End of an Era

As we approach our celebration on Monday, I am finally feeling that this program is almost over. I happened to be at the last cohort celebration, and one of the sentiments that was shared was that the year flew by. Everyone discussed how hard they had worked, as well as all that they accomplished. It is amazing that now I’m in their shoes, and I keep reflecting on truly how much we have done this year. I’m also having a self-actualization of how fast life moves by. Years of teaching will stack up, and we’ll be veterans before we know it! Yet, I’m also aware of the challenges that lay in front of us, before we can reach that point. Despite that, I’m very excited to show off what I have learned/accomplished in my short year at Warner. It will be a good opportunity to help new cohort members learn the structure of the program, and guide them during the beginning of their journey.

Unfortunately, many from last years cohort (in science and other subject matters) shared a negative experience from their time at Warner. I feel very fortunate to not have shared their opinion after finishing my program (almost). There were surely times that I felt needlessly over-worked, but I am confident that I have learned enough about teaching and teaching science, that will inform my professional practice in a productive way.

I suppose I should rant…

I just finished my first draft of my classroom management paper and it seems like an appropriate to fire out a blog post.  However, I don’t really have much on my mind about teaching or my professional development right now.  I could rehash my thoughts on my growth in the management aspect of inquiry, but that would be redundant and would frustrate me.   Essentially, I don’t feel like blogging right now, but I have a packed weekend and this is the most sensible time to fulfill my requirement.  Usually I enjoy blogging, because I have loads on my mind, but right now I’m finishing up a quiet vacation-y week at home with family and blogging would not be a priority for me, if it were a self directed task.  I suggest that in order to improve the blogging component of the course, which I think is good for the most part, give students the option to blog 10-12 /14 weeks of the semester.  This would give me a chance to abstain from blogging when I feel that I do not have much to contribution to the meta-narrative of our professional development.

Happy Easter to those who are celebrating!  Enjoy your holiday

If the red tape were gone…

Yesterday morning I interviewed for a position as the nature specialist at a day camp.  I’m very excited about the prospect, and a significant part of the work would be designing a curriculum around the maintenance of a garden.  One of the opening questions the director asked me was, “you’re at camp, all the red tape from the school is gone, what do you want kids to learn/do?”

I think that this was the most difficult question of the interview.  My answer was in line with a lot of the inquiry goals of GRS, essentially, let students direct their own experience and give them bountiful chances to explore their curiosity.  I’m somewhat happy with the answer I gave, but I found I was surprised at how difficult the question was.  Throughout student teaching I have struggled with teaching the vast amount of content discussed in the NYS LE standards, but I realized I don’t know exactly what I’d do if this ‘red-tape’ was removed.  I suppose I have more of an idea of the theory that would guide what experiences I’d provide my students, rather than the specific experiences I’d give them.  This might have to do with the nature of full-on inquiry, which would be an experience where the students pursue their own interest entirely.

Either way, I am very excited for the experience and challenge that this position would give me, should I get accepted.  I’m also interested in hearing how you would finish the sentence ‘If the red tape were gone…”

experiences since student teaching

It is great to say to folks, “I just finished my student teaching”.  It was so hard to imagine being done with it a few weeks back, but it is here.  The months of April and May are generally my favorite as weather starts to get nice and people start smiling more.  Although my free time has not been as plentiful as I thought it would be, I have relished the opportunity to shoot hoops with regularity and wake up after eight in the morning.  These experiences have revitalized me and lightened the stress immensely.  Despite that, I have come down with a cold, which I believe is a result of my body holding off getting sick until I was done with student teaching (because I willed myself not to get sick during that period). Anyway, I have had some interesting reflections and realizations since finishing student teaching.

First – I realized why Warner doesn’t offer courses in classroom management.  It relates to a post  Tyler wrote a week or two ago about teachers confusing good management with good teaching.  Although management is important, the best way to be successful is by engaging your students in science.  These students will want to learn science and explore, and it is these students we seek to mold in our reform-minded practice.

Second – I realized how much of a professional body of knowledge we now have.  I recently applied for a counselor position at a day camp for this upcoming summer.  The application had several questions asking about what made a well-run camp, and how campers benefited from such a camp experience.  I was able to write extensively about how kids are most engaged through hands on experiences, and that a camper-centered philosophy should be embodied, by letting campers take ownership of their summer experience.  I also wrote about inclusive practices I’d bring to camp, and how it’s the counselors job to make sure every camper gets the most out of camp that they possibly can.

We’ve learned an immense amount at GRS!  From the mock interviews and the summer camp application, I’m convinced I can articulate them well.  I also believe that I have the tools and commitment to put these theories into action in any setting with learners.

Engagement and Energy in the classroom

Over that past week and a half, I’ve been writing several lesson plan reflections for the lessons in my unit.  The first question, ‘how did you create an engaging learning environment?’ keeps sticking with me.  Generally, I have found that students have been engaged, however clearly some days the engagement is much higher than other days.  I’ve been synthesizing the strategies that make students more engaged on a regular basis.  Most of them are unsurprising given our strong background in inquiry.  When students are doing something hands on and manipulating something, as they do in their ‘beaks of finches’ lab where they simulate how beak shape affects competitive advantage in an individual, the engagement increases.  The game is also set up as a competition, which greatly enhances engagement.  I think competition is a great thing to incorporate into one’s classroom on a regular basis.  Not only does it greatly increase the energy level, but when people are on teams, they work together, creating a classroom community.  Competition is not a magic bullet however, and there are plenty of instances where it will not work. 

Another strategy I’ve used is getting people out of their seats.  If there is any lesson where you can get people to stand up, and sit down if ‘X’, it will set a positive, productive tone for class.  By getting everyone to stand, you set the expectation that everyone will be an active participant, and in morning classes, getting students to stand may wake them up and increase their energy!  I think that learning ways to be engaging and set up engaging activities may be the most beneficial tool to a teacher.  If you are skilled enough as an engaging person and lesson planner, then you can make any subject matter captivate the attention of your students.

rewards of teaching

My experience in the 8 week placement has been very challenging- probably the hardest thing I’ve done in the program thus far. While there are several reasons for this, I think the most important one is that we enter in the middle of the year. We spend only 8 weeks in the classroom, and we’re well aware of this during our placement. I haven’t really felt many times that I was making good connections with the students and that they were appreciating my work. This was truer in the first half of the placement, but I think this is slowly changing. Today I had a great conversation with a student who came up to see me while I was working in the library. This itself was a nice reward of teaching and we had a nice conversation. He told me he’s understanding the material now and his grade is improving. I’m almost incredulous regarding the effect I’m having on this student, because I had felt like I wasn’t making much of an impact on my students. This interaction shows that in fact I am! It is great to know that I’m making a difference, but it’s often easy to miss some of the rewards of teaching. I hope that in my career of teaching, I’m able to build many more, significant relationships such as this. I also feel obliged to tell everyone that baseball’s opening day is one week from Thursday (3/31)! The finish line is in sight – find your second wind everyone and finish strong!

Maintaining High Expectations.

How do we keep our expectations high for our students and how we do show students that we have high expectations.  As a novice, it can be so easy to get disappointed and frustrated with student performance, and I believe that can be misdirected at students sometimes.  I think that it is crucial to maintain high expectations throughout teaching, but sometimes I struggle on how to do it.  Some ideas I have had:

1) Grade and Return everything with lots of feedback.  While a lot of work for the teacher, probably is a way to raise expectations.  If the expectation is that every student will understand it, (communicated through feedback), than that should be the objective.

2) Give HW, and inform people consistently when they do not hand it in.  Address the expectation with each student individually.

3) Make sure students are thinking or learning a skill, all the time.  If the work you’re giving is mindless, or not tapping into multiple, valued literacies then it is probably not a meaningful assignment, nor will it help set high expectations.

4)  Consistency toward all students.  Don’t let some people play on their phone (because it wouldn’t worth the fight, and that student generally keeps other people off work.), same rules apply for all.  This shows that we expect professional behavior from everyone.

I think that we must have high expectations of ourselves as teachers before we can have high confidence of our students.  So every time we raise the bar, we must simultaneously improve ourselves.

Innovating the Innovative Unit

I’m teaching evolution for my innovative unit, which is a topic I love.  I’ve wrote previously about my positive experience teaching evolution in my 4-week placement, and am now excited to improve on my practice in the 8-week placement.  We’ve read so much about how to make science instruction meaningful, and one of the biggest things I’ve taken away is ‘big ideas’.  Big ideas give students a framework for putting all the lessons and labs encompassing a unit into a coherent picture.  I plan on explicitly labeling evolution as ‘the science story of how life has changed over time.’  Each student will get a folder at the beginning of the unit, which will serve as a portfolio for collecting all their work they have done on evolution, including teacher feedback on their formative assessments geared to refocusing them on the big picture and addressing misconceptions.  The folder will also have a ‘table of contents’ page, which has a the activities we will be doing (and that need to be in the folder to demonstrate completeness of the unit), as well as a description of how each assignment/activity contributes to the big picture. 

I’m really excited to give students a folder outlining a clear plan for what students will learn in the unit.  This will also help students with inconsistent attendance see what they missed and give them some context for the material we are now covering.  I have ideas for many interesting activities to get the students thinking about evolution, but I’m pushing my pedagogy and really trying to get students to see the big picture story of evolution. 

While I am excited to get this material together, I am simply terrified of getting this all completed, as well as finishing reproduction in the next week.  The stress is abundant.  I could write a lot more about the stresses, but let’s stay positive cohort! (that’s my internal dialogue, convincing myself that I’ll make it J).  We have three weeks plus tomorrow to get our students to really see how cool science is, and potentially give them opportunities to connect to the material in ways they have not had the chance to do previously.  I want to focus on that as my goal, rather than simply getting through the three weeks.

Unwilling or Unable

The title of the post is a quote from my CT, regarding students not completing work.  A teacher can conclude that either of the words apply to students who sit there blankly when there is an assignment in front of them.  For the most part, you can never know for certain which category a student falls in, but it is easier to say that the student is unwilling.  That student didn’t want to participate in the lesson the teacher prepared, so responsibility is removed from the teacher to change the plan.  If, however, the student didn’t participate because the work was not appropriately scaffolded to his or her abililty level, then concluding that the student doesn’t want to work is detrimental to that student’s success.  This is a powerful realization, because I can identify several times in frustration where I have dismissed students as being lazy or unmotivated.  Turning it around and asking myself, what can I do differently to allow these students to succeed, is an important question to ask myself, but a difficult process.  This is what scaffolding and inclusiveness are all about.  Finding a way to scaffold material appropriately to reach every student on every day, is no easy task.  Using formative assessment to constantly find new ways to present material to students will help to craft understandings for students in a productive way.  Ultimately, the question to keep asking oneself is “are these students unwilling or unable? and how can engage students and scaffold instruction to help them become able and willing?

Inquiry in action – sharing a cool resource