December is one of the times that class size inequalities really, really stinks.
We are in the process of scheduling parent-teacher conferences, which in itself is a nightmare. We are granted 1 Monday off for conferences and expected to stay late one evening (as one of our contracted times). Morning meetings are cancelled...but that actually doesn't leave enough time slots for all my kids. The hour lunch I'm supposed to have on Monday (since I don't have prep) isn't happening. I had to schedule conferences and work with other teachers. Lots of my students have siblings and we try to schedule their conferences as close together as possible to make it easier for families.
The school district does not give me the time needed to meet with my thirty six students and their families. Logistically, I've been giving an impossible task if I was to stick to only my contracted, paid hours yet expected to meet the goal of 100% participation rate.
So I have to come in early each day. I have to stay late. I love my students and their families, so I'm flexible with staying late for some evening conferences to accommodate their work schedules.
A good part of winter break will be spent compiling data for report card comments (and again, writing three dozen of them takes a while. We don't have drop down menus with pre-selected comments.)
None of this is financially compensated. The more I talk to non-teachers, the more I'm horrified that there's a myth teachers are paid overtime for this sort of work. Do any of you work in a magical district where this occurs? What I'm feeling in this district is that more and more demands are placed on me as an educator, while my pay and benefits are actually and financially shrinking.
This is one of the times where class size inequalities really, really stinks.
Primary grades (K-2) and third grade have around eighteen to twenty students. Completely doable within the allotted time parameters. Upper elementary? Where each class is approaching forty students? Not doable in the allotted time frame provided by the district.
But we'll get it done. We'll stay late. We'll be flexible. We support our students and their families, so we make the sacrifice of time with our own families to meet with our students. Our administration is amazingly supportive, but the district officials who make these decisions without processing if it is actually feasible for a classroom? Shame on them.
Showing posts with label expectations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label expectations. Show all posts
Friday, December 4, 2015
Monday, January 20, 2014
Change can be a good thing
I'm halfway through year five of teaching and my oh my have things changed.
For the most part, I see the changes as a good thing. I know to truly see a program or strategy's effectiveness, it should be consistent within a school for several years to be able to accurately measure growth. That's something we're working on at our school.
When I started teaching, we followed a scripted reading program with weekly spelling tests and a story of the week. I taught comprehension strategies, sort of, but we were expected to abide by the book. I thought I was doing pretty well following the structure and doing the same things as the other teachers in my grade level.
This blind, naive attitude only lasted a few months and (with administrative approval), I'd completely abandoned the scripted program by my second year. I don't do well with scripted programs anyway.
I brought additional challenges upon myself by having to find meaningful content, but at least during my second year I was teaching standards and not just a story. My students were becoming more engaged and I was enjoying teaching more.
By year three, I was feeling more confident in the classroom. I'd finished my masters degree and my Teach for America obligation. I had taken a lot of district trainings and was on a task force to unwrap the (at the time, new) Common Core State Standards. There were still lots of extra demands on me to find the materials I needed to teach with and lots of long weekends preparing. I was also in conflict with veteran teachers in my grade level who were unwilling to try new strategies and envied my successes in the classroom.
Year four brought more confidence and a partner. I was no longer pitted me against the grade level, but rather me and my ally against the veteran teachers. Slowly but surely, our students rose to our high expectations and outperformed the others simply because we weren't teaching a bland, scripted program. We were teaching (and reteaching) the standards with a variety of strategies. Not all of them worked, but our students were rarely bored. Their high levels of engagement translated into higher test scores due to what I believe was their interest in learning.
Year five: my dream team. I work with three other fifth grade teachers and my special education co-teacher. We are on the same page 95% of the time and always supporting one another. None of us follow a scripted reading program with a new story a week. No one gives a spelling test with 20 words that students had to memorize over the week and regurgitate on Friday.
No no, I think we do something much, much better.
We teach a weekly, grade-level phonics skill with explicit phonics. We teach the patterns, practice sorting by sounds, encode and decode with text, then on Friday give them a quick formative assessment with five words to see if they can apply the skill. I don't want to see if they can memorize basic facts, I want to see if they an apply their knowledge of word parts to spelling unfamiliar words because that's a much more true assessment of whether or not they got the skill.
For math, we are using the Investigations program which is far superior to what we previously used. Based on over eighty years of research and partnership with NCTM, the program has students discovering math concepts through manipulation and discourse, which provides for a more meaningful understanding of mathematics. They are constantly building their number sense through Number Talks and math games that rely on critical thinking.
For reading, we're loosely following another school district's pacing guide because it draws heavily from mentor text that is rigorous, engaging and within an appropriate lexile level. Before choosing to go with their plans as our backbone, we read through their plans, double checked that all standards were covered and added in our own notes. I think it's going fairly well.
We don't give a weekly reading test (thank goodness!). Instead, we give a monthly one with longer reading passages (to build their stamina) with questions that cover several standards. I'm not testing how much they remember of a story we'd read together and discussed in class five times (because at that point, it was regurgitation, not knowledge). We're testing how well they can independently apply the skills we've been working on in whole and small groups to the unfamiliar passage.
I look back at my first year in the classroom and have the overwhelming urge to apologize to that group of students.
I did the best I could with what I had, but I would never go back to that way of teaching. I would never rely on worksheets and a story of the week. That's not what helps students learn.
As an educator, I'm constantly trying to learn new strategies and implement them in my classroom. While this highly reflective process can be a tad frustrating when things don't go as planned, I think that learning and trying new things is far better than repeating the same thing over and over again.
In the past five years, I've implemented interactive notebooks and Number Talks. I do explicit phonics three times a day (whole group and both small groups). I have students interact with technology rather than me being the sole one to create things. I have centers and literature circles with novels, something I didn't even attempt until my second year. I've learned how to do the CORE phonics assessment to see where students break down phonetically and the DRA to determine their reading levels. (Although it's time consuming, I much prefer it to the old diagnostic tests I had to give!). We're using mentor text for reading and writing, doing mini-lessons and having students publish drafts both on the computers and the iPads. It's been a tough, uphill battle and I'm proud of the new things I've learned. I'm appreciative of the trainings I received at my school, from my district and from outside educational entities.
I'm saddened by teachers who are scared or unwilling to try new strategies. I don't have the same bunch of kids I did when I first started five years ago, so why should I teach the same lesson the same way?
Change can mean better instruction for students. Change can mean more engaging, thoughtful, purposeful, driven lessons. Change can mean teachers have more flexibility and students have more opportunities to collaborate with their peers on projects and activities, rather than just sitting quietly and working independently. Change can bring joy back into the classroom. I'm not saying every aspect of education needs to change nor that all change should be blindly accepted because that's no good either. However, if change brings about higher student performance and helps create more critical, thoughtful, passionate young scholars, why not give it a try?
Change can be a good thing.
For the most part, I see the changes as a good thing. I know to truly see a program or strategy's effectiveness, it should be consistent within a school for several years to be able to accurately measure growth. That's something we're working on at our school.
When I started teaching, we followed a scripted reading program with weekly spelling tests and a story of the week. I taught comprehension strategies, sort of, but we were expected to abide by the book. I thought I was doing pretty well following the structure and doing the same things as the other teachers in my grade level.
This blind, naive attitude only lasted a few months and (with administrative approval), I'd completely abandoned the scripted program by my second year. I don't do well with scripted programs anyway.
I brought additional challenges upon myself by having to find meaningful content, but at least during my second year I was teaching standards and not just a story. My students were becoming more engaged and I was enjoying teaching more.
By year three, I was feeling more confident in the classroom. I'd finished my masters degree and my Teach for America obligation. I had taken a lot of district trainings and was on a task force to unwrap the (at the time, new) Common Core State Standards. There were still lots of extra demands on me to find the materials I needed to teach with and lots of long weekends preparing. I was also in conflict with veteran teachers in my grade level who were unwilling to try new strategies and envied my successes in the classroom.
Year four brought more confidence and a partner. I was no longer pitted me against the grade level, but rather me and my ally against the veteran teachers. Slowly but surely, our students rose to our high expectations and outperformed the others simply because we weren't teaching a bland, scripted program. We were teaching (and reteaching) the standards with a variety of strategies. Not all of them worked, but our students were rarely bored. Their high levels of engagement translated into higher test scores due to what I believe was their interest in learning.
Year five: my dream team. I work with three other fifth grade teachers and my special education co-teacher. We are on the same page 95% of the time and always supporting one another. None of us follow a scripted reading program with a new story a week. No one gives a spelling test with 20 words that students had to memorize over the week and regurgitate on Friday.
No no, I think we do something much, much better.
We teach a weekly, grade-level phonics skill with explicit phonics. We teach the patterns, practice sorting by sounds, encode and decode with text, then on Friday give them a quick formative assessment with five words to see if they can apply the skill. I don't want to see if they can memorize basic facts, I want to see if they an apply their knowledge of word parts to spelling unfamiliar words because that's a much more true assessment of whether or not they got the skill.
For math, we are using the Investigations program which is far superior to what we previously used. Based on over eighty years of research and partnership with NCTM, the program has students discovering math concepts through manipulation and discourse, which provides for a more meaningful understanding of mathematics. They are constantly building their number sense through Number Talks and math games that rely on critical thinking.
For reading, we're loosely following another school district's pacing guide because it draws heavily from mentor text that is rigorous, engaging and within an appropriate lexile level. Before choosing to go with their plans as our backbone, we read through their plans, double checked that all standards were covered and added in our own notes. I think it's going fairly well.
We don't give a weekly reading test (thank goodness!). Instead, we give a monthly one with longer reading passages (to build their stamina) with questions that cover several standards. I'm not testing how much they remember of a story we'd read together and discussed in class five times (because at that point, it was regurgitation, not knowledge). We're testing how well they can independently apply the skills we've been working on in whole and small groups to the unfamiliar passage.
I look back at my first year in the classroom and have the overwhelming urge to apologize to that group of students.
I did the best I could with what I had, but I would never go back to that way of teaching. I would never rely on worksheets and a story of the week. That's not what helps students learn.
As an educator, I'm constantly trying to learn new strategies and implement them in my classroom. While this highly reflective process can be a tad frustrating when things don't go as planned, I think that learning and trying new things is far better than repeating the same thing over and over again.
In the past five years, I've implemented interactive notebooks and Number Talks. I do explicit phonics three times a day (whole group and both small groups). I have students interact with technology rather than me being the sole one to create things. I have centers and literature circles with novels, something I didn't even attempt until my second year. I've learned how to do the CORE phonics assessment to see where students break down phonetically and the DRA to determine their reading levels. (Although it's time consuming, I much prefer it to the old diagnostic tests I had to give!). We're using mentor text for reading and writing, doing mini-lessons and having students publish drafts both on the computers and the iPads. It's been a tough, uphill battle and I'm proud of the new things I've learned. I'm appreciative of the trainings I received at my school, from my district and from outside educational entities.
I'm saddened by teachers who are scared or unwilling to try new strategies. I don't have the same bunch of kids I did when I first started five years ago, so why should I teach the same lesson the same way?
(Poor Harry Potter, subjected to the old ways of teaching)
Change can mean better instruction for students. Change can mean more engaging, thoughtful, purposeful, driven lessons. Change can mean teachers have more flexibility and students have more opportunities to collaborate with their peers on projects and activities, rather than just sitting quietly and working independently. Change can bring joy back into the classroom. I'm not saying every aspect of education needs to change nor that all change should be blindly accepted because that's no good either. However, if change brings about higher student performance and helps create more critical, thoughtful, passionate young scholars, why not give it a try?
Change can be a good thing.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
paper slide
During the last week before winter break, we made paper slide videos for our must-do. I set the expectations:
But didn't pass out a rubric due to time. (We had Discovery tests to finish, a writing task and a grade level reading test so time was limited.) Next time, I'll do a rubric so they can self-assess.
Each time they're getting better, which is awesome to see their growth.
They worked collaboratively:
And we watched their final projects on the last day before winter break! Since they used their names, I won't post the link here but it is available on our kidblog sites (for my student & family readers).
But didn't pass out a rubric due to time. (We had Discovery tests to finish, a writing task and a grade level reading test so time was limited.) Next time, I'll do a rubric so they can self-assess.
Each time they're getting better, which is awesome to see their growth.
They worked collaboratively:
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