An Educational Adventure in Prague

      This week in Prague was a very busy one. Last week I went out of town and visited Venice, Italy and had alot of catching up to do when I came back. The trip was worth it though. Venice is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever been in. The people there are so friendly, and every street holds a new building or view of the water that can’t be captured in a picture. It was fun to visit another area in Europe and see how very different this place is.

     Upon returning to Prague, it began to hit me that our time in Prague is winding down. With only two weeks left I have spent this week trying to make the most of my time here while completing assignments for class. It has involved a great amount of planning and time managment, but this busy week has proven to be a blast.

     One of the biggest learning experiences of the week was our micro-teaching activity in the third grade Czech classroom. Megan, Sarah, and I prepared a lesson reviewing verbs the students had learned using their workbook and our assumptions about their skill level. We had never observed the class, and weren’t really sure if our lesson would be too difficult for them. We had only observed first graders, who spoke no english, and put that knowledge with what we know about our second language classrooms at home to plan. When we entered the classroom we quickly learned that their skill level was far above what we anticipated. They were very able to use the verbs we were reviewing and were even able to form sentences. We never expected this, and thus, our lesson was a little off. While they had fun because it was an active lesson, they were not at all challenged and at times got bored with the content. This just reaffirmed Vygotsky’s theory of the Zone of Proximal Development in my mind, and our lesson did not fall within that zone, but below that zone. If I could redo the lesson I would prepare a more challenging lesson for the students, but I would still incorporate ways of allowing them to be active and to work with one another to learn and review.

APPLICATION TO ELM:

In Assessment this week we talked about aptitude tests and their ability to measure cognitive skills and ability. We discussed Intelligence tests and how these are the popular choice of aptitude tests in schools. These are usually given to those being considered “gifted” and those being considered “handicapped” so as to decide where to place them in schools. The classroom we taught in this week was a gifted third grade classroom, as is the highly selective school. I am sure the students have some sort of aptitude test to decide which students are selected for the program, but I wonder if the aptitude tests in the Czech Republic are the same as those given in the United States.

APPLICATION TO EDP:

This week in Educational Psychology we discussed Classical Conditioning, the form of learning in which a new, involuntary response is acquired as a result of two stimuli being presented simultaniously. We use classical conditioning all the time in schools when we offer rewards and punishments to our students. When Megan, Sarah, and I were in the classroom on Wednesday we didn’t offer tangible rewards, but we did offer verbal rewards. If a student did something we approved of, that student was classically conditioned with a “Good Job!” Students don’t realize it, but they then strive for that stimuli the next time. Also, other students see that stimuli and begin to want that stimuli and work for it. The goal is to use classical conditioning tactics such as rewards in moderation so that students don’t become externally motivated and dependent upon such rewards, but they can push themselves to perform with intrinsic motivation.

     This past weekend we traveled to Cesky Krumlov, a medieval town in the Czech Republic. This was a wonderful opportunity to visit another part of the Czech Republic and have a change of scenery. This was also my favorite weekend since I have been here. We toured the Budweiser brewery and went rafting on a river that ran through Cesky Krumlov. While it was chilly and we got rained on, our raft had a blast. We sang in the rain and just made the best of the experience. It was nice being outside and being away from the city for the weekend. When we made it to the end we were soaking wet, freezing cold, and very tired. The trip, however, was one I will always remember and one that I wouldn’t trade for any other.  

APPLICATION TO EDP:

     This week in educational psychology we are learning about cognitive processes and learning itself. One topic that we discussed was the use of mnemonics to remember things when you don’t have a prior knowledge base. This is especially relevent for those of us studying abroad right now in the Czech Republic. The Czech language is one that can’t be related to any other bit of knowledge I have, and while I really want to learn it, I am having a hard time doing so. Dr. Pop gave us an assignment to use mnemonics, or memory aids, to remember 25 Czech words/sentences. This is something that I have been trying to do on my own, especially with Metro Stops and grocery store items. For example, our metro stop is Jirihoho Z Podebrad, or JZP. When I first got here to remember that I just made the rhyme “JZP is home to me.” This week I am going to challenge myself to remember more words in Czech through these mnemonic devices.

APPLICATION TO ELM:

This week in Assessment we talked about essay questions, short answer response, and performance assessment. This trip abroad and these study abroad classes have held little essay questions and fewer short answer questions, but I can honestly say the trip has been one huge authentic performance assessment. While our professors not been grading us on every thing we do, like our attitudes when the rain came during rafting or our ability to find our way back to the pension when lost in the city, these are all assessments of previous learning experiences in our lives. This trip has offered the opportunity to learn and apply what has been learned over and over again, and this life assessment truly helps me measure where I have come since I have been in Prague, as well as how much more I have to learn.

This week in Prague was filled with quite a few activities that made the study abroad classroom a very different experience. First of all, we took a field trip to the Jewish Quarter and we used information gathered here to make our first assessment. We also had the chance to visit a local elementary school this week. This school was very different from schools in the United States. When we walked in there were students running through the halls, something that would not be acceptable int he United States. Then a bell rang and the students ran into their respectable classrooms and sat in their seats, ready to learn. The teacher lead them in a song and an individual activity. They then switched papers and graded eachothers work, but grades weren’t actually taken. Next, the students got into groups of three and played a game.  They rolled a letter die and had to come up with a person’s name, animal, and object that began with that letter. The kids really enjoyed this competition and everyone participated. This is not the class we will get to teach, but it was fun observing this first grade classroom and seeing both the similarities and differences between American schools and Czech schools.

APPLICATION TO ELM:

This week in assessment we learned about Bloom’s Taxonomy and the six hierarchical categories an objective can be classified into based on comlexity. While many inexperienced test writers write test questions in the lowest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, knowledge, where facts are simply memorized, questions should vary in their levels of complexity. In the classroom we visited in Prague, the teacher used higher levels of Bloom’s than pure knowledge. While she wasn’t formally assessing her students, she was still informally assessing the students knowledge of letters. Instead of giving the students a word and asking them what letter it starts with (assessing knowledge,) she gave them a letter and categories and asked them to apply their knowledge about letters and sounds so as to make words (application being a higher level of Blooms.) Such assessme are more difficult for the teacher to up with, but they better test the students understanding of the subject area.

APPLICATION TO EDP:

In Educational Psychology this week one topic that was covered was Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. Gardner states that there are 8 (or 9) different abilities that manifest themselves in different people. While this theory is controversial in education, teachers can still incorperate the different intelligences into the classroom so as to capture the attention of the students. The classroom we visited on Wednesday did just this, using multiple methods of teaching to engage each student and help him or her learn. Within the short time we were in the classroom, the teacher incorperated linguistic, spatial, and musical intelligence. When we first arrived the teacher lead her students in a song using musical. Then they did an activity where they had to find the word on the right that was not on the left, using both spatial and linguistic. Finally, the students had the word competition as described above, involving linguistic intelligence. The use of multiple intelligence, whether one agrees with the concept/term intelligence, is a good tool for keeping students engaged and making sure they are well rounded students. The teacher did a great job of doing this during our time their, and I really enjoyed watching her engage her students.

     Week Two in Prague has still found me adjusting and learning. I have done a majority of the “tourist” things: visiting the castle, walking across Charles bridge, seeing the monastery, things of that sort. I am now starting to really learn about Prague the city. I am learning about things that I could not take away from a weekend visit to Prague, and I am enjoying experiencing the city for more than just a tourist attraction. I am also enjoying taking time to learn about people, both those I am studying with and those from the Czech Republic. I have had multiple conversations about how “rude” the people in the Czech Republic are. Waitresses don’t smile at you, people in stores don’t make small talk, adults don’t seem to cut up andjoke around. There is a different standard here, a different expectation and a different way of life as far as how people act. They are not rude, they have not been taught that smiling, laughter, and playful action show that you are content.

APPLICATION TO EDP:

This week in Educational Psychology we discussed cognitive development and both Piaget and Vygotsky’s thoughts on cognitive development. When I think about my new experiences with the way people act in the Czech Republic: the differences in their behavior and demeanor, I first began to assimilate that knowledge into my existing schemas. I tried to fit their behavior into some category I had already conceived. For example, I was in a restaurant ordering dinner. Our waiter was very short with us and did not smile at all. Through assimilation I placed his behavior and considered him to be a rude person, not having another schema for his behavior. After a few days in Prague I began to notice this behavior in multiple people from the Czech Republic. I then began to discuss it with my peers and my professors. I started to learn that these people weren’t rude, they were just behaving in the way they saw appropriate. They hadn’t been taught to be overly happy and smiley at all times like I had. Joking had not been taught as an appropriate behavior. The older generation had grown up under communism. All of these factors had something to do with the “rude” attitude I had seen since I had been here. Once I began to learn more about the people of the Czech Republic, I began to accommodate this information and change my schema by building a new one for their behavior.

APPLICATION TO ELM:

In assessment, reliability is a term that is important to know. It tells the “consistency or stability of assessment results.” This week we did an exercise where we wrote an assessment to describe the beauty of various statues throughout Prague. This exercise showed us that our questions made for a test that lacked both validity, and at times, reliability. Reliability is a difficult task to solve. It is hard to write questions that measure the validity (accuracy) and reliability (consistency.) Tests such as subjective tests where inter- rater reliability is pres are extremely difficult to score as well. I have noticed, especially since I have been in Prague, that this is because of differences in people like those mentioned above. At home and around the same people/friends reliability or consistency is fairly high. You tend to like the same music, eat the same foods, enjoy the same games, etc. It is safe to say that even if an ambiguous question was written and my best friend and I looked at it, we would answer in a similar fashion. However, study abroad has allowed me to appreciate the differences in people. There are many people in this program, for example, who have completely different ways of thinking from me. The design students could, for example, look at a statue calling it art, while I call it trash, The differences of perspective don’t, however, endhere. They transcend our group and are increased by differences in culture. This is why, as we are learning in class, andas I am learning through life in Prague, assessment is so difficult. Anyone can write a question, but it is very difficult to write a question that transcends differences in background, culture, preference, nd bias to produce assessment that is both valid ad accurately showing what it is testing and reliable in coming up with consistent scores. 

Studying abroad was an experience that both excited me and made me nervous. When I heard about the trip to Prague I knew it would be an amazing experience, one that would offer the opportunity to learn both within and outside of the classroom. It would be an experience that would pull me out of my normal way of life and make me live a life I am not accustomed to. I had a vision as to what this would look like, but it has been both challenging and wonderful getting to actually live that out this week. The challenges have included everything from figuring out how to get from one place to another, using the tram and metro, and trying to overcome the language barrier in multiple situations, especially at restaurants. Every time I go to do some small task, whether it be ordering a drink or buying bananas, I learn something new about the way of life here and how different America is. Every moment is a learning experience, and learning often comes from mistakes and trying again.

One of my favorite experiences since being in Prague was our visit to Charles University on Tuesday, May 19. We went to visit a classroom of elementary education majors who were taking an English class. These students had been working on projects where they had to choose a topic and teach the class about that topic in English. I really enjoyed sitting in on this class because we got to see what the students were involved in and interested in. We also got to see the work of the students and really play a role interacting with education majors in the Czech Republic. Each student who taught had some sort of activity to go along with their topic, an activity that got the class involved. The first student who taught focused on emotions. She had the class call out different emotions, and Megan made an idea map on the board organizing those emotions. The class then spent some time talking about different emotions in more depth, answering questions and filling in sentences like: “ I feel happy when I ________.” The second student who taught gave the class a mini quiz on Charles University. Everyone had to work with a partner to figure out the correct answers, and once you got all answers correct they made a word. She then played bingo with the class, having each bingo square hold a word. She read the story of the Ginger Bread Man and as the students heard a key vocabulary word in the story the covered it on their card. At the completion of the presentations the teacher had a small lesson with the class on the word stress. In groups we talked about what stresses us out and how we deal with stress. She then had the English speakers take turns coming to the board and writing down answers as each group shared things that are stressful and things that can be done to reduce stress. The teacher ended by reminding the students of their final exams coming up, and dismissed the class. I really enjoyed seeing how the Czech classroom worked and being a part of that class. I also enjoyed meeting the students who have similar goals as mine and being able to talk to them about similarities and differences in our lives. This trip to Charles University provided perfect application of what was learned in class this week to what was seen in my experiences in Prague.

APPLICATION TO EDP:

This week in Educational Psychology we discussed different teaching strategies used in the classroom, and those strategies were apparent in the classroom we visited at Charles University. First of all, In-Class Activities were apparent throughout the period, making up the majority of what the students did during that day. In-Class activities are authentic activities and are a type of project based learning, pulling higher level learning skills. The students had to take the English they had learned, and teach about a topic of their interest using the English they knew. Not only did they have to use English, but they had to know it well enough to use it in the instruction of others. They had to plan activities to teach others an idea that they wanted to get across so that the other students in the class would understand, for example, emotions in English, or so that the students would have a stronger grasp on their vocabulary words and at reading in English. This required preparation and careful planning. Next, I saw cooperative learning. Both the student planned lessons and the teacher lead lesson involved students working in groups with one another to reach common goals and help one another learn. (Ormrod p.470) The small groups helped the students discuss a topic and work through their ideas before presenting them to the whole group as a final thought.

APPLICATION TO ELM:

This week in Assessment we discussed different types of assessment, and in the class at Charles University different types of assessment were being implemented. We learned formative assessment was like a checkpoint, making sure students were where they were supposed to be, while summative was a final checkpoint. Traditional assessment was a regular assessment, like a spelling test, while authentic assessment was a “real life” assessment. The presentations we saw on Tuesday were both formative and authentic. They were a checkpoint of the student’s English and a way for them to demonstrate their progress thus far in the semester. They were also authentic in that they were done in the method of teaching one another, especially since they were taught by a group of education majors. This factor made the assignment even more authentic because it gave the students a chance to practice preparing a creative lesson and implementing that lesson. While we didn’t see Summative or traditional assessment while visiting with this class at Charles University, we did hear about a final exam the students would have to take. The teacher was giving the students details about the time and location of the exam, and I talked to one student about how nervous she was about her exams, or summative assessments, in general.