Right...
I opened up my solo teaching with a lot of work on bias and racism. We discussed the systematic basis of racism through activities like tallying what groups of people are represented in magazines and catalogs, watching and responding to Obama's landmark (at least for the public sector) speech on race, and reading from Toi Derricotte's The Black Notebooks. We used that learning to dive into studying the Civil Rights Movement using Seattle's de facto segregated schools as an entry point. We then broadened into employment discrimination, and then moved into labor unions and the IWW.
Overall, the student buy-in is very high. I think the students are sick of studying inane topics and are very into being treated as mature people who can handle tough topics. Having set the tone from day one, they will often 'discover' instances of subtle systematic bias and bring them to the attention of the class. Questions like, "Why doesn't this book I'm reading describe white characters as white when it describes black characters as black?" and "Why is it man-to-man defense even when it's women's sports?" are commonplace. A few days ago, we had a great discussion about bias in dictionaries when someone pointed out that the Merriam-Webster definition of 'guy' claims that it is gender neutral. I took them to the definition of 'right' (the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled) and then to 'privilege' (a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor) and to 'just' ( acting or being in conformity with what is morally upright or good OR being what is merited OR legally correct) and talked about how these definitions fit together.
I'm having a lot of fun breaking through the encapsulation of these kids, and I think they're enjoying it too; they seem to feel like they're being rebellious. I hope this enthusiasm is something I continue to see in my career. If so, I know there's no danger of me burning out. Sure, my content will be revealing that which is most unnerving about our world, but student enthusiasm is what gives me the most hope for the future. At the very least, teaching this group of 60 students is giving me increasing drive for beginning my career.
May 7, 2008
April 9, 2008
Student Introduction
My first lesson on Friday went quite well. I began by providing a few minutes for the students to think of a couple questions they wanted to ask me about myself, then I opened myself up to any and all questions, providing honest answers. I've done this before, and it can be anxious, but seems to work well. Toughest question I was asked: "Do you have a record?" Answer: "No." Which is true, though admittedly not the entire truth.
As expected, I was either asked or was able to guide towards "Why did you become a teacher?" I prepared for this by asking the students to list all the American wars they could, and as expected, the war of the Philippines was left out, prompting me to discuss how it was left out of my public school education as well, and launch into my desire to teach (and thereby learn) truth about history and the importance of critical thinking. Led a discussion about the complexities of grading and what that means, finished up with asking them to tell me what they have in common with me, what they want me to know about them, and how they learn best as an exit task. I'm logging some of the responses here for my own reference later.
What do you have in common with Mr. Coker?
-Don't like unhelpful questions (I think I'll label these as "dead-end" questions..)
-Dogs, cats, pizza x8
-enjoy history, critical thinking, teaching x9
-have a nickname we won't share (yet.. i'll get there)
-vegetarian
What do you want Mr. Coker to know about you?
-interest in Japan
-have a [insertgrade] despite/because of working hard x3
-no plans for career
-hunt animals, but use all of it
-music interest
-anger management issues
-lots of energy, like to talk a lot x3
-easily distracted
-soccer
-exterior reputation as hard to control but keeps most matters to self x3
-"I think you don't know my name yet because you called on me by nodding" (that's actually true... much to my shame. I knew everyone else's, but blanked on hers and left my seating chart across the room)
-very opinionated x3
How do you think you learn best?
-taking notes x2
-hands-on, games x9
-visuals x6
-groups x3
-'away from annoying people'
-discussions x11
-background music
-repetition/redoing work x2
-writing responses
-not bookwork x4
-flexibility x2
Needless to say, it's a pretty diverse group, though there are some common factors that will help me guide my planning.
Misc. thoughts:
A student who stutters and trips over her responses when called on in discussion is able to speak clearly and concisely when given a moment to write her thoughts first - I may give her a small notepad in order to scribble some thoughts before she speaks.
As expected, I was either asked or was able to guide towards "Why did you become a teacher?" I prepared for this by asking the students to list all the American wars they could, and as expected, the war of the Philippines was left out, prompting me to discuss how it was left out of my public school education as well, and launch into my desire to teach (and thereby learn) truth about history and the importance of critical thinking. Led a discussion about the complexities of grading and what that means, finished up with asking them to tell me what they have in common with me, what they want me to know about them, and how they learn best as an exit task. I'm logging some of the responses here for my own reference later.
What do you have in common with Mr. Coker?
-Don't like unhelpful questions (I think I'll label these as "dead-end" questions..)
-Dogs, cats, pizza x8
-enjoy history, critical thinking, teaching x9
-have a nickname we won't share (yet.. i'll get there)
-vegetarian
What do you want Mr. Coker to know about you?
-interest in Japan
-have a [insertgrade] despite/because of working hard x3
-no plans for career
-hunt animals, but use all of it
-music interest
-anger management issues
-lots of energy, like to talk a lot x3
-easily distracted
-soccer
-exterior reputation as hard to control but keeps most matters to self x3
-"I think you don't know my name yet because you called on me by nodding" (that's actually true... much to my shame. I knew everyone else's, but blanked on hers and left my seating chart across the room)
-very opinionated x3
How do you think you learn best?
-taking notes x2
-hands-on, games x9
-visuals x6
-groups x3
-'away from annoying people'
-discussions x11
-background music
-repetition/redoing work x2
-writing responses
-not bookwork x4
-flexibility x2
Needless to say, it's a pretty diverse group, though there are some common factors that will help me guide my planning.
Misc. thoughts:
A student who stutters and trips over her responses when called on in discussion is able to speak clearly and concisely when given a moment to write her thoughts first - I may give her a small notepad in order to scribble some thoughts before she speaks.
April 7, 2008
Welcome Back to Life
For those who are new to the readership, the introduction: http://lifeasprocess.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html
Last week I began my spring student-teaching placement at a Thurston County middle school we'll call "CMS" for safety purposes. My classroom is in a portable, but it's a reasonable space. I'll be working with two groups of students, 7th and 8th graders who, because of their gifted/talented designation, take Language Arts and Social Studies in an integrated Humanities double-period block format. They also work with the same content, switching subjects each year. For instance, the eighth graders began middle school with American History, studied Medieval History in the first semester, and is now studying Washington State History. The seventh graders will study American History next year.
My mentor teacher and I are, once again, an excellent fit. Social justice minded, non-proprietary of the classroom, open and flexible to allow me to do what I want. This is going to give me the freedom to try out a couple strategies I haven't been able to work with before, such as reverse-chronological history studies. The math/science instructor for this group of gifted students also has a student teacher from my program, so we'll be working on a multi-disciplinary cross-content area culminating project at the end of the year.
Demographically, the gender balance of the two classes is slightly skewed in each direction. The 7th grade group 11:18, and the 8th grade group is 16:12 (M:F for each). Ethnoracially, the group (which pulls from the entire district, not adhering to middle school boundary lines) does not reflect the diversity of the district, as is often the case in gifted/talented programs due to overidentification of white students and underidentification of other groups. Some stats below:
Ethnicity---Gifted Program (Raw)---Gifted Program (%)---District (%)
Native American---0---.00---3.8
Asian-------------3---.05---12.6
Black-------------3---.05---9.2
Hispanic----------1---.02---9.4
White------------50--87.71--63
Clearly, this population of students is very different from those I've worked with in the past in terms of age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and ability. Of course, these students deserve good teachers as well, and are independently beginning to question concepts of race, class, and gender. It will be an interesting opportunity for me to broaden my scope of experience within a framework I enjoy using: Humanities as portal to social justice.
Last week I began my spring student-teaching placement at a Thurston County middle school we'll call "CMS" for safety purposes. My classroom is in a portable, but it's a reasonable space. I'll be working with two groups of students, 7th and 8th graders who, because of their gifted/talented designation, take Language Arts and Social Studies in an integrated Humanities double-period block format. They also work with the same content, switching subjects each year. For instance, the eighth graders began middle school with American History, studied Medieval History in the first semester, and is now studying Washington State History. The seventh graders will study American History next year.
My mentor teacher and I are, once again, an excellent fit. Social justice minded, non-proprietary of the classroom, open and flexible to allow me to do what I want. This is going to give me the freedom to try out a couple strategies I haven't been able to work with before, such as reverse-chronological history studies. The math/science instructor for this group of gifted students also has a student teacher from my program, so we'll be working on a multi-disciplinary cross-content area culminating project at the end of the year.
Demographically, the gender balance of the two classes is slightly skewed in each direction. The 7th grade group 11:18, and the 8th grade group is 16:12 (M:F for each). Ethnoracially, the group (which pulls from the entire district, not adhering to middle school boundary lines) does not reflect the diversity of the district, as is often the case in gifted/talented programs due to overidentification of white students and underidentification of other groups. Some stats below:
Ethnicity---Gifted Program (Raw)---Gifted Program (%)---District (%)
Native American---0---.00---3.8
Asian-------------3---.05---12.6
Black-------------3---.05---9.2
Hispanic----------1---.02---9.4
White------------50--87.71--63
Clearly, this population of students is very different from those I've worked with in the past in terms of age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and ability. Of course, these students deserve good teachers as well, and are independently beginning to question concepts of race, class, and gender. It will be an interesting opportunity for me to broaden my scope of experience within a framework I enjoy using: Humanities as portal to social justice.
December 12, 2007
National Council for Social Studies Conference - Saturday, Day Three
9:15am – Using Data to Teach Higher-Order Thinking in American History
Not terribly interesting, some examples of questions in using statistics and maps to teach history, and that the National Archives and the Census Bureau have some good resources.
10:30am – Discussion Strategies to Increase Student Participation
This was also a pretty basic session. We really just modeled a couple baseline strategies for discussion and talked about how we could use them. It was only two, but they seemed worthwhile enough for mention. The “Final Word” strategy and a “Silent TPS” Big Paper strategy.
To prep the Final Word Activity, we did a quick journal write a few prompts. We used an explanation of our names, what the most controversial topic that arises in our classrooms is and how we deal with it, and whether we do and/or should allow our own political views to influence our teaching. We were then randomly sorted into groups of four (not hard, since none of us knew each other we were already pretty randomized), and sat facing each other in a “traffic intersection” form. Each person had 30 seconds to 2 minutes to talk on each prompt (depending on complexity), with the initiator also serving as a summarizing reflector when everyone had spoken. When time was up, the ‘teacher’ yelled switch, and we did no matter where we were in our thoughts. Taking turns initiating/summarizing is supposed to promote active listening, and if it were more authentic we would have finished up with a written reflection on each other’s brief speakings in order to formatively assess the activity.
The Silent TPS (Think, Pair, Share) was set up to analyze political cartoons. Large pieces of paper with cartoons about different presidents and some historical background were up around the room, and we took random partners and different colored markers to work through steps of analysis by writing on the paper rather than speaking aloud. We began with simple observation, circling and labeling what we saw, then guessing what it might mean or represent, etc. Finished up with a line activity, ranking ourselves on how balanced we felt the amount of power was between the executive branch and the other branches was. (Note: this then evolved into a discussion of whether power SHOULD be balanced, but it did evolve into discussion nonetheless)
11:45am – Person, Point, Puzzle: Making History Significant for Your Students
I was never really certain what the title of this session meant, not even when they explained it and continued using the terms. It was never really clear as to how the methods presented were going to make history significant, but it was an interesting method anyway. The concept essentially came down to creating manipulatives for complex ideas. The two teachers presenting were clearly heavy PowerPoint users, which I’m not, at least not yet. All they really did was to create their PowerPoints in such a way that the slides could be cut apart and the ideas on them used for different activities. We ranked reasons the English and Native Americans didn’t immediately kill each other at Jamestown, then reported out and discussed our rankings. We presupposed having just completed a unit on the Constitution, then sorted through quotes from the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, the Virginia Company Charter, and a few other documents into what sounded like the Constitution and what didn’t. From this, we would have built a ‘document/ideology family tree’ to see where the ideas in the Constitution came from. They said they were putting materials online… but if I took the address, I lost it. Oops.
2:45pm – Eleven Instructional Strategies that Empower Student Learners
In these, we ran (sprinted) through some very general (maybe overly so) strategies such as debate, role-play, open honest discussion, controversial issues, collaborative activities, music, art, literature, reading strategies, democratic principles, and movement/dance. I really wanted to hear more about using music, art, and movement, since as a mostly verbal/written oriented person, these tend to be weak points for me. While we were given some outline handouts, we weren’t really given too much on using the methods. We roled out a couple, but that was it. With regards to music and movement, I did come to the realization that I need to get out of my own comfort zone in order to use them. Most of the session was taught a dance set to some song from “Chorus Line” – pause to let you picture me dancing, stifle laughter… ready, resume – except for one guy who sat through it. The awkwardness of his unwillingness made me to realize that we can’t be unwilling to do anything we ask our students to do. From which it follows that if we’re going to serve multiple learning modalities, we have to be prepared to model them as well. I’m going to pair this with a recent Edutopia article about the value of teachers participating and trying to learn something they’re really bad at to direct my attitude towards this. Yes, that means I may end up taking music and/or dance classes.
4:00pm – “You Can’t Teach That!” Academic Freedom in Secondary Social Studies
This was a panel discussion consisting of Jack Nelson - academic freedom law expert from Rutgers, Nancy Paterson – social studies education professor at Bowling Green, Michael Baker – retired teacher and adjunct professor, and Prentice Chandler – one-time teacher, now Social Studies Methods instructor.
Jack Nelson spoke for most of his time on the history of academic freedom with regards to NCSS, which was really a rant on how NCSS has failed to keep its members apprised of issues regarding academic freedom in the past. I won’t go into the details, but it was interesting to hear a dissenting viewpoint at their own conference. This is finally (after 70 years!) being somewhat remedied through an online group within the NCSS, and I’m interested to see where it goes. Michael Baker and Prentice Chandler were highly effective teachers who were pushed out because of their methods.
Baker, the only National Board Certified teacher in his state at the time, was pushed out for using a reverse chronology approach to history. He used it effectively for 6-7 years, department leadership changed, and he was forbidden from using it. When he dissented and pushed, he had his history classes taken from him and was pushed towards early retirement.
Chandler used works by Howard Zinn (People’s History excerpts and the Voices collection of primary sources) alongside the standard textbook for a couple years before one family (only one!) complained to the point that he was forbidden from using primary sources at all, despite this being in violation of state standards regarding multiple perspectives, primary documents, and critical thinking. I can’t reproduce the situations of Baker and Chandler as well as they could, but perhaps if you google them, you can find more information.
We were then given advice on what to do if our academic freedoms are stepped on. Namely:
-Be abiding by the law
-Call NCSS, State Teacher Associations, the ACLU, and especially the American Association of University Professors. The last has helped secondary teachers in the past, and they are armed with a solid core of lawyers.
-Gather support from other teachers (basically, network and have friends)
-Be proactive, call the newspapers and a lawyer BEFORE they do
-Don’t hide, don’t give up, if you’re certain what you’re doing is right
On the online forum, there is a list of cited court cases, I’ll try to post about it eventually.
5:15pm – Engaging Reluctant Learners
The building block concept from this session was that kids need age-appropriate, interesting activities to be engaged. We then blitzed through a whole bunch of pre-created handouts to give us ideas on how to create these activities. The preparedness of these handouts was a clue: if the activity is hyper-structured, as worksheets tend to be, students are more likely to engage in them. Activities included writing telegrams (or text messages?) to past historical figures, writing answering machine messages for literary characters, the creation and fictional monsters (or city problems, or conflicts, etc) by groups who then trade with other groups to come up with ways to fight them, writing dialogue between characters/historical figures/etc by using blanked out comic strips, writing MySpace or Facebook pages for famous people, that kind of thing. Some interesting lesson ideas grew out of this session, but none are fully formulated.
7:00pm – International Film Festival
In the evening, there was an International Film Festival with several different options for viewings. One of which was Spike Lee’s documentary of interviews from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, called “When the Levees Broke.” You can get the entire documentary for free, with accompanying curriculum, at http://www.teachingthelevees.org.
I went to one hosted by Farmer’s Insurance. Weird, eh? Apparently, Farmer’s Insurance is very active in creating multicultural educational film resources for educators. They screened some parts of “Freedom Song” (http://www.freedomssong.net/), “The Bronze Screen” (http://www.bronzescreen.net), and “Across the Waves” (not yet completed). Freedom Song looked promising for classroom use, as it’s divided into decade sections from 1900 to the present, and had some good collaborators. The Bronze Screen seemed like it would serve as a good index to movies for excerption in teaching about the Latin-American experience, but perhaps not very usable in and of itself. “Across the Waves” isn’t finished yet, but from what I saw, it would need to be very carefully apart for classroom use. It has som great interviews about the experience of people from different Asian countries, but also some Horatio-Alger-Myth testimony included as well. They’re all available for free, though, so order as you will and judge for yourself.
Tomorrow: I’m reviewing the resources from the exhibit hall today, and I’ll give a run down tomorrow. This might take a while, so it may come in several parts. Adieu!
Not terribly interesting, some examples of questions in using statistics and maps to teach history, and that the National Archives and the Census Bureau have some good resources.
10:30am – Discussion Strategies to Increase Student Participation
This was also a pretty basic session. We really just modeled a couple baseline strategies for discussion and talked about how we could use them. It was only two, but they seemed worthwhile enough for mention. The “Final Word” strategy and a “Silent TPS” Big Paper strategy.
To prep the Final Word Activity, we did a quick journal write a few prompts. We used an explanation of our names, what the most controversial topic that arises in our classrooms is and how we deal with it, and whether we do and/or should allow our own political views to influence our teaching. We were then randomly sorted into groups of four (not hard, since none of us knew each other we were already pretty randomized), and sat facing each other in a “traffic intersection” form. Each person had 30 seconds to 2 minutes to talk on each prompt (depending on complexity), with the initiator also serving as a summarizing reflector when everyone had spoken. When time was up, the ‘teacher’ yelled switch, and we did no matter where we were in our thoughts. Taking turns initiating/summarizing is supposed to promote active listening, and if it were more authentic we would have finished up with a written reflection on each other’s brief speakings in order to formatively assess the activity.
The Silent TPS (Think, Pair, Share) was set up to analyze political cartoons. Large pieces of paper with cartoons about different presidents and some historical background were up around the room, and we took random partners and different colored markers to work through steps of analysis by writing on the paper rather than speaking aloud. We began with simple observation, circling and labeling what we saw, then guessing what it might mean or represent, etc. Finished up with a line activity, ranking ourselves on how balanced we felt the amount of power was between the executive branch and the other branches was. (Note: this then evolved into a discussion of whether power SHOULD be balanced, but it did evolve into discussion nonetheless)
11:45am – Person, Point, Puzzle: Making History Significant for Your Students
I was never really certain what the title of this session meant, not even when they explained it and continued using the terms. It was never really clear as to how the methods presented were going to make history significant, but it was an interesting method anyway. The concept essentially came down to creating manipulatives for complex ideas. The two teachers presenting were clearly heavy PowerPoint users, which I’m not, at least not yet. All they really did was to create their PowerPoints in such a way that the slides could be cut apart and the ideas on them used for different activities. We ranked reasons the English and Native Americans didn’t immediately kill each other at Jamestown, then reported out and discussed our rankings. We presupposed having just completed a unit on the Constitution, then sorted through quotes from the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, the Virginia Company Charter, and a few other documents into what sounded like the Constitution and what didn’t. From this, we would have built a ‘document/ideology family tree’ to see where the ideas in the Constitution came from. They said they were putting materials online… but if I took the address, I lost it. Oops.
2:45pm – Eleven Instructional Strategies that Empower Student Learners
In these, we ran (sprinted) through some very general (maybe overly so) strategies such as debate, role-play, open honest discussion, controversial issues, collaborative activities, music, art, literature, reading strategies, democratic principles, and movement/dance. I really wanted to hear more about using music, art, and movement, since as a mostly verbal/written oriented person, these tend to be weak points for me. While we were given some outline handouts, we weren’t really given too much on using the methods. We roled out a couple, but that was it. With regards to music and movement, I did come to the realization that I need to get out of my own comfort zone in order to use them. Most of the session was taught a dance set to some song from “Chorus Line” – pause to let you picture me dancing, stifle laughter… ready, resume – except for one guy who sat through it. The awkwardness of his unwillingness made me to realize that we can’t be unwilling to do anything we ask our students to do. From which it follows that if we’re going to serve multiple learning modalities, we have to be prepared to model them as well. I’m going to pair this with a recent Edutopia article about the value of teachers participating and trying to learn something they’re really bad at to direct my attitude towards this. Yes, that means I may end up taking music and/or dance classes.
4:00pm – “You Can’t Teach That!” Academic Freedom in Secondary Social Studies
This was a panel discussion consisting of Jack Nelson - academic freedom law expert from Rutgers, Nancy Paterson – social studies education professor at Bowling Green, Michael Baker – retired teacher and adjunct professor, and Prentice Chandler – one-time teacher, now Social Studies Methods instructor.
Jack Nelson spoke for most of his time on the history of academic freedom with regards to NCSS, which was really a rant on how NCSS has failed to keep its members apprised of issues regarding academic freedom in the past. I won’t go into the details, but it was interesting to hear a dissenting viewpoint at their own conference. This is finally (after 70 years!) being somewhat remedied through an online group within the NCSS, and I’m interested to see where it goes. Michael Baker and Prentice Chandler were highly effective teachers who were pushed out because of their methods.
Baker, the only National Board Certified teacher in his state at the time, was pushed out for using a reverse chronology approach to history. He used it effectively for 6-7 years, department leadership changed, and he was forbidden from using it. When he dissented and pushed, he had his history classes taken from him and was pushed towards early retirement.
Chandler used works by Howard Zinn (People’s History excerpts and the Voices collection of primary sources) alongside the standard textbook for a couple years before one family (only one!) complained to the point that he was forbidden from using primary sources at all, despite this being in violation of state standards regarding multiple perspectives, primary documents, and critical thinking. I can’t reproduce the situations of Baker and Chandler as well as they could, but perhaps if you google them, you can find more information.
We were then given advice on what to do if our academic freedoms are stepped on. Namely:
-Be abiding by the law
-Call NCSS, State Teacher Associations, the ACLU, and especially the American Association of University Professors. The last has helped secondary teachers in the past, and they are armed with a solid core of lawyers.
-Gather support from other teachers (basically, network and have friends)
-Be proactive, call the newspapers and a lawyer BEFORE they do
-Don’t hide, don’t give up, if you’re certain what you’re doing is right
On the online forum, there is a list of cited court cases, I’ll try to post about it eventually.
5:15pm – Engaging Reluctant Learners
The building block concept from this session was that kids need age-appropriate, interesting activities to be engaged. We then blitzed through a whole bunch of pre-created handouts to give us ideas on how to create these activities. The preparedness of these handouts was a clue: if the activity is hyper-structured, as worksheets tend to be, students are more likely to engage in them. Activities included writing telegrams (or text messages?) to past historical figures, writing answering machine messages for literary characters, the creation and fictional monsters (or city problems, or conflicts, etc) by groups who then trade with other groups to come up with ways to fight them, writing dialogue between characters/historical figures/etc by using blanked out comic strips, writing MySpace or Facebook pages for famous people, that kind of thing. Some interesting lesson ideas grew out of this session, but none are fully formulated.
7:00pm – International Film Festival
In the evening, there was an International Film Festival with several different options for viewings. One of which was Spike Lee’s documentary of interviews from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, called “When the Levees Broke.” You can get the entire documentary for free, with accompanying curriculum, at http://www.teachingthelevees.org.
I went to one hosted by Farmer’s Insurance. Weird, eh? Apparently, Farmer’s Insurance is very active in creating multicultural educational film resources for educators. They screened some parts of “Freedom Song” (http://www.freedomssong.net/), “The Bronze Screen” (http://www.bronzescreen.net), and “Across the Waves” (not yet completed). Freedom Song looked promising for classroom use, as it’s divided into decade sections from 1900 to the present, and had some good collaborators. The Bronze Screen seemed like it would serve as a good index to movies for excerption in teaching about the Latin-American experience, but perhaps not very usable in and of itself. “Across the Waves” isn’t finished yet, but from what I saw, it would need to be very carefully apart for classroom use. It has som great interviews about the experience of people from different Asian countries, but also some Horatio-Alger-Myth testimony included as well. They’re all available for free, though, so order as you will and judge for yourself.
Tomorrow: I’m reviewing the resources from the exhibit hall today, and I’ll give a run down tomorrow. This might take a while, so it may come in several parts. Adieu!
December 11, 2007
National Council for Social Studies Conference - Friday, Day Two
In order to narrow my session attendance decisions, I focused on sessions that would help build my toolbox as a teacher. Strategies, methods, special considerations, that kind of thing. I kept somewhat away from the more content specific sessions. I plan on coming back, and when I have a job and an idea of what courses I’ll be teaching, I’ll probably attend more of those. In the meantime, I tried to broaden my ideas of how to present material. Hopefully, that means that my English teacher readers can get something out of this as well. The descriptions below will go into the basics, if my professional readers have further questions, want copies of materials, or would like to discuss any of them, send me an email or a comment and I’ll get you what you’re interested in.
All the presenters were very good about providing something for attendees to take away from the presentation. With so many sessions, I don’t think I could have kept track of it with just my notes. Of course, this resulted in a lot of paper, which gets heavy. I ended up going to the post office on Saturday afternoon and mailing a box of paper to myself, which is part of the reason I’m not posting until now.
Friday:
9:00am – Using Effective Before-, During, and After- Reading Strategies
Like many of the presentations, this was accompanied with a PowerPoint presentation, which we were given in hard copy form. We were also given an activities packet, and we modeled each activity in a shortened form.
According to Robert Marzano, an educational researcher we were told more about that I can’t remember, the most important before-reading strategy is direct instruction of vocabulary related to the content. Essentially, the students must have something to build on, and we must provide that. This doesn’t mean looking up definitions in dictionaries, as students may not understand the academic definitions located there. This means creating definitions that work for your students in (my opinion) a culturally responsive way.
I think this is also a good during-reading strategy, and during student-teaching I came up with the idea of integrating a little art into the unit by having students create bookmarks of decorated and folded colored paper. Inside the bookmarks were their definitions, so they were always accessible while reading. Students would be encouraged to add words they didn’t know to the bookmark. I never had the opportunity to use this idea, but my mentor implemented it after I left.
Once the vocabulary has been provided, it’s important for the students to work with it, activities like creating word cards for each word on index cards with spaces for a term description, a space to draw an understanding, and space for additional notes is useful. These can be turned in with a self reported rank of understanding from 1-5 to check for misconceptions, then returned and used for word sorts or other activities (like creating the bookmarks, perhaps). Any activity that engages the student to think or rethink about the vocabulary during the unit will cement understanding of both the reading and the vocab. Other activity suggestions included Frayer Models, Term Description Group Writes, Think-Pair-Shares, and vocab games. (Ask for further descriptions)
Anticipation guides like true/false, agree/disagree, and predict/confirm guides are also useful. This involves writing a bunch of statements with space on both sides of each to write in answers, the left for before reading, and the right for after reading. Gotta do it after as well though! Before only is pretty useless. Include many levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy in writing the statements. We were also given examples of Pre-Reading Plans.
During reading, scaffolding different kinds of note-taking helps students organize their thoughts as they go, as well as teaching the skill of taking good notes. Using the existing structure of the text to organize ideas at various cognitive levels aids this scaffolding. Some sections are pre-filled in by the teacher, beginning with the higher cognitive levels. As the year progresses, gradually replace the higher cognitive level answers with blanks, and provide the lower cognitives. Graphic organizers were also stressed, and some were provided.
Reflection after reading was emphasized, and we were warned against rushing out of the unit without allowing proper time for solidifying the new knowledge. One interesting idea was the idea of ‘question cubes.’ Essentially, they are two six-sided die, with Who-What-Where/When-Why-How on one, and Is/Isn’t-Did/Didn’t-Can/Can’t-Will/Won’t-Might/Might Not-Shoud/nt, Would/n’t,Could/n’t on the other. Roll the die, generate questions, answer.
(Yikes, that’s more than I had expected. Don’t worry, I don’t think they’ll all be this long, case in point:)
10:15am - Deepening Learner Understanding via Opportunities Possible With Games & Simulations
This was run by an instructional facilitator from Tennessee. He was smart, and put everything online. Thus, I don’t really have to do much to present it to you. I will tell you that it’s not going to stay there, so download anything you like from there. It’s here: http://www.e4tn.org/cms/index.php?page=ncss-conference
Basically, this was about creating games. The idea is that if the student doesn’t have a strong anchor point to enter into the topic of study, we provide an experiential reference point through simulation and game. It can also be an entrance point for controversial topics. For instance, in the Triangular Trade Simulation, one of the items for trade is enslaved Africans. When the inevitable question arises (or should arise if one is teaching with social justice in mind) of how people could do such an evil thing, ask in return why, in the game, players traded enslaved Africans? Enter discussion from there.
Games and Simulations can be used to create common anchor points before a unit, work with information during a unit to elucidate difficult concepts, or to apply knowledge after it’s been learned. All are useful, but of course they aren’t the only methods we should use. For more ideas and to get manipulatives to use in the classroom, Dinah Zikes (google her, first result) was suggested.
11:30am – Engaging “Low Achievers” in Complex Historical Reasoning
This was more of a case-study used to present a collaborative program called “Persistent Issues in History” network. Basically, Auburn University and Indiana University have begun accumulating resources for teachers to use and laid out guidelines for effective use of those resources. Namely, that they are Scaffolded, Authentic, Address Multiple Intelligences, and Facilitate Effective Collaboration between Students.
The PIH Network was featured in the April 2005 issue of Social Education, and I have the PDF if anyone is interested. Basically, in exchange for doing most of the research on a topic, the PIH Network asks its members (membership is free) to write useable lesson plans, with video whenever possible, and post them on the website. Use without contribution is highly discouraged. I’ll be looking into it more when the opportunity for focus arises. (i.e. when I have a topic to experiment with). Website is www.pihnet.org.
After a lunch break, I wandered the exhibit hall and accumulated a great deal of resources that I’ll be reviewing soon. I went to another session in the afternoon, but it wasn’t honestly all that good, so I’ll skip it here. In the evening, there was opportunity for networking and socializing at a couple receptions and a small party at one of the hotels. Saturday was chock full of some intense sessions; my notes are eight pages long. See you tomorrow!
All the presenters were very good about providing something for attendees to take away from the presentation. With so many sessions, I don’t think I could have kept track of it with just my notes. Of course, this resulted in a lot of paper, which gets heavy. I ended up going to the post office on Saturday afternoon and mailing a box of paper to myself, which is part of the reason I’m not posting until now.
Friday:
9:00am – Using Effective Before-, During, and After- Reading Strategies
Like many of the presentations, this was accompanied with a PowerPoint presentation, which we were given in hard copy form. We were also given an activities packet, and we modeled each activity in a shortened form.
According to Robert Marzano, an educational researcher we were told more about that I can’t remember, the most important before-reading strategy is direct instruction of vocabulary related to the content. Essentially, the students must have something to build on, and we must provide that. This doesn’t mean looking up definitions in dictionaries, as students may not understand the academic definitions located there. This means creating definitions that work for your students in (my opinion) a culturally responsive way.
I think this is also a good during-reading strategy, and during student-teaching I came up with the idea of integrating a little art into the unit by having students create bookmarks of decorated and folded colored paper. Inside the bookmarks were their definitions, so they were always accessible while reading. Students would be encouraged to add words they didn’t know to the bookmark. I never had the opportunity to use this idea, but my mentor implemented it after I left.
Once the vocabulary has been provided, it’s important for the students to work with it, activities like creating word cards for each word on index cards with spaces for a term description, a space to draw an understanding, and space for additional notes is useful. These can be turned in with a self reported rank of understanding from 1-5 to check for misconceptions, then returned and used for word sorts or other activities (like creating the bookmarks, perhaps). Any activity that engages the student to think or rethink about the vocabulary during the unit will cement understanding of both the reading and the vocab. Other activity suggestions included Frayer Models, Term Description Group Writes, Think-Pair-Shares, and vocab games. (Ask for further descriptions)
Anticipation guides like true/false, agree/disagree, and predict/confirm guides are also useful. This involves writing a bunch of statements with space on both sides of each to write in answers, the left for before reading, and the right for after reading. Gotta do it after as well though! Before only is pretty useless. Include many levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy in writing the statements. We were also given examples of Pre-Reading Plans.
During reading, scaffolding different kinds of note-taking helps students organize their thoughts as they go, as well as teaching the skill of taking good notes. Using the existing structure of the text to organize ideas at various cognitive levels aids this scaffolding. Some sections are pre-filled in by the teacher, beginning with the higher cognitive levels. As the year progresses, gradually replace the higher cognitive level answers with blanks, and provide the lower cognitives. Graphic organizers were also stressed, and some were provided.
Reflection after reading was emphasized, and we were warned against rushing out of the unit without allowing proper time for solidifying the new knowledge. One interesting idea was the idea of ‘question cubes.’ Essentially, they are two six-sided die, with Who-What-Where/When-Why-How on one, and Is/Isn’t-Did/Didn’t-Can/Can’t-Will/Won’t-Might/Might Not-Shoud/nt, Would/n’t,Could/n’t on the other. Roll the die, generate questions, answer.
(Yikes, that’s more than I had expected. Don’t worry, I don’t think they’ll all be this long, case in point:)
10:15am - Deepening Learner Understanding via Opportunities Possible With Games & Simulations
This was run by an instructional facilitator from Tennessee. He was smart, and put everything online. Thus, I don’t really have to do much to present it to you. I will tell you that it’s not going to stay there, so download anything you like from there. It’s here: http://www.e4tn.org/cms/index.php?page=ncss-conference
Basically, this was about creating games. The idea is that if the student doesn’t have a strong anchor point to enter into the topic of study, we provide an experiential reference point through simulation and game. It can also be an entrance point for controversial topics. For instance, in the Triangular Trade Simulation, one of the items for trade is enslaved Africans. When the inevitable question arises (or should arise if one is teaching with social justice in mind) of how people could do such an evil thing, ask in return why, in the game, players traded enslaved Africans? Enter discussion from there.
Games and Simulations can be used to create common anchor points before a unit, work with information during a unit to elucidate difficult concepts, or to apply knowledge after it’s been learned. All are useful, but of course they aren’t the only methods we should use. For more ideas and to get manipulatives to use in the classroom, Dinah Zikes (google her, first result) was suggested.
11:30am – Engaging “Low Achievers” in Complex Historical Reasoning
This was more of a case-study used to present a collaborative program called “Persistent Issues in History” network. Basically, Auburn University and Indiana University have begun accumulating resources for teachers to use and laid out guidelines for effective use of those resources. Namely, that they are Scaffolded, Authentic, Address Multiple Intelligences, and Facilitate Effective Collaboration between Students.
The PIH Network was featured in the April 2005 issue of Social Education, and I have the PDF if anyone is interested. Basically, in exchange for doing most of the research on a topic, the PIH Network asks its members (membership is free) to write useable lesson plans, with video whenever possible, and post them on the website. Use without contribution is highly discouraged. I’ll be looking into it more when the opportunity for focus arises. (i.e. when I have a topic to experiment with). Website is www.pihnet.org.
After a lunch break, I wandered the exhibit hall and accumulated a great deal of resources that I’ll be reviewing soon. I went to another session in the afternoon, but it wasn’t honestly all that good, so I’ll skip it here. In the evening, there was opportunity for networking and socializing at a couple receptions and a small party at one of the hotels. Saturday was chock full of some intense sessions; my notes are eight pages long. See you tomorrow!
December 10, 2007
National Council for Social Studies Conference - Preview
I’ve taken some time to process the conference I went to last week and I think I’ve gotten my thoughts in order. First off, it was an incredible experience. I cannot stress enough how, well, professionally developing the conference was. Before I lose anyone’s attention, a word to my professional readers:
GO TO YOUR NATIONAL CONFERENCES!!!!
Really, it’s unlikely that your district will approach you and say, “Hey there, why don’t you go to the national conference?” Go to them and try to get a per diem. Take vacation days and pay out of pocket if you have to, but get there. If it is at all within my power, I will never be missing a conference. Both because of what I experienced as well as how much I wasn’t able to see. Every hour was packed with a couple dozen different topic sessions. I can’t really describe the range of the topics, they were so broad. For a taste, here are the topics from the first hour of the first day of the conference:
Pre-K/Elementary:
-Exploring Built Environments through Children’s Literature
-Crossing the Border: Powerful and Meaningful Teaching about Mexico
-Reaching Struggling Readers through Series Nonfiction
-Teaching U.S. History to the Dyslexic Student
-Making Room for Social Studies in the Elementary Classroom
-Differentiating Social Studies Curriculum for All Learners
-Survivor Jamestown! An Interactive White-Board Unit
-Putting Back the ‘Science’ into the Social Science Curriculum
Middle Level:
-Using Classroom Blogs to Foster Effective Student Discussion
-Developing Civic Literacy with Second-Language Learners
-Assessment Techniques for Novice Middle School Social Studies Teachers
-COEXIST An International Perspective on Peace Building and Interreligious Understanding
-Seek the Source: Integrating Document Based Investigations
-Vocabulary Strategies for Success in Social Studies with All Students
-Using Effective Before-, During-, and After- Reading Strategies
-Examining Child Labor through Children’s Lit and Primary Sources
-A Moroccan Specialty: Pigeon Pie, Camel Rides, and Mosques
Secondary:
-Translating Research into Practice
-Inspire Me! Professional Development Opportunities from the National Archives
-Pathways to Home Ownership—Financial Literacy in High School Students
-Crossing Borders, Building Bridges, Shifting Power on the Plains
-Brothers and Sisters: Making Connections between the Abrahamic Faiths
-Student-Created Scrapbooks of the Civil War
-Primary Sources and Document Based Activities: Online and in the Classroom
-Primary Sources and the Presidency
-Using Visual Primary Sources
-Crossing National Borders: Locating U.S. History in Migration History
-Lessons from the Cold War
-Teaching Genocide and Human Rights for the 21st Century
-So Many Learning Needs—How Do I Address Them All?
Mindblowing, eh? And there were about nine sessions a day. For two days. And then workshops on Sunday morning before the final keynote speaker. And poster presentations in the foyer. And an exhibit hall packed with programs and organizations presenting their materials. I’m sure you can understand how exhausted I was upon returning. Exhausted, inspired, and hungry for more.
In order to break this up a bit, and present in manageable chunks, I’m going to withhold the daily recaps on a 24-hour basis. Day One is below, and that was only two intensive sessions, so the many-hour-long sessions will take a little longer to write. Check back tomorrow for Day Two, Wednesday for Day Three, and Thursday for Day Four. Friday before I fly to Florida, I'll try to go through all the exhibit materials I received and post about ones I'm especially interested in. I'll update about the CPHS consultant position while down south. It's going to be a busy blog week!
GO TO YOUR NATIONAL CONFERENCES!!!!
Really, it’s unlikely that your district will approach you and say, “Hey there, why don’t you go to the national conference?” Go to them and try to get a per diem. Take vacation days and pay out of pocket if you have to, but get there. If it is at all within my power, I will never be missing a conference. Both because of what I experienced as well as how much I wasn’t able to see. Every hour was packed with a couple dozen different topic sessions. I can’t really describe the range of the topics, they were so broad. For a taste, here are the topics from the first hour of the first day of the conference:
Pre-K/Elementary:
-Exploring Built Environments through Children’s Literature
-Crossing the Border: Powerful and Meaningful Teaching about Mexico
-Reaching Struggling Readers through Series Nonfiction
-Teaching U.S. History to the Dyslexic Student
-Making Room for Social Studies in the Elementary Classroom
-Differentiating Social Studies Curriculum for All Learners
-Survivor Jamestown! An Interactive White-Board Unit
-Putting Back the ‘Science’ into the Social Science Curriculum
Middle Level:
-Using Classroom Blogs to Foster Effective Student Discussion
-Developing Civic Literacy with Second-Language Learners
-Assessment Techniques for Novice Middle School Social Studies Teachers
-COEXIST An International Perspective on Peace Building and Interreligious Understanding
-Seek the Source: Integrating Document Based Investigations
-Vocabulary Strategies for Success in Social Studies with All Students
-Using Effective Before-, During-, and After- Reading Strategies
-Examining Child Labor through Children’s Lit and Primary Sources
-A Moroccan Specialty: Pigeon Pie, Camel Rides, and Mosques
Secondary:
-Translating Research into Practice
-Inspire Me! Professional Development Opportunities from the National Archives
-Pathways to Home Ownership—Financial Literacy in High School Students
-Crossing Borders, Building Bridges, Shifting Power on the Plains
-Brothers and Sisters: Making Connections between the Abrahamic Faiths
-Student-Created Scrapbooks of the Civil War
-Primary Sources and Document Based Activities: Online and in the Classroom
-Primary Sources and the Presidency
-Using Visual Primary Sources
-Crossing National Borders: Locating U.S. History in Migration History
-Lessons from the Cold War
-Teaching Genocide and Human Rights for the 21st Century
-So Many Learning Needs—How Do I Address Them All?
Mindblowing, eh? And there were about nine sessions a day. For two days. And then workshops on Sunday morning before the final keynote speaker. And poster presentations in the foyer. And an exhibit hall packed with programs and organizations presenting their materials. I’m sure you can understand how exhausted I was upon returning. Exhausted, inspired, and hungry for more.
In order to break this up a bit, and present in manageable chunks, I’m going to withhold the daily recaps on a 24-hour basis. Day One is below, and that was only two intensive sessions, so the many-hour-long sessions will take a little longer to write. Check back tomorrow for Day Two, Wednesday for Day Three, and Thursday for Day Four. Friday before I fly to Florida, I'll try to go through all the exhibit materials I received and post about ones I'm especially interested in. I'll update about the CPHS consultant position while down south. It's going to be a busy blog week!
November 29, 2007
San Diego Conference - Day 1
The conference has opened as excitingly as I had hoped. This morning I attended a presentation entitled "Who Controls Historical Memory? Implications for Classroom Teachers and Students. The focus was more on why it's important to bring many perspectives into account to get a better understanding of history than how to do it in the classroom, which gave it a 'preaching to the choir' sort of feel. I did, however, get a LOT of materials addressing how the issue relates specifically to the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, and World War II. Large packets of photocopies from various resources were given to us, and I'm excited to read them. Some lesson ideas include reading/watching/recording instances in which historical memory are used to advance or attack courses of action, discussing how these instances are manipulated and changed according to the desires and needs of the person using them. I think it would be interesting, and certainly relevant to students, to examine not only how history and primary sources have bias, but how that bias is used to manipulate people en masse. Perhaps also bring in some elements of how nationalism (or other forms of artificial unity) are created using historical memory.
In the afternoon I went to another set of presentations called "Understanding Islam." I must say, I did come away with a much better understanding than I went in with. Naturally, it is not possible to present a complete understanding of all of Islam in a three hour session. Some highlights include an understanding of the Quran and Islam as a religion focused not on theology/metaphysics/explaining the universe, but as a setting down of legal principles that are to be followed. The goal is submission to the rule of law, and was partially a means of organizing and laying down rules a people that had no such structure. Islam has, alongside the Quran, a body of work called the Haddith, which is similar to the Talmud in its interpretive and prescriptive capacity. We discussed concepts of Jihad. Yes, it means warfare in 99.5% of usages, but there are limits to WHO (not 'people of the book'/monotheists) who can have Jihad declared against them. Even that is, of course, an oversimplification. Islam teaches not only tolerance of Judaism and Christianity, but respect. No one 'of the book' can be forcibly converted. There are five different kinds of rules, each with varying degrees and types of severity attached to them. Purdah is, interestingly, not amongst them. I'm still processing a lot of it.
Also interesting was the conclusion, given by a man who has worked in Iraq to help reconstruct the government and education systems there. He addressed how concepts of democracy are not fully understood by us ourselves (which is understandable, as we are encapsulated in it) and so cannot be easily communicated to others. We think of voting, but voting is a very minuscule part of what makes up our idea of democracy. Furthermore, Iraq totally gets voting. Of course, their version was more "here's your pre-marked ballot, go carry it over there and put it in the box," but they do get it in theory. What is far more difficult for them to understand is what amounts to not only the freedom of speech, but the importance of exercising it constantly. The education system, which has been around to some extent continuously since the eleventh century, has always been very unidirectional. K-college consists of the teacher telling, the students regurgitating, which makes sense given the structure of Islam as a religion. Translators had difficulty communicating the idea of 'deliberation' and 'debate' as a desirable activity, and several experts have postulated that what is really needed in Iraq is not democracy, but liberal arts education. Professors and officials were resistant to discussing controversial topics such as "Should the mosque and state be separated?" They feared losing jobs and being harmed. This portion of 'democracy' is not universal as we sometimes think it is, but is rather quite cultural.
There will be so much to process constantly for the next few days, and hopefully I'll be able to get a lot of it down... it's going to be a mind-blowing weekend! Ask questions, via email or comment, it'll help me get more of it recorded.
In the afternoon I went to another set of presentations called "Understanding Islam." I must say, I did come away with a much better understanding than I went in with. Naturally, it is not possible to present a complete understanding of all of Islam in a three hour session. Some highlights include an understanding of the Quran and Islam as a religion focused not on theology/metaphysics/explaining the universe, but as a setting down of legal principles that are to be followed. The goal is submission to the rule of law, and was partially a means of organizing and laying down rules a people that had no such structure. Islam has, alongside the Quran, a body of work called the Haddith, which is similar to the Talmud in its interpretive and prescriptive capacity. We discussed concepts of Jihad. Yes, it means warfare in 99.5% of usages, but there are limits to WHO (not 'people of the book'/monotheists) who can have Jihad declared against them. Even that is, of course, an oversimplification. Islam teaches not only tolerance of Judaism and Christianity, but respect. No one 'of the book' can be forcibly converted. There are five different kinds of rules, each with varying degrees and types of severity attached to them. Purdah is, interestingly, not amongst them. I'm still processing a lot of it.
Also interesting was the conclusion, given by a man who has worked in Iraq to help reconstruct the government and education systems there. He addressed how concepts of democracy are not fully understood by us ourselves (which is understandable, as we are encapsulated in it) and so cannot be easily communicated to others. We think of voting, but voting is a very minuscule part of what makes up our idea of democracy. Furthermore, Iraq totally gets voting. Of course, their version was more "here's your pre-marked ballot, go carry it over there and put it in the box," but they do get it in theory. What is far more difficult for them to understand is what amounts to not only the freedom of speech, but the importance of exercising it constantly. The education system, which has been around to some extent continuously since the eleventh century, has always been very unidirectional. K-college consists of the teacher telling, the students regurgitating, which makes sense given the structure of Islam as a religion. Translators had difficulty communicating the idea of 'deliberation' and 'debate' as a desirable activity, and several experts have postulated that what is really needed in Iraq is not democracy, but liberal arts education. Professors and officials were resistant to discussing controversial topics such as "Should the mosque and state be separated?" They feared losing jobs and being harmed. This portion of 'democracy' is not universal as we sometimes think it is, but is rather quite cultural.
There will be so much to process constantly for the next few days, and hopefully I'll be able to get a lot of it down... it's going to be a mind-blowing weekend! Ask questions, via email or comment, it'll help me get more of it recorded.
November 23, 2007
Final Weeks (Oct 29 - Nov 2, Nov 5 - 7)
The final weeks of my student teaching experience were focused on wrapping up the unit. Collection of rough drafts and final papers, scheduling presentations, and navigating the unexpected (as always!).
I was disappointed at the number of papers that I received. Many either didn't turn in the final draft or turned it in without references (no credit). I got a little down about this, until my mentor informed me that this does happen, that some students (especially sophomores) will end up responding well to the kind of pressure this lack of points will put on them. Also, the end of year exhibition assessment is worth as much as the rest of the course, so all the students will have ample opportunity to show their learning and pass the course.
This being the last two weeks of the experience did not prevent new students from entering the course. We had one student come back for two days from an absence of three weeks, then disappear again. We added three students to the class in the last two weeks. One of which we were able to design an alternative assessment based on learning from the presentations. Another was once the boyfriend of a girl also in our class. He apparently had moved back up from 'California' (read: Mexico) to be with her, only to break up with her on arrival and the day of her presentation and start talking to other girls. She got through her presentation well, but we had to do a little hallway counseling once she was done. Actually, she was remarkably mature about the entire situation, but it certainly brought some unexpected drama to the room. The last new addition showed up on my last day as the students and my mentor threw a surprise good-bye party for me. I tried to get her involved in festivities and to have some of our more outgoing students talk to her; hopefully she'll slide in well.
New additions are yet another reason for smaller chunking, the biggest learning I've gained from the quarter. The alternative assessments should be effective to get them into the course seamlessly, but smaller assignments might have made this even easier. If this is a trend that continues throughout the year, however, I can see how moving mid-school year can make for incredible difficulty navigating our public school system.
Also, the presentations showed much more learning than the papers did, partially because many were not received. I understand that presentations are not good representations of individual learning, but I can't help but think that perhaps a long writing assignment might not have been better for later in the course. Too much too fast, or high expectations set early? I suppose this will vary wildly depending on each and every class, and that with time I'll be able to get a good feel for where the class is early on and to design preassessments that can guide me even better.
It was difficult to leave Clover Park, and I'm glad I don't have to entirely. I'll be working as a 'consultant' when I return from my Thanksgiving break. In other words, I'll be grading papers and assisting my mentor behind the scenes in exchange for a small hourly wage and some face time with the students I came to care so much for. And I'll still wear a shirt and tie everyday.
I was disappointed at the number of papers that I received. Many either didn't turn in the final draft or turned it in without references (no credit). I got a little down about this, until my mentor informed me that this does happen, that some students (especially sophomores) will end up responding well to the kind of pressure this lack of points will put on them. Also, the end of year exhibition assessment is worth as much as the rest of the course, so all the students will have ample opportunity to show their learning and pass the course.
This being the last two weeks of the experience did not prevent new students from entering the course. We had one student come back for two days from an absence of three weeks, then disappear again. We added three students to the class in the last two weeks. One of which we were able to design an alternative assessment based on learning from the presentations. Another was once the boyfriend of a girl also in our class. He apparently had moved back up from 'California' (read: Mexico) to be with her, only to break up with her on arrival and the day of her presentation and start talking to other girls. She got through her presentation well, but we had to do a little hallway counseling once she was done. Actually, she was remarkably mature about the entire situation, but it certainly brought some unexpected drama to the room. The last new addition showed up on my last day as the students and my mentor threw a surprise good-bye party for me. I tried to get her involved in festivities and to have some of our more outgoing students talk to her; hopefully she'll slide in well.
New additions are yet another reason for smaller chunking, the biggest learning I've gained from the quarter. The alternative assessments should be effective to get them into the course seamlessly, but smaller assignments might have made this even easier. If this is a trend that continues throughout the year, however, I can see how moving mid-school year can make for incredible difficulty navigating our public school system.
Also, the presentations showed much more learning than the papers did, partially because many were not received. I understand that presentations are not good representations of individual learning, but I can't help but think that perhaps a long writing assignment might not have been better for later in the course. Too much too fast, or high expectations set early? I suppose this will vary wildly depending on each and every class, and that with time I'll be able to get a good feel for where the class is early on and to design preassessments that can guide me even better.
It was difficult to leave Clover Park, and I'm glad I don't have to entirely. I'll be working as a 'consultant' when I return from my Thanksgiving break. In other words, I'll be grading papers and assisting my mentor behind the scenes in exchange for a small hourly wage and some face time with the students I came to care so much for. And I'll still wear a shirt and tie everyday.
October 30, 2007
Sixth and Seventh Weeks (Oct 15-19, 22-26)
I'm not certain what happened to the post about the sixth week; it never seems to have made it up. I apologize to loyal readers and will attempt to reconstruct it.
Following the collection of my pre-assessment at the beginning of the week, I promptly began freaking out. The impression I had received when planning the lesson was that all the 10th graders should be familiar with the writing process to the point that they can be expected to complete it on their own. This was not at all the case, as I had discovered by our collaborative faculty meeting during a half-day on Wednesday. These meetings are truly invaluable, as it allowed me to interact with not only my mentor, but also the ESL instructor, the Sp.Ed. instructor, and a literacy-focused instructional facilitator. We were able to draw up a plan that focuses on the free time of my collaborators and highly differentiated instruction. The plan of writing a paper to prepare for a presentation went out the window when we realized that the students didn't know how to write an expository paper.
Thursday began damage control and a new plan that has me teaching the unit not until the end of the seventh week as planned, but until the end of the ninth. This has created a LOT of work, and it has been and will be challenging, though instructive, to keep up with it all. Several lesson plans were created last minute and on the spot. The senior class was turned back over to the mentor teacher a little bit earlier than I would have liked, but it seems necessary to both of us. Rather than have the papers guide the presentations, by alternating days that we work on each, they will inform each other. Hopefully. More on that later. We've been going through each step of the writing process, and each student is working at a pace that works for them and with individualized guidance. Without the ELL and SpEd instructors in the class now and again, I could never pull this off. Have I mentioned they're great? I've been getting as much library time as I can for on-spot research in between, and for presentation preparations.
Upside: Most students use the time very well, and are learning a lot about the writing process and their nations. The individualized instruction works for them. Downside: Some students who have checked out completely, and have not done work all year, do not have an entry point. No matter what I say, or my mentor says, they do not complete any work. Since each step is predicated on the last, and students are working at their own paces, the unit has passed them by. This is really only in one of the two class periods, and there is no real way that they can re-enter the learning process at this time. These students actively avoided doing any research, and so have nothing to write about. They are not invisible, I get on them everyday, but tomorrow, when we have the mobile laptop cart in the room to write rough drafts, I have to come up with something else for them to do. In the past couple days, as I have become fixed on the deadline, they have become more disruptive. I'm not entirely sure what to do about this. I've talked with their other teachers, and similar behavior has been seen in their classes as well. One student's home did not answer the phone on multiple attempts, another has no contact information listed. A couple others do complete work, but can be distracted by the more disruptive students.
I brought these concerns to my mentor, and he shares them . We'll talk more about it tomorrow, but he did encourage me to realize that this behavior does happen, that the failing grades may be a wake-up call for them, and that steps will be taken. Unfortunately, I won't be directly around to see them. At some point, he said, the student has to take on the responsibility to show effort, and my job now is to figure out what parts of this situation are a result of my own planning and actions. "Courage to change what you can, patience to live with what you can't," right?
So:
I think that the plan of modeling an investigation using China and then pushing to investigate other nations was badly chunked. As in, too big. Better to have investigated China as a class, through direct instruction and transparent research methods on my part, and investigated each group's nation as we went through each step. Show them how I researched China to teach them, have them research their own nation. Make a pre-write about China, have them make a pre-write for their own nation. Models of what to do next would have more available in student short-term memory, and by doing a day or two of instruction followed by a day or two of student investigation, I think the planning load would have been greatly lightened. I wouldn't have had to produce so much in so little time on China, and I wouldn't have had to create so much time for them to work on their own. Time that, for those who are less self-directed, has turned into deliberately unused time. I could also have adjusted better along the way, identifying scaffolding needs through increased opportunities for pre/formative assessments.
Lessons of pacing and planning that aids management can only really be gotten through practice, and that's something I have to remember. Part of the difficulty is that I already care so much about these kids, here, now, and I worry constantly about their success. My mentor teacher did chuckle at this, and reminded me that I haven't academically scarred them for life; it's only a few weeks long unit, that there's much more of the year to go, and that I'm welcome to come in and check up on them now and again. I look forward to doing so.
Following the collection of my pre-assessment at the beginning of the week, I promptly began freaking out. The impression I had received when planning the lesson was that all the 10th graders should be familiar with the writing process to the point that they can be expected to complete it on their own. This was not at all the case, as I had discovered by our collaborative faculty meeting during a half-day on Wednesday. These meetings are truly invaluable, as it allowed me to interact with not only my mentor, but also the ESL instructor, the Sp.Ed. instructor, and a literacy-focused instructional facilitator. We were able to draw up a plan that focuses on the free time of my collaborators and highly differentiated instruction. The plan of writing a paper to prepare for a presentation went out the window when we realized that the students didn't know how to write an expository paper.
Thursday began damage control and a new plan that has me teaching the unit not until the end of the seventh week as planned, but until the end of the ninth. This has created a LOT of work, and it has been and will be challenging, though instructive, to keep up with it all. Several lesson plans were created last minute and on the spot. The senior class was turned back over to the mentor teacher a little bit earlier than I would have liked, but it seems necessary to both of us. Rather than have the papers guide the presentations, by alternating days that we work on each, they will inform each other. Hopefully. More on that later. We've been going through each step of the writing process, and each student is working at a pace that works for them and with individualized guidance. Without the ELL and SpEd instructors in the class now and again, I could never pull this off. Have I mentioned they're great? I've been getting as much library time as I can for on-spot research in between, and for presentation preparations.
Upside: Most students use the time very well, and are learning a lot about the writing process and their nations. The individualized instruction works for them. Downside: Some students who have checked out completely, and have not done work all year, do not have an entry point. No matter what I say, or my mentor says, they do not complete any work. Since each step is predicated on the last, and students are working at their own paces, the unit has passed them by. This is really only in one of the two class periods, and there is no real way that they can re-enter the learning process at this time. These students actively avoided doing any research, and so have nothing to write about. They are not invisible, I get on them everyday, but tomorrow, when we have the mobile laptop cart in the room to write rough drafts, I have to come up with something else for them to do. In the past couple days, as I have become fixed on the deadline, they have become more disruptive. I'm not entirely sure what to do about this. I've talked with their other teachers, and similar behavior has been seen in their classes as well. One student's home did not answer the phone on multiple attempts, another has no contact information listed. A couple others do complete work, but can be distracted by the more disruptive students.
I brought these concerns to my mentor, and he shares them . We'll talk more about it tomorrow, but he did encourage me to realize that this behavior does happen, that the failing grades may be a wake-up call for them, and that steps will be taken. Unfortunately, I won't be directly around to see them. At some point, he said, the student has to take on the responsibility to show effort, and my job now is to figure out what parts of this situation are a result of my own planning and actions. "Courage to change what you can, patience to live with what you can't," right?
So:
I think that the plan of modeling an investigation using China and then pushing to investigate other nations was badly chunked. As in, too big. Better to have investigated China as a class, through direct instruction and transparent research methods on my part, and investigated each group's nation as we went through each step. Show them how I researched China to teach them, have them research their own nation. Make a pre-write about China, have them make a pre-write for their own nation. Models of what to do next would have more available in student short-term memory, and by doing a day or two of instruction followed by a day or two of student investigation, I think the planning load would have been greatly lightened. I wouldn't have had to produce so much in so little time on China, and I wouldn't have had to create so much time for them to work on their own. Time that, for those who are less self-directed, has turned into deliberately unused time. I could also have adjusted better along the way, identifying scaffolding needs through increased opportunities for pre/formative assessments.
Lessons of pacing and planning that aids management can only really be gotten through practice, and that's something I have to remember. Part of the difficulty is that I already care so much about these kids, here, now, and I worry constantly about their success. My mentor teacher did chuckle at this, and reminded me that I haven't academically scarred them for life; it's only a few weeks long unit, that there's much more of the year to go, and that I'm welcome to come in and check up on them now and again. I look forward to doing so.
October 12, 2007
Fifth Week (Oct 8-11, No School Friday)
What a week in the Pac Rim class!
I graded like a madman all weekend in order to have everything ready when the students walked in Monday morning, and it was immediately apparent that they are not used to such a quick turnaround. I prefaced handing them out with explaining that I didn't feel the quiz represented what they actually knew about the subject, that I was taking responsibility for that, and what the makeup quiz options were. I handed them back, repeated the makeup quiz options, and tried to settle down the upset students. We then reviewed the entire quiz, and I was glad to see that many students took notes as we did so.
I then began an activity to create a graphic representation of the culture changes in China. Three columns, cut out descriptions of various aspects of culture in different time periods, arrows and similar language in the descriptions to communicate relationships. Some confusion on how to attack it at first, but they caught on after a bit. I attempted to create a sense of urgency by having a short amount of time allotted. For most this worked, but for some of my struggling students (and especially my LEP students, they began to disengage at first. But then, and this is HUGE, they realized (despite the fact that I had addressed it) that I made the cut out pieces front/back, English/Spanish. Suddenly a few them seemed to feel like they could do the task. Self-efficacy went up, activity went up, and I wasn't about to shut them down again by ending the activity and giving them low marks because they took a while to start. I had to explain it to them a second time once they realized they could do it, and this set them behind.
So we continued the task the next day, and they became even more involved, although it was taking them a bit longer to complete. The second part of the task was to explain the chart, either verbally or in writing, so the quicker workers had something to do while others finished up. Most people were done when i wanted to move on, but those who weren't came up and asked if they could take it home to finish it. Which means they WANTED to finish it! Success!
We moved on with a little textbook reading on Chinese communism (I felt dirty doing it, but they needed a break from constructivism for a bit, and they actually seemed happy to be using a textbook for once) and a question at the end of the section. Some didn't have time to finish it, so I told them we'd pick it up tomorrow.
The next day (Wednesday) I passed out a letter I wrote that mocks a Communist recruitment essay. It pretends to be from a student group, and I actually fooled some students to the point that they thought it was real. I let them in on the joke, and we reflected in journals on what communism would look like if it was implemented in a school. As I let them go back to the textbook reading, as they wanted to know more (look at that!) in order to answer the journal question, and some went back to doing the charts, I realized that there seemed to be a work ethic developing. Some students were coming up with their charts in hand, others wanted to retake the quiz, etc. I called the class to attention, and, despite my fears that it would turn into a social hour, I announced that the whole period would be used to complete work assignments. I put the assignments I wanted done up on the board, and said that I was available for grade conferences, quiz make ups, help on the work we were doing, etc, but everyone had the period to work on what they needed to do.
I have not seen such engagement since the first day of school. It kept me rushing all over the place, getting materials for students, helping students, giving conferences, encouraging students worried about their grades and making plans on how they can improve it, on and on. The hour and a half flew by and felt like three hours all at the same time. My students who were previously completely disengaged were now coming up and asking what they could do to make up work that they 'missed' while they were in the classroom. It's as if they suddenly felt that if they had all this time, they could catch up, they could do it, and they would.
Thursday we watched a short piece of a film, wrapped up Communism, and started talking about the research project they'll be starting next week. More requests for make up work. I've logged everything that each student is missing and I'm making 'make up work' folders for each one this weekend, which will double as student research folders to keep in the room when they start their projects next week. Time will tell, but I think I've managed to turn a degrading situation into a high expectation work environment. Last week I was down, this week I'm totally jacked, and it feels great.
I graded like a madman all weekend in order to have everything ready when the students walked in Monday morning, and it was immediately apparent that they are not used to such a quick turnaround. I prefaced handing them out with explaining that I didn't feel the quiz represented what they actually knew about the subject, that I was taking responsibility for that, and what the makeup quiz options were. I handed them back, repeated the makeup quiz options, and tried to settle down the upset students. We then reviewed the entire quiz, and I was glad to see that many students took notes as we did so.
I then began an activity to create a graphic representation of the culture changes in China. Three columns, cut out descriptions of various aspects of culture in different time periods, arrows and similar language in the descriptions to communicate relationships. Some confusion on how to attack it at first, but they caught on after a bit. I attempted to create a sense of urgency by having a short amount of time allotted. For most this worked, but for some of my struggling students (and especially my LEP students, they began to disengage at first. But then, and this is HUGE, they realized (despite the fact that I had addressed it) that I made the cut out pieces front/back, English/Spanish. Suddenly a few them seemed to feel like they could do the task. Self-efficacy went up, activity went up, and I wasn't about to shut them down again by ending the activity and giving them low marks because they took a while to start. I had to explain it to them a second time once they realized they could do it, and this set them behind.
So we continued the task the next day, and they became even more involved, although it was taking them a bit longer to complete. The second part of the task was to explain the chart, either verbally or in writing, so the quicker workers had something to do while others finished up. Most people were done when i wanted to move on, but those who weren't came up and asked if they could take it home to finish it. Which means they WANTED to finish it! Success!
We moved on with a little textbook reading on Chinese communism (I felt dirty doing it, but they needed a break from constructivism for a bit, and they actually seemed happy to be using a textbook for once) and a question at the end of the section. Some didn't have time to finish it, so I told them we'd pick it up tomorrow.
The next day (Wednesday) I passed out a letter I wrote that mocks a Communist recruitment essay. It pretends to be from a student group, and I actually fooled some students to the point that they thought it was real. I let them in on the joke, and we reflected in journals on what communism would look like if it was implemented in a school. As I let them go back to the textbook reading, as they wanted to know more (look at that!) in order to answer the journal question, and some went back to doing the charts, I realized that there seemed to be a work ethic developing. Some students were coming up with their charts in hand, others wanted to retake the quiz, etc. I called the class to attention, and, despite my fears that it would turn into a social hour, I announced that the whole period would be used to complete work assignments. I put the assignments I wanted done up on the board, and said that I was available for grade conferences, quiz make ups, help on the work we were doing, etc, but everyone had the period to work on what they needed to do.
I have not seen such engagement since the first day of school. It kept me rushing all over the place, getting materials for students, helping students, giving conferences, encouraging students worried about their grades and making plans on how they can improve it, on and on. The hour and a half flew by and felt like three hours all at the same time. My students who were previously completely disengaged were now coming up and asking what they could do to make up work that they 'missed' while they were in the classroom. It's as if they suddenly felt that if they had all this time, they could catch up, they could do it, and they would.
Thursday we watched a short piece of a film, wrapped up Communism, and started talking about the research project they'll be starting next week. More requests for make up work. I've logged everything that each student is missing and I'm making 'make up work' folders for each one this weekend, which will double as student research folders to keep in the room when they start their projects next week. Time will tell, but I think I've managed to turn a degrading situation into a high expectation work environment. Last week I was down, this week I'm totally jacked, and it feels great.
October 7, 2007
Fourth Week (Oct 2 - Oct 5)
This week I took over the classroom. Seating charts and the new format came with mixed classroom management results; one class is doing better at keeping attention, but in the other some students have begun disengaging more than ever. I didn't realize to what extent until an activity I had considered to be setting them up for inevitable success failed.
We did primary documents for a few days, and actually studying them seemed to go really well. Students at different language levels were helping each other, kids were mostly on task, reporting out went well too. But, the guided note sheets, which I was proud of creating, thinking it would make everything more accessible, and which I based the quiz on, seem to not have been completed to satisfaction. No worries, I thought, I'll go over it entirely in class. Quiz was the next day.
Either my assessment was bad, or they just didn't have the knowledge like I thought they did. Friday afternoon grading was depressing, and it took some doing to get past it and start thinking about what to do next. So next week will begin with a reteaching, and an alternative assessment. And we'll go onward and upward from there.
We did primary documents for a few days, and actually studying them seemed to go really well. Students at different language levels were helping each other, kids were mostly on task, reporting out went well too. But, the guided note sheets, which I was proud of creating, thinking it would make everything more accessible, and which I based the quiz on, seem to not have been completed to satisfaction. No worries, I thought, I'll go over it entirely in class. Quiz was the next day.
Either my assessment was bad, or they just didn't have the knowledge like I thought they did. Friday afternoon grading was depressing, and it took some doing to get past it and start thinking about what to do next. So next week will begin with a reteaching, and an alternative assessment. And we'll go onward and upward from there.
October 1, 2007
Third Week (Sept 24-28) Plus One (Oct 1)
The third week of my student teaching experience went very well, I thought. I led a lesson on Tuesday in which I introduced the concepts of Imperialism and Isolationism through Legos. We did some vocabulary work as a class, and read a story from their textbook to become more familiar with Chinese traditional culture. I've continued to foster relationships with the students.
In my section that is almost half ELL, I may be receiving some support. An ELL teacher on our faculty team has had a period open up that coincides with every other day of that class. Hopefully, she'll be helping me out there, and I look forward to her advice in designing lessons that are accessible to all my students.
Today I took over the Pacific Rim classes. I opened with a discussion on classroom expectations and attempted to democratically construct the expectations of the course. In one section, the discussion seemed to come off fairly flawlessly. We worked from a fairly rowdy "our regular teacher isn't here" attitude into one of respect and courtesy. We achieved everything we wanted to, and I even was able to give them a closing journal question.
In the second Pacific Rim period, the same activity and discussion went terribly. The students gave similar expectations as the first class, but it was clear they weren't internalizing them. They would tell me, "yes, it's important that we respect each other and hear each other," and then immediately go back to their disruptive side conversations. The discussion stalled several times, and while I think they must have seen how disappointed and frustrated I was, I hope they also noticed that I never stopped treating them with respect and that I never raised my voice in anger. To some degree, I'm going to consider that a success.
The classroom is now organized in tables of four to six students, and I have a seating chart arranged. Hopefully this will help alleviate some of the classroom management problems we've been having with distractability and side conversation. It's going to be difficult having my most challenging section at the end of everyday, since it's all I can think about on the way home. Still, I'm hopeful and ready to take the challenge on. More to come!
In my section that is almost half ELL, I may be receiving some support. An ELL teacher on our faculty team has had a period open up that coincides with every other day of that class. Hopefully, she'll be helping me out there, and I look forward to her advice in designing lessons that are accessible to all my students.
Today I took over the Pacific Rim classes. I opened with a discussion on classroom expectations and attempted to democratically construct the expectations of the course. In one section, the discussion seemed to come off fairly flawlessly. We worked from a fairly rowdy "our regular teacher isn't here" attitude into one of respect and courtesy. We achieved everything we wanted to, and I even was able to give them a closing journal question.
In the second Pacific Rim period, the same activity and discussion went terribly. The students gave similar expectations as the first class, but it was clear they weren't internalizing them. They would tell me, "yes, it's important that we respect each other and hear each other," and then immediately go back to their disruptive side conversations. The discussion stalled several times, and while I think they must have seen how disappointed and frustrated I was, I hope they also noticed that I never stopped treating them with respect and that I never raised my voice in anger. To some degree, I'm going to consider that a success.
The classroom is now organized in tables of four to six students, and I have a seating chart arranged. Hopefully this will help alleviate some of the classroom management problems we've been having with distractability and side conversation. It's going to be difficult having my most challenging section at the end of everyday, since it's all I can think about on the way home. Still, I'm hopeful and ready to take the challenge on. More to come!
September 19, 2007
Second Week
I've been engaging my students in and out of the classroom consistently, even if it's as simple as a "Good Morning, _____!" when passing in the hallway. I'm amazed at how many of them are shocked that I know their names. Please, please, my professional colleague readers, learn your kids' names!
I haven't been planning much of the lessons on my own; my mentor teacher and I are collaborating on most classroom activity together. We attempted to pre-assess and enter into our study of China through self-selection of mini-research topics and some low-stakes public speaking. My mentor is a debate coach and public speaking enthusiast, and so he insists on speeches being involved in the course. Immediate issues with unscaffolded speeches and unscaffolded research as pre-assessment should be obvious: we have now spread many misconceptions. We asked plenty of probing questions in order to plant the seeds of critical analysis in their heads, and we'll be debunking the misconceptions as we go. It's good that we know these misconceptions exist, but perhaps we should not have let them spread so virally.
Our vocabulary studies have not gone quite as I would have liked. It's been more "teacher-as-deliverer" than "student-as-worker," and I think there is a lack of provided context for the words. This is proving to cause our ELL students (almost half of one class) significant difficulty. I have some thoughts on ways to fix this in the future, including an arts/crafts assignment that will create a bookmark with the vocab word roots on them. The kids will record words that derive from their roots in their bookmarks as they read, and share out. Also, points given for the use (and recognition of) word roots in their journal entries.
Soon we will be entering into our study of China as an entry point to imperialism in the Pacific Rim Region. Monday's lesson (if not more) is on me, and a week later the class will be turned over to me entirely. Exciting!
I haven't been planning much of the lessons on my own; my mentor teacher and I are collaborating on most classroom activity together. We attempted to pre-assess and enter into our study of China through self-selection of mini-research topics and some low-stakes public speaking. My mentor is a debate coach and public speaking enthusiast, and so he insists on speeches being involved in the course. Immediate issues with unscaffolded speeches and unscaffolded research as pre-assessment should be obvious: we have now spread many misconceptions. We asked plenty of probing questions in order to plant the seeds of critical analysis in their heads, and we'll be debunking the misconceptions as we go. It's good that we know these misconceptions exist, but perhaps we should not have let them spread so virally.
Our vocabulary studies have not gone quite as I would have liked. It's been more "teacher-as-deliverer" than "student-as-worker," and I think there is a lack of provided context for the words. This is proving to cause our ELL students (almost half of one class) significant difficulty. I have some thoughts on ways to fix this in the future, including an arts/crafts assignment that will create a bookmark with the vocab word roots on them. The kids will record words that derive from their roots in their bookmarks as they read, and share out. Also, points given for the use (and recognition of) word roots in their journal entries.
Soon we will be entering into our study of China as an entry point to imperialism in the Pacific Rim Region. Monday's lesson (if not more) is on me, and a week later the class will be turned over to me entirely. Exciting!
September 10, 2007
First Week
The first few days saw a lot less community building than I would have liked. Expectations were just laid out there, without much classroom democracy used. I won't be doing much of anything actively in the AP Government class, mostly just grading papers and similar assistful type duties, which is to be expected, as I've never had AP training and there are 48 kids in the class. The kids are slowly warming up to me, but with each interaction so far, I've made a stronger connection, which is what the first days are all about for me.
Without much community building, it's been on me to learn the students' names using a seating chart as my main guide. Subvocal repetition, repeated self-quizzing, and borrowing last year's annual has gotten me to a point where I'm pretty sure I can greet 75% of the students by name, and without hesitation, in the hallways. (And I do.)
There are often lessons learned in theory that one can't really appreciate the importance of until actual practice comes around. Three big ones from the first week, and a conclusion:
1. Assume nothing, pre-assess, yet walk the knife's edge between patronizing and condescending
In our Pacific Rim Studies humanities course, one of the opening activities was a map fill-in assignment. A textbook map was provided, and as long as the locations and capitals were on those maps, they were fine. However, not all of the information was on these maps, even though it could be found around the room, whether it was on wall maps, or atlases in the room's decently sized classroom library. The assumption of basic research habits of "if I can't find it here, I should look elsewhere" resulted in some frustration when they couldn't find the answer and we wouldn't simply give it to them. "Where am I supposed to find the answer?"
2. ELL students and weak readers may not understand you or the text. They'll appreciate further explanation if they are brave enough to ask for it or if you are attentive enough to explain. Make it so neither is necessary.
My mentor teacher is very conscientious of the needs of his students. Still, benefiting from the opportunity to observe while he is talking and caught up in activity, I've noticed that we both occasionally talk too fast for our many ELL students to understand. Whether it's explaining an activity, running through vocabulary, or reading aloud or own their own, keeping these students in front of one's mind is helpful. I've thought of some strategies such as asking students to repeat my directions back to me in their own words, slowing down my pace when speaking, and monitoring the vocabulary I use.
3. Along with pre-assessing, built-in scaffolding is crucial. Without the skills and understanding to perform an activity, the only possible assessment is how well the teacher chose and explained the activity. We can't expect students to show us their learning without the skills to complete the activity in place.
If it involves research, scaffold research. If it involves vocabulary building, scaffold figuring out words from context. If it's paying attention to the news and then taking a quiz on what was in the news and discussion, scaffold smaller versions in groups and note-taking strategies. I've already seen a few struggles in performing class activities, and I believe they are entirely attributable to a lack of properly scaffolded skills. This is especially poignant for the English Language Learners.
Conclusion: Much of this seems like it can be accomplished with student-centered community building activities in the first day or two.
Getting-to-know-each-other activities that are easily understood and involve elements of skills involved in expected daily tasks might inform the needed scaffolding and trouble spots. An introduction to the room is necessary before the students can be expected to use the resources the room has to offer, for instance. Worked into this should be classroom expectations, democratically created. (I've worked out what I hope to use to do this, if my professional readers are interested)
All in all, I'm still processing a lot, there really is no substitute for jumping in when it comes to learning the practice of the craft. I think the theoretical base I built last year is definitely giving me a schema to use in the processing that I would not have had otherwise, and for that I'm grateful.
Without much community building, it's been on me to learn the students' names using a seating chart as my main guide. Subvocal repetition, repeated self-quizzing, and borrowing last year's annual has gotten me to a point where I'm pretty sure I can greet 75% of the students by name, and without hesitation, in the hallways. (And I do.)
There are often lessons learned in theory that one can't really appreciate the importance of until actual practice comes around. Three big ones from the first week, and a conclusion:
1. Assume nothing, pre-assess, yet walk the knife's edge between patronizing and condescending
In our Pacific Rim Studies humanities course, one of the opening activities was a map fill-in assignment. A textbook map was provided, and as long as the locations and capitals were on those maps, they were fine. However, not all of the information was on these maps, even though it could be found around the room, whether it was on wall maps, or atlases in the room's decently sized classroom library. The assumption of basic research habits of "if I can't find it here, I should look elsewhere" resulted in some frustration when they couldn't find the answer and we wouldn't simply give it to them. "Where am I supposed to find the answer?"
2. ELL students and weak readers may not understand you or the text. They'll appreciate further explanation if they are brave enough to ask for it or if you are attentive enough to explain. Make it so neither is necessary.
My mentor teacher is very conscientious of the needs of his students. Still, benefiting from the opportunity to observe while he is talking and caught up in activity, I've noticed that we both occasionally talk too fast for our many ELL students to understand. Whether it's explaining an activity, running through vocabulary, or reading aloud or own their own, keeping these students in front of one's mind is helpful. I've thought of some strategies such as asking students to repeat my directions back to me in their own words, slowing down my pace when speaking, and monitoring the vocabulary I use.
3. Along with pre-assessing, built-in scaffolding is crucial. Without the skills and understanding to perform an activity, the only possible assessment is how well the teacher chose and explained the activity. We can't expect students to show us their learning without the skills to complete the activity in place.
If it involves research, scaffold research. If it involves vocabulary building, scaffold figuring out words from context. If it's paying attention to the news and then taking a quiz on what was in the news and discussion, scaffold smaller versions in groups and note-taking strategies. I've already seen a few struggles in performing class activities, and I believe they are entirely attributable to a lack of properly scaffolded skills. This is especially poignant for the English Language Learners.
Conclusion: Much of this seems like it can be accomplished with student-centered community building activities in the first day or two.
Getting-to-know-each-other activities that are easily understood and involve elements of skills involved in expected daily tasks might inform the needed scaffolding and trouble spots. An introduction to the room is necessary before the students can be expected to use the resources the room has to offer, for instance. Worked into this should be classroom expectations, democratically created. (I've worked out what I hope to use to do this, if my professional readers are interested)
All in all, I'm still processing a lot, there really is no substitute for jumping in when it comes to learning the practice of the craft. I think the theoretical base I built last year is definitely giving me a schema to use in the processing that I would not have had otherwise, and for that I'm grateful.
September 4, 2007
The Day Before The First Day
Yeah, I know, it sounds like a terrible movie about a religious detective unearthing clues to the creation of the Universe or something. I'm sure Spielberg's already on it.
Today my mentor teacher and I finished cleaning up the room and getting everything organized. He's the department chair, so we also organized the books in the 'forbidden teacher hallway of locked departmental cages.'
We also had our first departmental meeting, a combined venture between the English and Social Studies teachers who teach "Humanities." The process of buying books and paying for books and distributing books reminded me that there's another side to teaching: navigating bureaucracy. Over the course of the day, I was reminded of this several times. Classes being dropped and combined with other classes, obscene numbers of students in some classes, very few in others, and various other bureaucratic annoyances. I suppose at some point one just has to look at the state of things as it is, rededicate yourself to doing the best possible job you can with what you've got, and then expect even more from yourself. Easy for the wet behind the ears student-teacher to say, right?
My mentor teacher and I have some good ideas as to the flow and scope of the Pacific Rim Humanities course we're teaching, and the Contemporary World Problems course will make itself as we go. After all, if we planned too far ahead, the problems wouldn't be very contemporary, would they? That course will be largely guided inquiry based.
My mentor is still occasionally asking me the surprise planning question, asking me to think on my feet. I love it. Today's issue was whether to immediately adopt the Latin and Greek word root vocabulary curriculum (that we were presented with for the first time today, without any teacher editions) or to reuse the same stuff he's been using forever. My idea: in the first week, we'll have some craft time. We'll take the first twenty word roots (in five units) addressed in the vocab text, jigsaw their meanings, and have experts present them to combined groups. So, in a class of 35, groups of seven are assigned to learning each unit, then students are regrouped into groups of five where each person is presenting one unit's worth of words to the others. They will then create foldable bookmarks, outside is decorated by them, and inside are twenty lines of:
[Word Root]: [Meaning] -- (example from text we're reading) (page number)
My hope is that this will lead to some closer reading of the texts in our Humanities classes, along with providing very contextual vocabulary practice. The bookmarks will be checked regularly, Think-Pair-Shared with classmates, and presented to the class so that each person will have examples of each word root. Still needs some refining, but my mentor liked the idea and we'll be incorporating it into the first week.
On my way out, I borrowed last year's yearbook from the library, made some copies, and will spend tonight making myself flashcards of the students faces and names. My goal is to have all my student's names hallway ready by the end of the first week.
Looking through the yearbook and my class list, my students are extremely ethnically diverse. I've been told that the district is 65% free and reduced lunch, and that the affluent kids in the area generally attend private schools in the Tacoma area. Demographic information below, with the obvious disclaimers that 'Asian' once again groups everyone from any country on the Asian continent, including India, Cambodia, China, Vietnam, etc, that Dropout rate numbers are notoriously skewed to seem lower than they are by not counting anyone who doesn't file drop out paperwork, and that very few are going to report themselves as migrant, and so forth and so on.
Student Enrollment - 1,363
Male - 52.2%
Female - 47.8%
American Indian - 1.5%
Asian - 13.6%
Black - 24.0%
Hispanic - 16.7%
White - 42.5%
Free or Reduced Lunch - 52.6%
Special Education - 11.9%
Bilingual - 8.8%
Migrant - 0.0%
Dropout Rate - 3.8%
Cohort Graduation Rate - 77.7%
Today my mentor teacher and I finished cleaning up the room and getting everything organized. He's the department chair, so we also organized the books in the 'forbidden teacher hallway of locked departmental cages.'
We also had our first departmental meeting, a combined venture between the English and Social Studies teachers who teach "Humanities." The process of buying books and paying for books and distributing books reminded me that there's another side to teaching: navigating bureaucracy. Over the course of the day, I was reminded of this several times. Classes being dropped and combined with other classes, obscene numbers of students in some classes, very few in others, and various other bureaucratic annoyances. I suppose at some point one just has to look at the state of things as it is, rededicate yourself to doing the best possible job you can with what you've got, and then expect even more from yourself. Easy for the wet behind the ears student-teacher to say, right?
My mentor teacher and I have some good ideas as to the flow and scope of the Pacific Rim Humanities course we're teaching, and the Contemporary World Problems course will make itself as we go. After all, if we planned too far ahead, the problems wouldn't be very contemporary, would they? That course will be largely guided inquiry based.
My mentor is still occasionally asking me the surprise planning question, asking me to think on my feet. I love it. Today's issue was whether to immediately adopt the Latin and Greek word root vocabulary curriculum (that we were presented with for the first time today, without any teacher editions) or to reuse the same stuff he's been using forever. My idea: in the first week, we'll have some craft time. We'll take the first twenty word roots (in five units) addressed in the vocab text, jigsaw their meanings, and have experts present them to combined groups. So, in a class of 35, groups of seven are assigned to learning each unit, then students are regrouped into groups of five where each person is presenting one unit's worth of words to the others. They will then create foldable bookmarks, outside is decorated by them, and inside are twenty lines of:
[Word Root]: [Meaning] -- (example from text we're reading) (page number)
My hope is that this will lead to some closer reading of the texts in our Humanities classes, along with providing very contextual vocabulary practice. The bookmarks will be checked regularly, Think-Pair-Shared with classmates, and presented to the class so that each person will have examples of each word root. Still needs some refining, but my mentor liked the idea and we'll be incorporating it into the first week.
On my way out, I borrowed last year's yearbook from the library, made some copies, and will spend tonight making myself flashcards of the students faces and names. My goal is to have all my student's names hallway ready by the end of the first week.
Looking through the yearbook and my class list, my students are extremely ethnically diverse. I've been told that the district is 65% free and reduced lunch, and that the affluent kids in the area generally attend private schools in the Tacoma area. Demographic information below, with the obvious disclaimers that 'Asian' once again groups everyone from any country on the Asian continent, including India, Cambodia, China, Vietnam, etc, that Dropout rate numbers are notoriously skewed to seem lower than they are by not counting anyone who doesn't file drop out paperwork, and that very few are going to report themselves as migrant, and so forth and so on.
Student Enrollment - 1,363
Male - 52.2%
Female - 47.8%
American Indian - 1.5%
Asian - 13.6%
Black - 24.0%
Hispanic - 16.7%
White - 42.5%
Free or Reduced Lunch - 52.6%
Special Education - 11.9%
Bilingual - 8.8%
Migrant - 0.0%
Dropout Rate - 3.8%
Cohort Graduation Rate - 77.7%
August 30, 2007
Planning Day
Today was spent with my mentor teacher learning the room, the building, and the administration. I sorted through old materials from past Pacific Rim classes, and we discussed the syllabus with the teacher we're collaborating on it with. We figured out the best place for me to take over for a few weeks (mid-October) and various classroom procedural stuff. I'm even more sure now that we're going to be a good fit; we get along well and seem to have a similar idea of what a classroom should look like and how it should function.
Oh, and he's a Steelers fan.
Oh, and he's a Steelers fan.
August 29, 2007
CP School District Opening LID Day
Today was the first LID (Learning Improvement Day) for my district's high schools, all of which assembled at the Tacoma Convention Center. We began with keynote addresses from the interim superintendent, welcoming us back for another year and extending new welcome to those new to the district. He touched on a few challenges we face teaching in CP, including the level of poverty, homelessness, and parents deployed overseas. He congratulated us for choosing CPSD and for considering these factors challenges and not excuses.
CPSD has been placed on the federal District Improvement list, and so one of our year's goals is to raise achievement scores. The other is to provide support--emotional, academic, and otherwise--to students with parents overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are to hold the children and ourselves to high expectations, treat each child with dignity, care, and respect, and maintain an optimistic and positive view of the future. I think much of this falls under the category of things that seem like they should go without saying, and yet need to be revisited often. This would become a theme for the day.
Our second keynote speaker was Dr. Rebera Foston, author of You Don't Life On My Street and more than twenty other books. She also has several Master's degrees and Doctorates (M.D., MPH, MATS, D.Min). She read the title poem for us at the end of her speech, and if you can find the full text, you should read it. She touched on each of the twelve areas we need to be conscious of when kids are acting out or simply not achieving. Her anecdotes were especially powerful, but I would fail miserably if I attempted to recount them here. She called on us to take a sort of Hippocratic Oath in our practice: to first, do no harm.
We then reviewed the District mission statement, and I'm happy to say that my mentor and I began to examine it critically rather than accepting it unquestioned. I began to suspect from this point that we would probably get along well, and so far, I seem to be right.
During lunch, we discussed the school I'll be working in a bit more. It is a Gates Foundation Small Schools focus, with three school 'houses' within one building. The school is centered on the principles espoused by the Coalition for Essential Schools. Intensive periods are combined with integrated humanities classes on alternating days. On Day 1, for instance, we will have 2 sections of Pacific Rim Studies and on Day 2, we will have corresponding English 3 sections with the same students. Really, neither of these are Social Studies or English focused; they are integrated with each other. We also will have two stand alone classes: Current World Issues on one day and AP Government on the other. It is likely, however, that I will not be involved with the AP class.
The school district also engages in a "State of the Art Instruction" initiative. It is a combination of (get this) the "Principles of Learning developed at the University of Pittsburgh" and some National Board Propositions. Mild irony is appreciated; I came across the country to get a new perspective, and up learning stuff from the University of Pittsburgh. The interesting factor here is the idea of "Colleague Groups" that are composed of teachers in like disciplines. We are to meet every couple weeks and constantly be working to improve the quality of our and each other's instruction. We read a chapter written by Carl Glickman on establishing common beliefs on teaching and learning and establishing a collegial (from colleague, not college) atmosphere rather than a conventional or congenial one. The first refers to the traditional fully individually autonomous and non-cooperative teaching environment, and the second to an environment in which teachers are friendly but are not constructively critical for each other. Very Freirean dialogue oriented.
All in all, a good first day, and hopefully the beginning of a great fall experience! Tomorrow, my first day in the building...
CPSD has been placed on the federal District Improvement list, and so one of our year's goals is to raise achievement scores. The other is to provide support--emotional, academic, and otherwise--to students with parents overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are to hold the children and ourselves to high expectations, treat each child with dignity, care, and respect, and maintain an optimistic and positive view of the future. I think much of this falls under the category of things that seem like they should go without saying, and yet need to be revisited often. This would become a theme for the day.
Our second keynote speaker was Dr. Rebera Foston, author of You Don't Life On My Street and more than twenty other books. She also has several Master's degrees and Doctorates (M.D., MPH, MATS, D.Min). She read the title poem for us at the end of her speech, and if you can find the full text, you should read it. She touched on each of the twelve areas we need to be conscious of when kids are acting out or simply not achieving. Her anecdotes were especially powerful, but I would fail miserably if I attempted to recount them here. She called on us to take a sort of Hippocratic Oath in our practice: to first, do no harm.
We then reviewed the District mission statement, and I'm happy to say that my mentor and I began to examine it critically rather than accepting it unquestioned. I began to suspect from this point that we would probably get along well, and so far, I seem to be right.
During lunch, we discussed the school I'll be working in a bit more. It is a Gates Foundation Small Schools focus, with three school 'houses' within one building. The school is centered on the principles espoused by the Coalition for Essential Schools. Intensive periods are combined with integrated humanities classes on alternating days. On Day 1, for instance, we will have 2 sections of Pacific Rim Studies and on Day 2, we will have corresponding English 3 sections with the same students. Really, neither of these are Social Studies or English focused; they are integrated with each other. We also will have two stand alone classes: Current World Issues on one day and AP Government on the other. It is likely, however, that I will not be involved with the AP class.
The school district also engages in a "State of the Art Instruction" initiative. It is a combination of (get this) the "Principles of Learning developed at the University of Pittsburgh" and some National Board Propositions. Mild irony is appreciated; I came across the country to get a new perspective, and up learning stuff from the University of Pittsburgh. The interesting factor here is the idea of "Colleague Groups" that are composed of teachers in like disciplines. We are to meet every couple weeks and constantly be working to improve the quality of our and each other's instruction. We read a chapter written by Carl Glickman on establishing common beliefs on teaching and learning and establishing a collegial (from colleague, not college) atmosphere rather than a conventional or congenial one. The first refers to the traditional fully individually autonomous and non-cooperative teaching environment, and the second to an environment in which teachers are friendly but are not constructively critical for each other. Very Freirean dialogue oriented.
All in all, a good first day, and hopefully the beginning of a great fall experience! Tomorrow, my first day in the building...
Welcome to Life
The title and URL of this blog come from a John Dewey quote I am fond of:
"Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself."
This is taking on special meaning for me as I am entering into my first student-teaching experience. I am soon to be involved in both my own growth and process of becoming a teacher (more directly than I ever have been) and the growth and process of the students that enter into my classroom, school, and sphere of indirect influence. This means that I will be juggling the role of educating myself, the role of educating others, and the role of inspiring others to educate themselves. These will be roles I will, hopefully, be consciously taking on for a long time to come.
And this? This is to be a log of that process. The process of education, the process of life.
"Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself."
This is taking on special meaning for me as I am entering into my first student-teaching experience. I am soon to be involved in both my own growth and process of becoming a teacher (more directly than I ever have been) and the growth and process of the students that enter into my classroom, school, and sphere of indirect influence. This means that I will be juggling the role of educating myself, the role of educating others, and the role of inspiring others to educate themselves. These will be roles I will, hopefully, be consciously taking on for a long time to come.
And this? This is to be a log of that process. The process of education, the process of life.
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