Winter Reflection

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As I find myself at the end of winter quarter, I find myself once again faced with a reflective post on growing as a reflective blogger and teacher. I feel that yet again, I have indeed grown as a blogger, but more importantly, a reflective teacher. Although I shy away from talking about specific examples of students in my class (I feel those reflections are more suited for my own, less public, brain), I do feel that many of my posts are reflective of how I am beginning to be contemplative of what my practice is starting out as and where it can go. I feel that I have also began blogging about things that I am trying to enter in to a conversation about rather than spew rhetorical nonsense from my head.

An example that I would like to point out is my post on Reaching All Students. I think This demonstrates my desire to deepen my perspective on my practice in two ways. One -- I am always looking for insight from others into their teaching practices. And two -- I am continuing to generate more questions from that information rather than saying "oh, that post was nice." and moving on.

I feel that I am also growing as a commenter in that I am questioning more rather than, again, spewing rhetorical praise. I feel a comment that demonstrates this growth was on this post on Goal Setting. Rather than saying, "Oh goal setting is so inspiring and lovely and great job -- keep it up." I took an antagonistic approach to this bloggers' thinking. I spoke of my own personal dread of goal setting, and challenged her to think about what she would do if a student shared my sentiment and refused to participate in goal setting. I realize goal setting can be a beneficial motivator for many people, and I'm not trying to convince her or others not to use it in their classrooms; I was just trying to get some thinking started about the true use of goal setting and what about those who don't find goal setting helpful.

I think I'll keep this one short and to-the-point and finish it off here. I hope those who have been reading my posts have also seen my growth, and I hope to see you on the other side of the new quarter.

Free Education for All

Having grown up a sheltered, middle class, white girl who has done little traveling in other countries. Now, I'm going to admit now to my ignorance when it comes to third world countries and the realities of the lives of the people who live there. I'm well aware that I should already know of these realities, and it blows my mind when I see things like this post about a free school in India. This "school" is located under a bridge and lets children from the nearby slums attend and get an education for free.

Now for the questions showing my ignorance:

I commented on the actual post saying "Wow. This is amazing. It's great to see the children so eager to learn and try to make a better life from what they were given. How did this get started? Is there no other free education available? Are there other schools like this?"

I am also wondering, why is it that this is the only education that these children have access to? Does India not have any free education other than "schools" under bridges from those willing to teach them? Why can't more people realize that without education, the problems of poverty and children living in slums will repeat generation after generation? What would need to happen for more countries to realize this AND be able to do something about it?

Furthermore, these children are so involved and engaged with their education and are proactively trying to learn. It's so wrong that these children who so want to learn are being so under served, and many kids in our country only go to school because they are forced to. How can we instill this kind of need and purpose for education in our own sheltered, middle class, children?

Lesson Out of Context

Two of my cohort mates and I planned and implemented a science lesson recently to a class we had only observed for one one-hour lesson prior to teaching. It was an experience of mixed emotions and thoughts. Our lesson didn't crash-and-burn, but it also didn't go as well as it could. A lot of our issues I feel sprang from the issue that we didn't know the classroom nor the kids well enough to anticipate the nuances of our lesson delivery to these students in particular. We had little to no relationship with these students, and we had very little context for how our lesson fit with the overall unit and how the students had been learning the material. Had I known what the lesson would end up like with these particular students, I would have planned it much differently.

I'm not writing this post to complain nor am I looking to sit here and think of every single thing I could have or should have done differently. I know that in my own future classroom, I will have context for my students and my lessons. I will be able to have more wiggle room for adjustments and follow-up lessons.

But, I am also thinking about two other related things. One is the importance of getting to know your students to create a leaning environment that will work for each individual and for the class as a whole. Teaching this lesson really drove home through an actual personal experience of how much of an impact knowing your students makes.

Another important thought sprung from this experience is the thought of substitute teaching. Many teachers substitute teach every day, and I may need to substitute teach sometime in the future. In this situation, you will most likely get lesson plans given to you for the day. But what about knowing students and implementing those lessons? What about the emergency substitute situation where you are thrown in not knowing the students and without detailed lesson plans? These are things I am realizing I need to start thinking about if I am going to be a successful and wanted substitute teacher anytime in the future.

Research Organization

In Steve Moline’s article, “Using Graphic Organizers to Write Information Texts,” he says that when children are presented with a research and report type of task, they need to have scaffolding for how to organize the information they find in their final product. The graphic organizers he suggests are helpful, but my cooperating teacher has developed another way to help students organize data in her class research projects that seems very straightforward and helpful for students.

The students in my class have recently started a president research project where each student has one president and must find information on the president to write a report from and give a presentation. To help students stay organized, my cooperating teacher gave each student three envelopes, one for each main topic. The envelopes have a list taped to the outside with the subtopics in order of how they should appear in the final write-up. As the students research, the students are supposed to have separate, labeled index card for each of the sub topics and keep them in the corresponding envelopes. Once the students have note cards with research completed for each subtopic, they can begin writing that section of the report. They pull out their cards and synthesize the information in the order listed on the envelope. This way, the students understand what order information should be presented in and get practice ordering their notes in a logical way.

Along with the research/note organization, my teacher also has mini lessons and examples of pieces of the final project. On one day, she provided examples of a poor introduction and a good introduction. On another day, she presented examples of a poor “early life” section and a good “early life” section. She will be doing the same thing for the other main sections as well as for the conclusion.

Although my cooperating teacher doesn’t have a drawn web or other visual organizer for the students, she does provide the structure through the envelopes and examples of well-organized reports through her mini lessons. Just thought it was a great way to scaffold students’ research.

Integrating disciplines

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Students need to learn how to integrate subjects in their minds. Students need to make the connection between math and science to be able to succeed in chemistry. Rather than seeing math and science as two distinctly separate periods and subjects, utilizing the new and background knowledge across subjects will help them not only succeed during the school year but also remember what they learned.

I personally know that I remember new information better when I make multiple types of connections to other new things I am learning as well as things I already know. Students need to be able to make connections like these in order to tap into the full capacity of their learning and memory capabilities. However, students may or may not be able to learn to do this on their own.

Teachers need to learn how to teach the students through integration of subjects, or at least teaching students about the links between subjects. How powerful would it be to have an art teacher talk to an English class about William Holman Hunt’s painting of "The Lady of Shalott" or other similar paintings while they are reading Lord Tennyson’s ballad? How many more connections could be added by a history teacher? Understanding of the poem could be much deeper and memory of the connections would be much stronger.

What I am trying to say is that teachers should be teaching in a more collaborative and integrated way in order to teach students to make the connections between the subjects. When I was in my middle school placement for student teaching, I saw teachers teaching in exactly the same way they have always taught middle school, completely separate from other subjects. Sure they met as teams, but that was only by subject. Math with math, social studies with social studies. The thing that bothered me most about this way of teaching was the school had been built to facilitate collaboration between subjects.

There were four classrooms and a shared space that made up a pod, and each classroom in a pod was a different subject. Furthermore, most of the students had most of their classes in one pod; a student who had math in pod B usually also had history, language arts, and science in pod B. So why weren’t these teachers collaborating and trying to link their curriculums to find places where they could teach the student to utilize multiple disciplines at once? Yes, it takes a lot of time, but isn’t a school supposed to be about creating success for the students? I think if schools would open their eyes to how beneficial integration of subjects is, there would be more time allocated to collaboration between subjects as professional development.

Reaching all students

As I was monitoring my Facebook feed the other day, a friend of mine shared a blog post written by a parent about what one teacher does to monitor her students' feelings of belonging and inclusion. The mother talks about how the teacher has the students anonymously list three students who they would like to sit by the next week, and how she studies those requests to see which students are not being requested to sit by who may be lonely and may need some intervention. The author artfully threw in that this teacher had been doing this with her class (I think 4th or 5th grade) every Friday since Columbine in an attempt to prevent something similar from happening again by helping lonely students before it reaches a critical point. Although the blog post provided an impressive and insightful way of information gathering, it didn't go in to much detail about how the teacher actually goes about using the information she finds.

After I read the post, I tried to comment to try to get more information, but the site continually said it wouldn't post my comment because there was some sort of error (and now, as I try to go back to the post, the host says that page doesn't exist). So, I turn to you, my cohort and other small pocket of readers, to help me think about how to answer what I would have asked the original author.

Here is what I would have commented had I been able to:
"Wow. As a preservice teacher, I found great ideas in this post. I would be very interested in hearing what she does next with those students next. How does she arrange her room to try to make those who are outcasts more involved? How does she approach those who seem to be lonely? How does she actually go about using those lists to actually help the children in need?"

So what do you think? Once we discover which students are lonely, what can we do about it as teachers?

Project Learning Tree

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Yesterday my cohort had the opportunity for environmental studies professional development through a Project Learning Tree workshop. It was a great, eye-opening experience into both environmental issues and incredible ways in which to incorporate environmental sudies into all school subjects.
I think the most impactful thing I learned, however, was the "pyramid" approach to environmental education. Our instructor introduced us to the concept of creating a base for student knowledge not through fear and guilt, but through connection to and love of the environment.

So many environmental programs go for the upfront "wow" factor by showing pictures of damage world climate change has caused to the earth or showing videos of the giant trash spot in the Pacific Ocean. While these photos and videos may frighten or guilt kids in to turning off a couple lights at home or recycling when it's convenient, it's not going to get lifetime complete buy-in to saving the earth.

However, if we were to start by getting kids to love the environment through outdoor education and direct connection, they would have a reason to want to help save what they have grown to love. For example, if a student were to become interested in birds and when they arrive back to a specific area each year, that student would be more interested in making the environment around where he/she lives livable for birds. That student might move on to studying birds in other ways. If he/she then discovered that human water conservation also impacted bird or other animal populations, the student would then have a personal, deep connection and drive to conserve water. This connection would remain part of this student much more than fear and guilt would. They would have personal investment in environmental concerns.

Although I still plan on teaching middle school math once I'm done with this program, I'm looking forward to using the resource book I bought at the workshop to try to implement some environmental activities in to math lessons. Thanks for the great workshop PLT!