A) Eric Jensen’s main two arguments for teaching students who are in poverty is the

importance of relationships and the need to break down barrios. Jensen believes
that relationships are important because without having a firm relationship with a
student, you can’t fully understand them or their life outside of school, which has
a huge factor on their schooling as a whole. Having this essential relationship will
also help me in the future to make classroom management decisions. This is
because if I have more understanding for what a student is going through, I am
able to better asses how to deal with punishments that they may need due to
their actions.
Jensen’s second argument of breaking down barrios was shown in his video
when talking about the school. This school worked with many student in poverty.
Their goal was to give each student the support they needed to succeed. If the
student needed help with homework, they were able to stay after with a tutor. If
the student didn’t know how to apply for colleges, they would help with this. If the
students didn’t have money for college, they would help in finding and applying
for scholarships to make school more affordable. I am not optimistic that I can
solely do all of these things for students in my future classroom, but I can do my
best. I believe this argument by Jensen has been more beneficial to me in the
way that it proves that each student has the power to succeed, something I
previously was wavering about. This will allow me to help each and every student
to my full extent without believing my efforts are being wasted.

B) As of right now, the soft skills that students seem to be struggling with are
communication, teamwork, and work ethic. This doesn’t necessarily have to do
with how my cooperating teacher is choosing to teach and more to do with the
way in which he has to teach. Upon trying breakout rooms during one of my field
experiences, many kids were trying to communicate but couldn’t due to glitchy
internet. This makes communication close to impossible, and also has negative
effects with teamworking. Although there are nonverbal ways to practice
teamworking, I believe that by solely doing these children’s soft skill of teamwork
will fall short. He is developing leadership, problem solving, and capacity to
accept and learn criticism. One way I have seen leadership in his classrooms is
when he is seeing if technology is working or asks for someone to respond. All
students seem to be eager to share their answers, and still show this excitement
if they get an answer wrong. This shows me that they are able to learn through
criticism and understand the importance of mistakes in learning. Lastly, he is
developing problem solving in his students because they all respond in pear doc
where he includes many interactive lessons, for example, students were asked to
recreate Pangea which took a lot of hard and creative thinking.

C) I believe that the most important 21st Century Skills for these sixth-grade science
students include global awareness, environmental literacy, and reasoning
effectively.

D) Attending to students’ funds of knowledge in the mathematics classroom

E) Piaget’s theory supports this resource. The resource talks a lot about how
students move through stages that ultimately deepen knowledge. Many of the
strategies given by this source requires a higher level of developmental thinking.
If students simply learned by being shown a problem and asked to repeat, then
they would never be depending their thoughts. Through allowing students to
teach each other and play different roles, they are gaining a deeper knowledge in
the subject area and will ultimately aid students through the stages and help
them gain a deeper understanding.