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!
September 19, 2007
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%
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