Saying Goodbye | Internship Reflection 10

     Last week was my final week in the school as part of my internship. As I announced that I was leaving to my six different classes, I was met with a lot of resistance and questions. My students complained that it was not fair that I was leaving and asked me why I had to go already. Even the class that caused me the most trouble and stress had a tough time accepting that I was leaving. The experience was both sad and touching for me, because I was also feeling a little resistant about leaving these classes with whom I had spent the past semester (or for two of the classes, year). Saying goodbye to my students and my mentor teacher made me think about how much my understanding of and approach to teaching had changed through my internship experience.
     When I began my internship, I knew that teaching was hard, but I don't think I realized just how hard it was. There were several days during this internship where I left school feeling run down and frustrated, wondering if I was ever going to get the hang of things. Whether it was students that refused to listen to me, a concept that they just couldn't seem to grasp, or technology issues that prevented me from presenting an important component of my lesson, some days just went completely wrong. These days made me appreciate the importance of patience, empathy, and flexibility. I learned to stay calm when students were aggravating me, I learned to look for external factors that may be impacting a kid's ability to engage with my lessons, and I learned to always have a back up plan. Basically, I began to approach bad days as a lesson on how to be a better educator in the future. If I expect my students to come up with solutions when they encounter a problem, I should be doing the same thing. This internship helped me to be a better problem solver.
     Despite how it feels on the bad days, though, most days were not bad. On the good days, my passion for helping others understand science was reinforced. I got to see over and over again how great it is for a student's eyes to light up in understanding and curiosity. I watched students become filled to the brim with questions about how things worked and a desire to learn more than I had time to teach them. I laughed more times that I can count at my students' cleverness and ingenuity. I felt my heart warm as I watched students work with each other to figure out a problem, rather than ask me. I swelled with pride when a student who was previously uninterested in science raised his hand and correctly answered a question that no one else could figure out. On the good days, I learned how amazing it is to be a teacher.
     Teaching can be unpredictable and exciting, draining and rewarding. Regardless of what we, as teacher, are covering in the classroom, we are also learning daily from our students. A day that I am not learning while in the classroom is a day that I am not being an effective teacher. This is the most important lesson I learned from my internship. Overall, my internship was an excellent and rewarding experience. I adored my kids and am so grateful that I was placed with such an open-minded and supportive mentor teacher. I will carry the things that I learned and the experiences that I had over the past several months with me as I continue to move through life and the world of education.

Teacher of Promise | Internship Reflection 9

     On April 7th, I was invited to be a part of the Maryland Department of Education's Teacher of Promise Institute. I received this invitation because had the honor of being nominated as a 2017 Teacher of Promise in Maryland. The Teachers of Promise program was created by the Maryland Department of Education to recognize prospective teachers who were performing well in their university programs and to provide them with resources and mentors to help them transition into their first year in the classroom. The Teacher of Promise Institute is an event that brings the Teacher of Promise nominees together with experienced mentor teachers who have been chosen as Teachers of Year in Maryland. During the event, attendees hear from various individuals in the education field, including the Maryland Board of Education Superintendent. In addition, Teachers of Promise get the opportunity to ask questions of their mentors about how to approach the first year of teaching.

     While at this event, I had the opportunity to speak with several other prospective teachers and veteran teachers (including my media specialist from middle school, see left). It was a great experience to get perspectives from students in other programs as well as to speak with teachers who had been in the classroom for several years. Three of the speakers during the event were previous National Teachers of the Year. All of these teachers had a lot of great advice to share, despite having very different experiences with and approaches to teaching. This taught me that there are a lot of paths to being a successful teacher and making a difference for your students. The one thing that these teachers did have in common was their love for teaching and their students. This thread carried through the whole event. It was clear that in order to make progress in the classroom, you had to really care. In a later discussion, my mentor and I discussed how inspiring this was to hear.

     Speaking of my mentor, I was matched with the current Teacher of the Year from Howard County, MD. She and I got the opportunity to talk about both the joys and challenges of teaching, from engagement to technology policies. She provided me with a lot of insight into how to present yourself to your students and the real struggles of being a high school science teacher. In addition, though, she mentioned to me multiple times that she couldn't imagine doing anything else. We both remarked about how exciting it was to be at an event surrounded by so many people who were so passionate about providing the best education possible to kids in Maryland.

     I am very thankful that I was given the opportunity to be a part of this event. The Teacher of Promise institute helped me to build professional connections, ask questions that would help any first year teacher, and to get exposed to exemplary teaching practices. I hope the the Maryland Department of Education is able to continue providing this program for prospective teachers.

Change of Heart | Internship Reflection 8

After being in the classroom with the same sets of students for several months, you may feel as though you have a fairly good grasp on those students' personalities, abilities, and needs in the classroom. By the end of March, I had been working with a gifted and talented 9th grade Biology class for 7 months. I was confident that I knew what to expect from each student. Despite this class being at the GT level, there was a student in the class who had spent most of the previous 7 months being minimally engaged with the class. His test scores were lower than average, he wouldn't turn in completed classwork, and he rarely would participate in class discussions without being called on directly.

However, at the end of March, we were getting into the genetics unit which was proving to be popular with many of the students, including this particular one. Suddenly, this student was not only completing all of his work, but he was doing so correctly and was often the first one done. He always had answers for me when I asked questions to the class and even began asking his own questions to further understand the material. During one class period, he finished his work so early, that I gave him an additional assignment to complete, which he did excitedly and without complaint.

There are a lot of factors that can affect a student's performance in the classroom. Many of those factors occur outside of the classroom and are out of the teacher's control. This student made me realize that I should never make assumptions about student behavior, regardless of how long I have known them. If I always have high expectations for every student, there is always room for them to grow and improve. There is also a huge benefit to finding what interests students and allowing them the freedom to explore those interests.

Unexpected Results | Internship Reflection 7

In a previous blog, I discussed implementing a positive reinforcement strategy using tickets in one of my classes to improve classroom behavior. This strategy would allow students to earn tickets for good behavior that they could exchange for rewards. As expected, after introducing the tickets at the beginning of March, students became invested in earning tickets, often asking what they needed to do to earn tickets. While the strategy did not work for all students (particularly the most disruptive ones), many students did embrace the idea of earning tickets. In order to allow students to keep track of the amount of tickets they earned, I created a "scoreboard" that listed ever student in the class and how many tickets they had earned. At the end of each class, I would adjust the scoreboard to reflect current ticket amounts. If students exchanged their tickets for rewards, I would decrease their ticket number on the scoreboard.

A surprising result of this was that many students seemed to be more interested in having the highest number on the scoreboard than receiving a reward. I would announce when students had enough tickets to buy a snack, but many students expressed that they would rather "save up" their tickets, despite the fact that there was not reward that cost more than the number of tickets they currently had. It seems like the motivation for many students was in the form of competition rather than tangible reward.

This unexpected reaction from my students made me aware that I could likely increase engagement in the classroom by introducing activities based around games/competitions. I am hesitant to pit students against each other because I would rather encourage personal growth, but this particular class seems to enjoy the challenge of trying to be the best in the class.

Too Much Independence | Internship Reflection 6

In the senior-level Biomedical Innovations (BI) PLTW class that I work with, a lot of the classwork focuses around providing the students with problems to solve on their own or, more recently, having them come up with their own problem that needs solving. At the end of this course, the curriculum has students develop and implement their own independent project for which they pick a biomedical topic and find a solution to a problem. Students are given the opportunity to do a research study, a fundraising event, an internship, and more. On the surface, the freedom of this project seems like an excellent way to get students engaged with science by allowing them to research something in which they are interested. However, in practice, students who are not used to taking so much responsibility for their own learning (and the demonstration of that learning) get overwhelmed by the openended-ness of an independent project of this type.

In March, we spent the majority of time in BI helping students plan, research, and implement their projects. After receiving a lot of push back from the students, I began developing extra scaffolding activities that would provide structure to the project that students were floundering without. For instance, I noticed that the students were really good at providing feedback for each other, so I had students get into groups and take turns describing their vision for the project. Afterwards, other students in the group would ask questions and make suggestions for moving forward. I also used drills at the beginning of class to ask questions that would help students complete sections of their projects. For one drill, I asked students to create a list of steps (shorter than 10 items) that it would take to implement their project. After creating this list, students had an outline for the methods section of their project. Breaking daunting parts of the project up into small pieces was a much more successful strategy for students who did not have experience with this amount of independence in the classroom.

What this experience made me realize is that it is important to get students engaged in independent learning from an early age so that they are comfortable with this sort of projects at the end of their secondary school career. If the seniors in my BI class had been engaged in inquiry and project-based learning throughout their educational experience, they may not have needed as much scaffolding during this course. But regardless of the age, it is beneficial to stay aware of the students' needs in the classroom and to be flexible enough to provide extra support when needed.

On My Own | Internship Reflection 5

During the first week of March, my mentor teacher was absent for several days because of a fall in the classroom. For these days, I had to manage and instruct the classroom on my own. The first day or two were particularly difficult because we had not prepared for my mentor teacher to be out, so I was scrambling to make sure that I had all of the copies and resources I needed to complete all of the lessons. My university mentor was also scheduled to come in to observe one of my lesson during these days, which added to the stress.

Fortunately, I was able to coordinate with other professionals in the school to make sure that I had everything I needed. Through email and text message, I coordinated with other teachers to get access to copiers and supply rooms so that by the time my students entered the classroom, everything was ready to go. For the most part, I was able to run through the lessons smoothly and keep the instruction moving forward, despite my mentor teacher not being there.

One thing that I noticed during this time was the dramatic difference in behavior between the two classes I had been with all year and the four classes I had only just met at the beginning of the semester. The two classes I had been working with all year didn't change their behavior much, despite my mentor teacher being out. They were still very respectful and completed the work I assigned to them. On the other hand, the classes with which I hadn't had as much time to build relationships acted up much more while my mentor teacher was out. They did not respect my authority as much and spent much more time off task during the lesson. This experience helped me to realize how important it is to build relationships with students early in the year in order to set a tone and expectations for the class. Having an environment of mutual respect is a key component of a well managed classroom.

Positive Reinforcement? | Internship Reflection 4

As February was coming to a close, I had begun gathering data for the action research project I had been assigned to complete for the MAT program. I had decided to introduce a positive reinforcement system based on tickets for the class in which I struggle most with classroom management. The tickets would be earned by doing good things and they could use the tickets to "buy" rewards. My goal was to reward good behaviors rather than spending so much time punishing bad behaviors in order to encourage students to be less disruptive and stay on task.

I had spent the past few weeks observing the students' behaviors in the normal classroom without the tickets and taking down data. During the final week in February, it was time to explain to the class how the ticketing system would work and begin giving out tickets for good behaviors. I started out the class discussion by having students identify what they thought could be improved about their classroom behavior, what behaviors they thought were good behaviors, and what rewards they would like to receive for demonstrating good behaviors. This conversation had two goals. 1) It helped me to focus on certain behaviors and get an idea of what sorts of rewards would be effective external motivators. 2) Allowing the students to provide their input would hopefully make them feel like they were part of the process and provide them with more incentive to cooperate.

Surprisingly, the students' responses to this discussion were overwhelmingly negative. One particularly disruptive student expressed that she didn't think this would make any difference in the class' behavior. Another student seemed skeptical that I would follow through on my promise of rewards.

I had anticipated a positive reaction or at least apathy from the students, so it surprised me to hear them being so cynical. At this point, I explained to them that I was taking this system seriously because it was an expectation of my own classes. While it is not typically a good idea to introduce bias when completing a research study, I felt like it was important to let students know that I was committed to following through with this project. In other words, my bark was not going to be bigger than my bite. Upon hearing this, the students seemed to be more accepting and willing to participate.

The whole experience showed me that how important it is that students trust that you will do what you say you will do. I've always heard how important follow-through can be when dealing with discipline in the classroom. This conversation showed me how much of an impact not following through can have on students.