Reflection of Eisner's Three Curricula All School Teach

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"....the use of extrinsic rewards can create a set of expectations on the children's part that dampens their future interest in activities if extrinsic rewards are not provided.

  • It reminds me of my experience of teaching 10th grade mathematics in Shanghai. 10th Grade has 4 homeroom, and students have all the classes in their homeroom. I was a math teacher of two homerooms and my colleague was teaching the other two. In my colleague's class, students would get a token every time they answer a question, and students were told that there would be a reward for students who gained the most amount of tokens. In the middle of the semester, one of her student transferred to my classroom for some reasons. And my new student was disappointed after he knew I was not doing this reward activity. After knowing this kind of extrinsic rewards was happening in the other two homerooms, my students wish I could do this as well. I appreciated the effort that my colleague had put to encourage students to answer the questions, but I had a doubt of whether this was a right approach to engage students. Now I am glad that I have a chance to read this article, and get to know more about the impact of extrinsic rewards. 
"Competitiveness is not only fostered by grading system; it is also fostered by the differentiation of classes into ability groups."

  • Personally I am interested in this topic because I used to be a math teacher of both an honer class and a "normal" class at the same time. I agree with Eisner's argument about differentiating students into different class based on they academic ability. However, I also see the some advantages of this class setting. For example, honer class might have a faster teaching space and more challenging problems would be able to to introduced since students in this class have a higher level of mathematics. And for the "normal" class, I would have lower teaching pace and assigned problems that were capable to be solved by the students since they were already not confident in learning mathematics. 

Comments

  1. Susan GerofskyJanuary 8, 2020 at 5:15 PM

    Great commentary, Wanyi! You've connected the reading with your own teaching experiences in interesting ways. (Note the spelling of 'honour class' -- I was a bit confused on first reading but I understand now!)

    ReplyDelete

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