Asking the Right Questions | Week 4 Reflection

This week in my graduate class, we have been reading about and discussing purposeful questioning. Question generation is a skill that I want to stress in my future classrooms, so it has been helpful to spend time learning about the questioning process and figuring out what to do and what to avoid in the classroom. Our text, Principles to Action: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All from the National Council of Teacher of Mathematics (NCTM), has outlined various levels of classroom discourse. In a Level 0 classroom, students only answer questions requiring short answers posed by the teacher. As the levels increase, students are asked more questions that rely on them to reflect on their thinking process. They are also given the opportunity to discuss and question their peers. At the highest level, Level 3, the teacher's role is simply as a facilitator of conversation, with the students doing most of the questioning and answering. In my ideal classroom, all discussions would be student-centered, like in the third level of the NCTM classroom discourse. In the 12th grade class that I am observing, the students are currently working on a project where they are creating a layout for a hospital emergency room that is supposed to help eliminate the problems found in many current ERs. For the majority of this project, the students are working in groups to come up with solutions to their problems and create their own designs. I have been able to observe students presenting ideas to their partners and then having a discussion about whether or not that idea would work, with little to no interference from myself or my mentor teacher. It has been interesting to see this level of discourse in action in a classroom and encourages me that I may be able to be successful creating this environment in the future.

In the younger, ninth grade class, the level of discourse is not this high. Often, the students are still given questions from the teacher to answer that deal mostly with small pieces of information. However, this does occasionally vary, specifically when it is clear that the class is having trouble getting a grasp on information. This week, the class watched a BrainPop video on the properties of water and then completed the quiz at the end as a class. One of the questions stumped the majority of the class and they could not agree on an answer. I was running this activity, so I guided the students through some thought processes to help them arrive at the right answer, but students were also talking among themselves to problem solve. One student took the initiative to look up the definition to a word in the question with which much of the class was not familiar. I noticed that students were more animated and engaged when I gave them the opportunity to problem solve rather than just simply rattle off the answer to the question. However, I had a student who tends to be disengaged with the class frustratedly ask me why I wouldn't just give them the answer instead of spending time having the students figure it out. One thing that seems clear to me is that many students aren't used to being in a classroom that is anything but Level 0 most of the time, so when they are asked to do more than just answer simple questions with clear answers, they feel confused and maybe even overwhelmed. I want to make sure to keep this in mind when I am in my own classroom so that I can slowly introduce the higher levels of discourse to get my students comfortable with the idea of discussion, answering open ended questions, and even creating questions to ask themselves.

Making and Grading | Week 3 Reflection

For a lot of this week, I've spent time reflecting upon the workshop we had during residency with Josh from the Digital Harbor Foundation makerspace. To me, the concept of making seems to line up perfectly with project and inquiry-based learning. By bringing making activities into the classroom, you are encouraging students to solve problems in novel ways and get a deeper understanding of concepts. It also gives learners with non-traditional learning styles a opportunity to get a meaningful, hands-on experience with a tangible project in the end. In his presentation, Josh mentioned that making is an important skill to have because when you make something successfully (as opposed to buying it) you not only have a cool product, but you also gain learning an experience. But more importantly, even if you make a product that doesn't work well or at all, you still have gained learning and experience. This is the growth mindset in practice. I was so inspired by the workshop that I decided to do a little reflection about my own learning experiences on my video blog:

Another area that I have been reflecting on is the assessment and grading portion of instruction. On Tuesday of this week, the GT Biology class that I am working with did a worksheet.  As a class, they worked through the majority of the worksheet and then were asked to individually complete the problem on the last page. As they were completing the final question, my mentor teacher and I walked around to each group and talked through the question with them to make sure they were on the right page. As a result, the teacher decided to collect that final question for a grade. When it came time to grade the question, my mentor teacher explained to me how she wanted the assignment graded and then let me grade it. This was the first assignment I had ever graded and I was concerned that I was being too harsh when awarding points for the answers. The problem was that nearly every one of the students had not seemed to understand what the question was asking of them. When I realized that there had been a disconnect in their understanding, I discussed my concerns with the teacher. We decided to return the assignment to the student with the bad grades and give them the chance to redo the assignment after we clarified our expectations and answered any of their questions. I will be interested to see if this clarification helps them to complete the assignment in the way we initially intended.

This experience really brought my attention to the importance of making sure that your assessments, formative and summative, are assessing what you want them to assess. If student don't understand what is being asked of them, their performance is not going to be a good representation of what they have actually learned. In this situation, the students knew the information that the question was hoping to draw from them, they just did not understand how to provide that information. This is an experience that will stay with me as I begin planning my own classwork and assessments.

Starting in the Classroom | Week 2 Reflection

This week, I finally made it into the classroom. After having a really encouraging meeting with my mentor teacher last week, I was looking forward to getting into the class and starting to make myself a part of things. For this semester, I will be following two classes, a Project Lead the Way class called Biomedical Interventions and a GT Biology class. Due to the school's A/B day schedule, I am visiting the school every other day for two periods in the morning. Last year, I found that it is helpful to schedule my observations so that I can be a part of a class every day that they meet, rather than skipping around and missing some days of instruction. This helps me to get a better understanding of the flow of instruction and also helps the students to get to know me and become more comfortable with me. I anticipate that it will make the lessons that I teach in these classes more successful.

This week, I had asked the teacher if I could just sit in the class and observe. I wanted to get a chance to see how she ran her class and spend a little bit of time getting a few for the type of students that were in her class. The teacher did give me the opportunity to introduce myself to the class. I made a very quick Prezi presentation, complete with a picture of a two-headed fish that I encountered while I worked in an ecotoxicology lab. Unfortunately, I think I found that picture cooler than the students, but I tried!

From watching the teacher during the two days I've spent at the school so far, I have already gathered some information about being a successful teacher. As a teacher at this school, you have to command respect from your students. Otherwise, they won't take you seriously. Interestingly, the PLTW class is made up mostly of seniors that had my mentor teacher for classes earlier in their high school careers. There is already a respect and rapport that has been established in this class. The GT Bio class, on the other hand, is made up of freshmen. The teacher is still working to establish this respect and you can see the students testing her limits. My mentor teacher is very good at commanding respect. She is firm with the students, but in a way that is fair and reasonable. When I was a high school student, I remember that I had trouble respecting my teachers if they were unnecessarily strict for no reason. This teacher strikes a good balance.

Classroom management is one of my biggest concerns as I am working towards becoming a teacher. I am very fortunate to have been placed with a teacher who seems to have a handle on her class and manages it in an almost effortless manner. I know I will learn a lot from her in this aspect and will hopefully gain more confidence in my ability to obtain respect from the students and manage their behavior.

The Beginning | Week 1 Reflection

Starting with this blog, I will be cataloging my reflections of the experiences that I am having as I continue through my MAT program and spend more time in the classroom. While there are many things that watching videos and reading articles can do to put future teachers in the right mindset, so much of the process of being a teacher must be learned in the classroom, working with students. Up until the time of this blog post, I have had, at most, four hours of classroom time in a week. This time was spent mostly observing another teacher and occasionally answering students' questions as they worked. I have taught a single lesson as a requirement for a previous course. What this means is that I still have so much to learn. Over the next several months I will gain practical experience in a classroom that will be an invaluable contribution to my success as a teacher. I am greatly looking forward to beginning this journey of learning.

Unfortunately, there is little to reflect upon at the moment because I have not yet been in the classroom during this school year. However, through the process of trying to figure out my school placement, I have learned more about two important qualities of being a teacher: flexibility and patience. At the beginning of the summer I was given a placement for the 2016-2017 school year. However, halfway through the summer, I was told that placement would no longer work out and was given a new placement. As the school year was rapidly approaching, I had not heard back about this new placement and was not sure if it was still happening. Then, during the first week of school I heard that I was to be moved once more to a different mentor teacher.  This was a stressful and frustrating process, but it allowed me to practice these skills I knew I was going to need in the classroom.

Yesterday, I was finally able to meet with the teacher with whom I will be working over the next year. It was an excellent meeting and it seems like we have compatible approaches to the classroom. I am looking forward to spending time in her classroom and learning the day-to-day lessons that you can't get from a book. I am nervous because I don't have a lot of experience teaching yet, but I am sure that this year will help me to feel more comfortable planning lessons, providing instruction, and interacting with students, parents, and the various other adults in the school.