Inquiry Project-Again

The final week of school is at hand, and the inquiry project is where my focus seems to be lying right now. I’m not complaining -- I am actually enjoying reading the research and writing the paper. Originally I was going to research about how to use diversity in a classroom can be utilized, however I was not finding good sources. I therefore changed my topic to “How do the arts affect academic achievement?” I was involved in the arts when I was younger. I played a few instruments, did a few plays and musicals, and was involved in several choirs.

For me, the arts greatly affected my achievement in school in various ways. I will explain this further in my paper, but I am also interested in researching the statistics behind success of students involved in the arts. I have found many articles pertaining to the fact that the arts do indeed have an impact on academic achieve. One article even claims that the arts can help create creativity. Of course I will have to look at the negative sides as well and the contradictions, but I am really excited to finish this paper and discover how the arts have affected other people as well.

Community Service: Ten Hours

For my 10 hours of community service I have been involved with “CCMP” or “Community Connections Mentoring Program” held at Montclair State. Every Tuesday night for an hour and a half, students grades K-12 come from Newark and we run a mentoring program in which we all talk about and discuss things pertaining to education. From what I understand, the program used to be a tutoring program, however they did not have enough students to tutor each subject and so now we focus primarily on encouraging students with their education and helping them with anything they may be struggling with in school. My group consists of two 8th grade girls. Both struggle in math and so we have been trying to come up with fun ways to help them study. We also talk a lot about college and what they want to do with their lives. The one girl wants to be a fashion designer and design her own perfume, which we explained that math could really be helpful in doing so. We have a lot of fun each week learning about each other and incorporating education within our discussions and activities. The program runs for 6 weeks, and also has an additional two weeks worth of training and orientation.

In addition to the mentoring program, I also bought a Thanksgiving dinner for a family in need. The church I am currently attending collected Thanksgiving dinners for families in need, and then delivered those dinners to the families right before Thanksgiving. I believe we had about 50 dinners all together, which was a pretty good accomplishment considering there are only about 20 people in this new church.

Community Meetings

I finally completed both of my meetings for the class field work requirements. In one, I attended a football game several weeks ago, and then Tuesday after my full day observation, I attended a meeting for teachers in Newark Arts High School. The meetings are held every month over the course of a few days, and require all the teachers to attend at one of the meetings. They are named “PLCs” or “Professional Learning Communities”, and they were started about a year ago by the new principal at Arts High. Each meeting the teachers are given readings and documents prior to the meeting, and they are expected to read and come up with their own conclusions and be prepared to discuss what they discovered. Each meeting is about an hour long and contains a meeting objective as well as guiding questions that help guide the main issues to be discussed.

Every participant in the meeting is also given an opportunity to share.
In this particular meeting, the discussion was based on open-ended questions. The teachers and vice principal discussed what the definition of open-ended questions were, how “open” an open-ended question can be, what makes a question “open”, and when is it appropriate to ask open-ended questions. It may sound like the topic became monotonous; however there were a lot of ideas that the teachers shared that were very helpful. For example, one teacher shared that asking open-ended questions gives students the ability to share their thoughts with others, even if that student is generally very shy.