From: Eugene Matusov
Submit: Post Message
Date: 07 Nov 1996
Time: 18:21:02
Hi Valerie--
You wrote, " i feel that the children are not really being motivated to come anymore. i see less faces than i did at the beginning. "
I share your worry about deterioration of the ecology at Barrious Unidos for kids. I want to ask you (or somebody else) to examine the dynamics of the kids' attendence. Maurice told me that has an attendence sheet where he marks kids' attendence every day. Can you (or somebody else) creat a table by week or by some days (to exclude the week with the recent holiday), so we can check your hypothesis that fewer kids attend Barrios Unidos than previously. We can also start asking kids about how do they feel about Barrios Unidos.
You wrote, " i feel like im seeing the kids i work with stay more in the 1st stage of zpd then to do the process of progressing through it. this may due to factors such as the fact that i dont really work with the same child every time or to the lack of computers, but nontheless im feeling a bit lost ."
This is also very interesting point. I'm thinking to design additonal tool for the fieldnote templete, so you can systematically code type of learning you witness in the kids using Tharp & Gallimore's terminology (i.e., zpd, self-helping, autimatization, recursion). By doing this, we can check and address your another hypothesis that kids' learning at Barrios Unidos is mainly zpd-like.
Thanks for your concerns and let us know about your suggestions for improvement.
Eugene