Reflection on Joel Springs book Common Core: A Story of School Terrorism

We discussed as a group the quote from page 135, They crammed into the
small room behind the one-way glass looking into a classroom of twenty
students receiving instruction from Sally2, the reprogrammed teacher robot.
We discussed how this quote really could symbolize a couple different things in
the realm of education. Some of us in the group are new teachers and need to
go through the whole formal observation process. We discussed how the oneway mirror could symbolize our evaluator grading us on our teaching without
knowing the true dynamic of the classroom relationships between students
and students, students and teachers, and teacher and teacher if in a coteaching environment. A student may look like they are dominating the
classroom discussion or teachers time to help students but if you are just
behind a one-way mirror you do not know the true circumstances of the
interactions seen.
We also discussed how looking behind one-way mirror can also represent how
policy makers and politicians are like standing behind a one-way mirror. They
may claim they have observe classrooms and know what is going on in the
schools, but unless they spend all the time observing the same classroom they
truly do not know what is really happening in this classroom and school. The
observations could also not be generalized for the whole county.

The passage that I thought was interesting was from page 137, The room grew
quiet as they watched the robot bend over and point at the tablet saying, The
proof is based on the proportionality of the sides of two similar triangles The
lesson is good preparation for passing. I think in my every day teaching where
I will have the book definition for my students and then we try to break it down
in our own words so we can truly understand it. I also thought how I taught
the Pythagorean Theorem this year and how just regurgitating the book
theorem or definition will not truly get the students to understand the main
topics.
Discussion of Reliability and Validity
We spent some time during our group discussion talking about the reliability
and validity of our research. One thing that came up frequently during this
discussion was how reliable and valid our research would be outside our own
classroom or the school. We talked about how some of our finding may truly be
specific to a class, a grade, or a school but trying to take on too much and
extend our research could make us lose focus of our research. If the research I
am doing in my classroom relates to just my class, my findings do not
necessarily become less valid or reliable because of the concentrated research.
The majority of our research in my group was taking the Emic approach, so we

could really focus on and be part of inside the system, not Etic where we would
be outsiders.