Monday, February 20, 2017
What are you noticing about Gender Bias, Ability Grouping, students with Special Learning Needs?
In your clinical placement please share some of your observations about gender differences/bias, are if students are grouped by ability and how that occurs, and they way students with special learning needs are provided for in your setting. Are you noticing other students that are marginalized? Can you describe that?
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These questions are a little bit difficult, because I really only see the students in entire class groups when giving guidance lessons. With that being said, teachers will generally leave, so it is difficult to pinpoint specific gender bias. However, I do recall one example, in that at recess some teachers will talk to the genders differently. They may yell more at the boys for being "too rough," while acting more gentle towards the young girls. Honestly, the biggest gender difference is clothing styles, but behaviors are generally very similar. The only thing that really stands out to me is when counseling boys, they move around more, compared to girls.
ReplyDeleteAgain, I am not sure if the general classrooms group children by ability. I do know of the TAG program that involves the "talented and gifted" students. They are pulled out of their regular classrooms and given extra activities.
Students with special learning needs are either in their own classroom with an extra aide or again, pulled out by a specific teacher to work on certain subject areas away from the regular classroom setting.
Fortunately, I do not notice students being marginalized. Again, I think this comes from working more with my site supervisor, who is a counselor, than spending my time with all of the teachers in the school. I work directly with the students which makes it hard to determine whether or not other students are being marginalized.
I haven't noticed any gender bias in my placement. The teacher I am with doesn't seem to treat the genders differently. Students generally work in groups of 2 to 3, which they self assign. This does tend to result in the higher achieving students grouped together and the lower achieving students grouped together, but the teacher doesn't assign groups. She also doesn't change around the groupings that the students choose. I generally walk around and help the students when they are working in groups, so I often spend most of my time with the groups of lower achieving students. I spend more time helping them than the teacher does. The main two students with special learning needs that come to mind are a boy with ADHD and a girl with low vision. The girl is given large print worksheets and handouts and the teacher writes down anything written on the board for her. She is seated front and center. Otherwise, she participates with the other students. The boy with ADHD is allowed to wander the back of the classroom behind the desks while the teacher is talking. The other students generally are not bothered by this. He answers questions and participates in discussions even though he is not seated with the rest of the class. During group work, he generally is in and out of a seat, but he does participate with his group and they are generally not bothered by his occasional wanderings. The students that seem somewhat marginalized are a few of the lower achieving students who are very disengaged with the class and generally do not participate. I have asked them why they don't participate and was told that it didn't matter because they were too dumb to get it anyway and it wasn't going to be useful to them, so they were just going to sit there. The teacher told me she has given up trying to engage them. Occasionally they choose to do some work, but they generally just sit there and the teacher lets them do so.
ReplyDeleteWhile at my placement in 1st grade, it seems that the gender bias is a double-edged sword where the teacher treats ‘gender specific’ behaviors accordingly. Female students are more likely to be allowed to be out of their seats but are quickly reprimanded for talking out of turn or tattling on other students. Boys seem to be kept on a short leash overall and the teacher is vigilant for boys who are out their seats or not controlling their bodies. I find it interesting, but also troublesome. The teacher frames the major issues of the girls being “chatty” and boys “grabby,” which seems biased, but her analysis is quite accurate for the behaviors in the class. Framing the perceived differences between genders at a young age seems to be troublesome, but the girls in the class are always chatting and the boys want to wrestle.
ReplyDeleteThere is a large range of academic performance in the classroom and the teacher is proactive in using running records and other low stakes assessments to track students’ performance. Reading groups during the ELA block are separated by reading level and a reading specialist comes in the room to work with the lowest students. The students also have free choices during this block and the teacher tries to group high and low level readers in paired activities. She is also proactive in her seating chart which she shifts regularly and couches lower students with higher achievers. She also privately interviews students to see who they would like to sit next to. This has produced very interesting results (students did not just simply want to sit next to their best friends) and we feel that it brings a greater sense of community and student-led direction to the class.
I am in a fourth grade classroom and I have not noticed anything happening with gender biases. The teacher I am with has been teaching for a long time, so I think that she just sees all of the students as "kids" regardless of their gender. I am not with the students when they are with any other teachers, so I can't speak for the way other teachers react. Students who require special services seem to receive extra help while in the main stream classroom. There are two students specifically who need extra help in reading/writing and after the lesson is taught the teacher will help one of the students and I will help the other. There are some students who leave the classroom for help in reading. When they come back into the class, they usually simply join in with whatever the rest of the class is working on. The only time I have seen those students treated differently was last week. Many of the fourth graders were participating in testing, so the remaining students in all of the classes were combined and went to each classroom for different stations. The students who needed to still went to their remedial classes but when they returned there was nowhere for them to sit because most of the fourth grade was in our classroom for that station. The students were sent to another classroom because of the overflow. They were still doing what the other students were doing but they were in a room with no other children and just a teacher. This was the only time I have seen them treated differently and it wasn't because of their abilities, it was just coincidence that they came in late because of their class. The teacher I am with seems to treat her students fairly and I haven't noticed the students treating each other differently for any reason. They seem to work together very well, in fact their seats are in different places every week because they all talk to each other too much!
ReplyDeleteMy teacher is a high school social studies teacher. My time in the classroom consists of 12th grade civics and 10th grade history for multiple periods each. I have not noticed ability grouping or gender bias to a whole lot of extent. What little gender bias I have witnessed was the teacher simply telling me while I was grading students tests which ones I'd have to look closer at based on them being athletes or not saying the male athletes feel they have more important things to do than study. I think that may have been her simply knowing how much effort they put into studying but at the same time knowing it was mainly male students targeted for this makes me think of this as gender bias. Students with special needs are treated fairly in the classroom. Either the teacher or I pull the students aside that need extra help depending on what the teacher is doing at the moment and go through the worksheets with them as a small group. On tests she has a special test for them with the choices narrowed down to two and the questions in bigger print.
ReplyDeleteBeing a school counselor, my classroom observations have been minimal, except when I'm doing a developmental guidance lesson or maybe running a group with a small number of students. After thinking about this post, I would like to be able to observe more often to see if I could point out gender bias or ability grouping.
ReplyDeleteAt my particular elementary site, for small groups, boys and girls are separated. My supervisor feels the students have a better learning experience if they are grouped that way. I have noticed in the younger grades, Pre-K-3, girls and boys often socialize and interact together. From 4th grade on, I can see differences in their play between boys and girls and they are more prone to making close friends within their own genders. However, that's not always the case.
As far as students with special learning needs, they are often in the same classroom as those without, and sometimes have an aide or helper working with them. In some cases, students are pulled out of classes. I feel that students with special needs are being provided for well at both my sites during internship.
Thankfully, I have not noticed many students being marginalized in the schools so far.
As the other counselors have mentioned, I have not seen much gender bias at my internship. This is because I do not generally see classroom teachers interact with their classes. When I am there, the teachers are either in the back of the room planning or leave the room all together. Therefore, it would be difficult to see anything occur. With that being said, I am not assuming it does not happen. I am sure that it (unfortunately) happens at both of my placement sites. After thinking about it, I will be much more vigilant in noticing and advocating for students in this situation. Most special education students are in pull-out classes, but still have some regular ed classes as well. I think this is done in order to prevent marginalization. The only students who are separated totally are the severe and profound students. Further, when I am running groups I do my best not to exclude students. Most of my groups have boys and girls in it. I also include special education students if they wish to sign up (all students are given this opportunity). The only groups I have separate are the "Girls Only" and "Boys Only" groups, but I make sure that I am running both so no one feels ostracized.
ReplyDeleteAs the other school counseling students have mentioned, I have not really had the opportunity to see much gender bias within my placements. When I am in the classroom, doing lessons, I have not really seen anything to indicate that one gender is treated differently than the other. If anything, it has been interesting to observe students at the lower levels, who seem to not really care about gender differences, and then moving upwards to students who hang out directly with other students of the same gender. As far as learning ability is concerned, I have not seen any outright grouping, but at both placements, students with specialized needs are either mainstreamed into the classroom with an aide or their needs are so severe that they are in another class entirely.
ReplyDeleteI'm at West Fairmont Middle school, and I haven't seen any gender bias yet. As Amanda mentioned, it seems like all of the students are "kids" to the teacher I'm observing. I truly can't think of anything that she does differently between the two.
ReplyDeleteAs far as ability grouping, at first I thought this did occur. My first day in my placement, my teacher made the comment that I could be extra helpful in her first period because these students need extra help. She said that she moves that class at a different pace, so I thought this was an intentional grouping. Last week, however, I inquired some more about how they decided who would be in that class, and it turns out that it was coincidence that these students happened to all be in that class together. As I was talking with my teacher, I learned that it is actually her preference to work with grouped classes. When I shared some of the research findings about grouping students (which is that grouping is actually not as helpful as it seems), she seemed undeterred in her opinion that it IS helpful for her students. Short answer on grouping: Fairmont Middle does not do ability grouping (other than by accident) unless the students absolutely cannot function in the class atmosphere because of a learning or behavioral disorder. In this case, they are placed in LD or BD class.
I am in a fourth grade class at Brookhaven Elementary and both the students and teacher are great. The only gender bias I have slightly recognized within the classroom is that the teacher tends to scold the male students a bit more harshly than the female students when they are unfocused, out of their designated areas, or speaking while the teacher is talking. The gender bias is very slight.
ReplyDeleteI like how the ability grouping for this class is demonstrated. The teacher has organized desks into groups of 4 and the abilities of these students vary so they tend to help each other with work when needed. The more challenged readers in the class go for specialized help throughout the day with another staff member. The math set up is really beneficial to the students. They do math as a whole class and later in the day separate into ability groups for a half hour. My host teacher leads the higher leveled math group and it is so interesting to see how quickly they catch on to the math concepts. The teacher will put a problem on the board and each student has a dry erase board and marker to work out the problem. It really seems to work for this group.
There is only one special learning needs child that I have noticed in the class and he is treated the same as the other students.
My experience so far has been really great and I am glad to be in this particular teachers classroom!
I have not noticed very much gender bias in my class. The teacher definitely does treat either gender differently. I think this lack of gender bias is due to the fact that my students are so young. As we learned in class when they are very young, gender bias is not as noticeable. Most students will engage and play with one another regardless of gender. Also there does not appear to be ability grouping intentionally. Sometimes students are given free time to play or look at books after they complete a task, and it each time its the same students that complete activities first. This kind of makes you aware of the students abilities because you see which ones can easily complete assignments. Although the grouping isn't intentional it is evident to the students who the most competent classmates are.
ReplyDelete