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Peer Teaching Nummelin Home Learn More Standards Inspiration About the Author |
About the Author: Minna Nummelin
Photo by Manuel De La Rosa
Background
After my studies at Pacific Union College, including an academic year in Argentina where I learned Spanish, I began my teaching career in a small, Northern California K-6 elementary school where I was one of 3 teachers. There, my mom, the K-1 teacher prepared students with great learning habits to enter my 2-3 combo class, and my neighbor, the 4-6th grade teacher, mentored me through the BTSA program. After learning many lessons there for two years, I got a job in a 90-10 dual Spanish English immersion school where I have been teaching 2nd grade for the last 7 years.
My Teaching Philosophy
Through my career and in working with others I have learned that my contribution to a team is often as an innovator. I enjoy thinking up solutions and carving out new paths where old ones are inefficient. I believe in my students’ ability to run their own learning and I want to hand over the keys to the car as early as possible because “the person who does the work does the learning.” I do quite a lot of work as do most teachers and as an ever learning teacher, I constantly am reminding myself that if I don’t hand over some of that responsibility to my students, I’m taking away their learning opportunities. I am a true believer in setting high expectations accompanied by rigorous, yet predictable routines in the beginning of the year so that with time, students can accomplish things they never would have initially thought were in their capacity to do.
Teaching During a Pandemic
The part of my teaching journey that has led me through a global pandemic has brought many discoveries. I am in awe of my students’ capabilities. They are exponentially better at navigating the tech world than when I first met them in August...and I am too! Because of this, so many learning doors have been opened and I can see their academic knowledge expanding as well. This is a major joy factor that keeps me in the profession. I love watching and participating in growth. During the pandemic, concepts and standards have remained the same but the delivery time and style is a whole new world. The "mini" in mini-lesson has taken on a whole new level of importance. Each concept has to be reimagined to fit onto a screen and explained clearly in a matter of a few minutes with accompanying exercises that are easily understood and easily manipulable for 7 year olds.
Entering the Innovative Learning Masters Program
“What will I do this summer?,” I wondered to myself as the end of my first trimester of virtual teaching drew to a close in May of 2020. “Maybe I should tutor...maybe I should study more…” Traveling was off the list as the COVID-19 pandemic had just begun a few months earlier. I remembered the promotional email that had popped up in my overloaded inbox for the masters program for Innovative Learning through Touro University. After hemming and hawing about the big step to enroll, I finally decided that opportunity’s door had opened for me and I needed to step through it. I have always been a learner and knowledge seeker, continually naive about the hard work that the learning process entails. Despite the hard work, I always come out a better person after wrangling through new phases of learning.
The Path to Peer Teaching
My research focus in the Innovative Learning masters program has gone through many revisions. It began with my interest in feedback and morphed into peer teaching as I realized I wanted to emphasize peers providing that feedback to each other. Peer teaching has been studied many times but a vast majority of research has focused on secondary and higher education students. I believed that even primary aged children teach and learn from each other. John Hattie's research found that students retain more of what they hear from their peers than what they hear from their teacher. So if what I was saying was going in one ear and out the other for the majority of my talk time, I decided I wanted to give peers an opportunity to teach each other and that my job would be to check in to make sure that what was being communicated was accurate.
Lasting Learning from the Innovative Learning Program
Right from the beginning of having students work together in Zoom breakout rooms, I saw smiles and I heard students guiding each other in all kinds of ways that I hadn't realized were areas of need before. If I wouldn't have allowed my students this communication and grappling space, many would have continued to flounder in just the initial steps of an assignment. By working with a peer, small hurdles were easily overcome.
I, myself, had hurdles to jump over, one of which was losing over half my students in the middle of my action research due to a switch to hybrid learning. With the students went some of their unrecoverable data into the technological abyss. My research cycle two took place almost immediately after I was introduced to a new mix of students. Results were less dramatic and one take-away for me is that successful peer teaching is built on top of strong classroom community connections. One of the main lightbulbs that has switched on for me over the course of this Innovative Learning masters program is that self-driven learning is exponentially more powerful than teacher directed learning. I have only gotten my toes wet with this idea by implementing peer teaching. But it has shown me that by students sharing a learning experience with a peer, they are better able to remember concepts and increase their desire to understand new concepts related to that activity.
Other lightbulbs have gone off during the program as well. I've been introduced to so many new technological tools to use with students. These are not tools for virtual teaching, but are tools for teaching in any setting where the technology is available. The point is not to have little eyeballs at the screen, clicking from app to app but to have a wide array of tools at my disposal to improve my lesson delivery and to allow students to show their learning and engage with classmates. With the new technology I've learned, I have been able to take initial steps, cognizant that there are so many more ahead of me that will continue to open doors to student learning.
After my studies at Pacific Union College, including an academic year in Argentina where I learned Spanish, I began my teaching career in a small, Northern California K-6 elementary school where I was one of 3 teachers. There, my mom, the K-1 teacher prepared students with great learning habits to enter my 2-3 combo class, and my neighbor, the 4-6th grade teacher, mentored me through the BTSA program. After learning many lessons there for two years, I got a job in a 90-10 dual Spanish English immersion school where I have been teaching 2nd grade for the last 7 years.
My Teaching Philosophy
Through my career and in working with others I have learned that my contribution to a team is often as an innovator. I enjoy thinking up solutions and carving out new paths where old ones are inefficient. I believe in my students’ ability to run their own learning and I want to hand over the keys to the car as early as possible because “the person who does the work does the learning.” I do quite a lot of work as do most teachers and as an ever learning teacher, I constantly am reminding myself that if I don’t hand over some of that responsibility to my students, I’m taking away their learning opportunities. I am a true believer in setting high expectations accompanied by rigorous, yet predictable routines in the beginning of the year so that with time, students can accomplish things they never would have initially thought were in their capacity to do.
Teaching During a Pandemic
The part of my teaching journey that has led me through a global pandemic has brought many discoveries. I am in awe of my students’ capabilities. They are exponentially better at navigating the tech world than when I first met them in August...and I am too! Because of this, so many learning doors have been opened and I can see their academic knowledge expanding as well. This is a major joy factor that keeps me in the profession. I love watching and participating in growth. During the pandemic, concepts and standards have remained the same but the delivery time and style is a whole new world. The "mini" in mini-lesson has taken on a whole new level of importance. Each concept has to be reimagined to fit onto a screen and explained clearly in a matter of a few minutes with accompanying exercises that are easily understood and easily manipulable for 7 year olds.
Entering the Innovative Learning Masters Program
“What will I do this summer?,” I wondered to myself as the end of my first trimester of virtual teaching drew to a close in May of 2020. “Maybe I should tutor...maybe I should study more…” Traveling was off the list as the COVID-19 pandemic had just begun a few months earlier. I remembered the promotional email that had popped up in my overloaded inbox for the masters program for Innovative Learning through Touro University. After hemming and hawing about the big step to enroll, I finally decided that opportunity’s door had opened for me and I needed to step through it. I have always been a learner and knowledge seeker, continually naive about the hard work that the learning process entails. Despite the hard work, I always come out a better person after wrangling through new phases of learning.
The Path to Peer Teaching
My research focus in the Innovative Learning masters program has gone through many revisions. It began with my interest in feedback and morphed into peer teaching as I realized I wanted to emphasize peers providing that feedback to each other. Peer teaching has been studied many times but a vast majority of research has focused on secondary and higher education students. I believed that even primary aged children teach and learn from each other. John Hattie's research found that students retain more of what they hear from their peers than what they hear from their teacher. So if what I was saying was going in one ear and out the other for the majority of my talk time, I decided I wanted to give peers an opportunity to teach each other and that my job would be to check in to make sure that what was being communicated was accurate.
Lasting Learning from the Innovative Learning Program
Right from the beginning of having students work together in Zoom breakout rooms, I saw smiles and I heard students guiding each other in all kinds of ways that I hadn't realized were areas of need before. If I wouldn't have allowed my students this communication and grappling space, many would have continued to flounder in just the initial steps of an assignment. By working with a peer, small hurdles were easily overcome.
I, myself, had hurdles to jump over, one of which was losing over half my students in the middle of my action research due to a switch to hybrid learning. With the students went some of their unrecoverable data into the technological abyss. My research cycle two took place almost immediately after I was introduced to a new mix of students. Results were less dramatic and one take-away for me is that successful peer teaching is built on top of strong classroom community connections. One of the main lightbulbs that has switched on for me over the course of this Innovative Learning masters program is that self-driven learning is exponentially more powerful than teacher directed learning. I have only gotten my toes wet with this idea by implementing peer teaching. But it has shown me that by students sharing a learning experience with a peer, they are better able to remember concepts and increase their desire to understand new concepts related to that activity.
Other lightbulbs have gone off during the program as well. I've been introduced to so many new technological tools to use with students. These are not tools for virtual teaching, but are tools for teaching in any setting where the technology is available. The point is not to have little eyeballs at the screen, clicking from app to app but to have a wide array of tools at my disposal to improve my lesson delivery and to allow students to show their learning and engage with classmates. With the new technology I've learned, I have been able to take initial steps, cognizant that there are so many more ahead of me that will continue to open doors to student learning.
TPACK: Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge
What a mouthful of teacher lingo, right? Through the Innovative Learning Masters Program, I have become familiar with the TPACK model. The TPACK model depicts the integration of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge practices into multiple learning settings. In today's world, educators need to be well versed in technology, not just for their own organizational well-being but to ensure their students' preparedness for a world of ever changing technology. As I waded through my action research in the classroom, I had to deepen my understanding and comfortability with the technological tools available to me in order to effectively deliver content knowledge in the area of math. After teaching second grade for over 8 years, I was happy not to struggle too much with content knowledge, successfully predicting what was up ahead in our math learning journey. Without effective teaching strategies, or pedagogy, however, this content knowledge and any technology skills I had would be of little use. A teacher's effectiveness in today's world largely depends on the ability to grow in, and integrate all three of these domains into one's teaching practice, especially in the world of virtual learning. The balance of all three of these elements looks different in each particular grade level and community of learners. Older and younger students need different content knowledge, different pedagogical strategies, and different levels of technology integration and skills in order to succeed in learning. Keeping these three components and their balanced integration at the forefront of the teaching practice is what leads to success in learning for students of all ages.
What a mouthful of teacher lingo, right? Through the Innovative Learning Masters Program, I have become familiar with the TPACK model. The TPACK model depicts the integration of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge practices into multiple learning settings. In today's world, educators need to be well versed in technology, not just for their own organizational well-being but to ensure their students' preparedness for a world of ever changing technology. As I waded through my action research in the classroom, I had to deepen my understanding and comfortability with the technological tools available to me in order to effectively deliver content knowledge in the area of math. After teaching second grade for over 8 years, I was happy not to struggle too much with content knowledge, successfully predicting what was up ahead in our math learning journey. Without effective teaching strategies, or pedagogy, however, this content knowledge and any technology skills I had would be of little use. A teacher's effectiveness in today's world largely depends on the ability to grow in, and integrate all three of these domains into one's teaching practice, especially in the world of virtual learning. The balance of all three of these elements looks different in each particular grade level and community of learners. Older and younger students need different content knowledge, different pedagogical strategies, and different levels of technology integration and skills in order to succeed in learning. Keeping these three components and their balanced integration at the forefront of the teaching practice is what leads to success in learning for students of all ages.