#5: History of Education

In my service learning classroom, I saw students who appeared to be from different ethnic backgrounds, which comes from Brown v. Board of Education. One thing that actually bothered me a bit is that I saw one student, who I'll call Jake (that's not his real name), who was having a lot of trouble focusing, following instructions, and sitting still. My brother has severe ADHD that he's learned to manage, but in elementary school, he acted a lot like Jake. I'm definitely not qualified to diagnose him, but if I were his teacher, I would've recommended that he be evaluated. Under IDEA and section 504, he could've gotten help to learn how to manage it, as well as things like extra time on assignments, individual instruction, and even counseling. They also learned about science, which comes from Sputnik making science more of a priority in schools.

From the research I've done on No Child Left Behind, it was actually replaced by the Every Child Succeeds Act in 2015. This law moves to give education to the states, rather than the federal government. It also gets rid of an accountability system that punished states with underperforming students. However, it keeps standardized testing in place. 

#4: Engaged Learning

My cooperating teacher engages her students pretty well. One activity involved play-doh. She had the kids make letters out of play-doh, then had them form words with the letters, similarly to the video we watched where the kids had letters on little pieces of paper.
Another activity she did was a "guess what number I'm thinking of" game while they were waiting in line to leave for lunch. She gave them clues like "it's an even number, it's greater than 100, the number in the 100s place is a 2," etc.
A third activity she did was on the class iPads. The students went to a website called Prodigy, where they can play math games.

One activity she does that didn't engage the students as much as it could've was a worksheet on grammar and spelling. She could have made it into a game where the first person to find all the mistakes in the sentence wins.