Are standardized tests even applicable to how successful a school or teacher is? If the teacher merely teaches the test, then the they are doing the students a disservice. However, there are many academic experiences in my own life that featured teachers placing a heavy emphasis on “Standardized test prep” where we would dedicate weeks out of the school year to practicing those tests and doing problems from past tests. It is the contradiction in the world of education that needs to be figured out. It all starts with the Education Department of our government, but the people who are in charge of such are not ideal representatives of the teaching force. Not enough is being done to fix this issue and I am sure that when all the pre-service teachers are in the field, it will still be a conflict of how they would like to teach their own classrooms. I think both videos are great, but the first video seemed to be more hands on than the second video. The teacher in the second video did a lot more teacher led instruction than the teacher in the second video. There is nothing wrong with her approach, but it is not as inquiry based as the teacher in the first video. The reading rocket video seemed to be a more effective method to teaching than the second teacher. In my own academic experiences, especially in English classes, the teacher in the first video mirrored how I was taught. A lot of group work and figuring out problems by bouncing ideas off of peers.

• What are the strongest arguments for and against taking a disciplinary approach to teaching reading at the elementary levels?
  • The strongest argument for taking a disciplinary approach to teaching reading at the elementary levels is that it will set up the student for success in the later grades. By teaching disciplinary skills in the subjects in elementary school, the students will become accustomed to it when they move on in their academic journey. The counter argument is that students do not have the fundamental skills in elementary school to succeed, so they need to build the foundation first before going into disciplinary skills. In my personal opinion, I think disciplinary skills should not be taught in elementary school because the fundamental skills should be taught first, mastered, then move on to disciplinary skills. The counter argument to my counter argument could be that students could be taught both, hand and hand, instead of it being mutually exclusive.
• What Discourses, social languages, genres, and/or cultural models help to shape your focal discipline? 
  • I believe social language should be incorporated into the classroom. Students engage in this type of language in every aspect of their life, so it makes sense to incorporate it into the classroom. Especially with ELA students, it can serve as a bridge to building the necessary academic language. Incorporating all cultures also is vital to building a focal discipline that acknowledges all students have different backgrounds. I want my students to engage in discussion using social language as a bridge that can allow them to engage in intellectual discussion while also making it seem the discussion is informal and casual. When students are pressured to discuss subjects using academic language, they feel pressured to succeed and will not aim to engage in a higher cognitive level.
• Think back to experiences in your focal discipline—how were you taught? Do you believe your teachers exposed you the processes by which experts created knowledge in your focal discipline? 
  • I believe my school district did a good job of teaching the disciplines middle school all the way through to my senior year of high school. Each subject area teacher in both middle and high school did a good job of treating their students like we were developing experts in that field of study. In science we did a lot of inquiry based learning with labs and hands on learning. History classes involved examining various sources and using them to help us develop an argument when it came to writing papers. I can remember in seventh grade English how we were taught a certain method to answering standardized testing. Even when it came to answering questions in class that were not standardized testing questions, we still used that method, just to drill it into our brains and so it became habit. In the AP class I took sophomore year, the disciplinary skills that were needed for success in the class were higher than my own skill. However, it did allow me to rapidly develop my disciplinary skill for that course as the year went on, because I had to adapt or I would have failed the course.

1. What did Disciplinary Literacy teaching look like in a history and physics class? What might it look like in other school subjects?
   • In history, disciplinary literacy was giving the students a historical dilemma, and using primary sources with different perspectives help them develop their own opinion on what they believe was correct. The teacher explained to them that historians go about finding their answers differently than people in other professions, which meant that the students had to view the texts through a different lens. Not all questions needed to be answered, but as long as they found the main point of the reading and it allowed them to formulate their own argument is what was vital. In the physics class, the students engaged in inquiry regarding the laws of physics and how it applied to the effect of gravity on a ball thrown in the air. The teacher asked the students to come up with an experimental question or a hypothesis, and then work in small groups to test it. In my most recent field experience, the students spent a lot of time discussing the laws of physics and how it applies to rockets. The situation explained in the reading was almost identical to the process that occurred in my field experience. For a couple weeks, the teacher introduced a new physics law, and then the teacher would instruct the students to discuss, in their groups, how it applied to launching rockets. In math, disciplinary literacy could come in the form of the teacher introducing new math content, doing an example with the class, and then letting the students work in small groups on different problems to come up with various ways to solve the problem. Math is similar to science in the way that it takes a level of exploration of self-discovery that needs to be involved in order for students to engage in meaningful learning. In the content of English/language arts, disciplinary literacy could come in the form of breaking down a text for various parts of language (theme, metaphors, authors’ message, etc.). However, the skills used in English/language arts could also be used to dissect historical texts as well.
2. Apply the concept of content, content area, and disciplinary literacy to your own learning/teaching experiences. How do each of these concepts lead you to different interpretations of your observations?
   • When discussing content, this is the material the teacher is going to be introducing and discussing with the students. I have been in many different classrooms, with different content being taught, depending on what subject I was involved in. To me, the content is what it is in the means that a lot of the same content is taught throughout the nation, what changes is how it is taught. There have been teachers I have observed who were good at teaching their content, and some who did just enough to get by. My fall field experience Junior year was at a Midwestern, urban school where the socioeconomic level was lower and homogenous. The teacher understood that the students had bigger problems to deal with outside of school, but none the less they were high achieving students who needed to be pushed to reach their potential. This teacher did a good job of teaching the students vital disciplinary literacy skills that would be needed not only for their success that year, but for their continued success in the future. Content area is just another term for subject area, and I already touched on that when discussing content. To truly be effective at teaching a content area, a teacher needs to not only be masters of their content but understand how to explain the content in various ways, so it reaches all cognitive levels of learners. When discussing disciplinary literacy, there have been many ways the teachers from my field experiences have gone about implementing the necessary disciplinary literacy skills within their content area. The most successful disciplinary literacy took place in my most recent science field experience, when the teacher was having the students engage in the process of inquiry. The least effective use of disciplinary literacy was in my Junior year fall semester field experience when the teacher used PowerPoint presentations to teach and also used the textbook for the content area. It was not very exploratory friendly, but it did force students to do their own work or they would be lost.
3. How does disciplinary teaching look across the different school subjects?
   • Disciplinary teaching looks different across the school subjects depending upon what subject the students are engaging in. History and English deal with a lot of texts, therefore the teachers can use a similar disciplinary teaching strategy. Not for all aspects of the class, but specifically when dealing with the analyzation of texts. Science can involve a lot of math, so a science teacher may want to be cognizant of how math teachers teach disciplinary skills in case they want to utilize similar strategies. Math teachers engage in disciplinary teaching by teaching students the various steps to solving a problem and how the solution to a problem can be achieved in different ways. Having students engage in self led learning can be useful because they may feel comfortable using a different approach than what is more commonly used.

1. What is the difference between Content, Content area and Disciplinary Literacy? 
   1. Content is the relationship between the author and reader where the author is trying to convey a certain message to the reader through images and sounds, and the reader connects their own experiences to the content to make the relationship a full circle. Content area is what is taught in schools and it is usually organized by grade and a particular subject. Subject area and content area are usually interchangeable. Disciplinary literacy is taking the information from a content area and using it to go down a path of exploration. It is aimed at what is being taught rather than how it is being taught. The information being taught through disciplinary literacy is to be analyzed like one was a scientist and there were questions that needed to be answered from the information that was received.
2. What does “metadiscursivity” have to do with disciplinary literacy? Why is it important?
   1. Metadiscursivity is where students engage in disciplinary literacy outside of the school environment and use the skills and information they gain from other aspects of their life in school.  It can be great for a school setting because students are always engaging in in life, they just do not understand they are. It can make it easier for students to engage in disciplinary literacy in school, but it can also make it difficult. Students could see the information they learn in school as merely information they need to memorize and then not use. Whereas the information they learn in a non-school setting, they place a higher importance on. The difficulty for teachers is getting students to understand that the information they learn in school is more important than a level of memorization.
3. How does Moje’s disciplinary theory compare and contrast to Gee’s perspectives on reading and language
   1. Moje’s disciplinary theory discusses that students learn information more than just outside the classroom and engage with the information in many different ways. It is the job of the teacher to guide them on a journey of engaging with academic information with interest in the same manner they would with information that pleases them. Gee discussed that language is more than just used for communicating with one another and believes that humans use language in ways that we do not pay enough attention to. Teachers can use language to make educational content more interesting, so the student’s disciplinary literacy is higher than if teachers just taught information and expected students to comprehend it. By following Moje’s disciplinary theory and Gee’s perspective on language, teachers can be a better version of themselves, which would make them an even better educator. Having a broad perspective on reading would allow students to engage with more information and do more with it rather than if they did not engage in reading that they did not find interesting. It is imperative teachers lead by example and push the envelope of the different genres they read. Regardless for pleasure or for work.