The Good, The Bad, and The Best Practice

Over the summer while we were on our five week or so break from Clark I took a course to obtain my licensure in English as a Second Language and as much of a pain it was to go in every Saturday from 8 to 330 and Wednesdays and Thursdays from 4 to 6 I actually fell in love with ESL as a subject matter and ended up passing my ESL MTEL which I took in July. Naturally after passing this MTEL ESL and ELL's were on my mind as I began my practicum at Sullivan that is where I met Bao. Bao is a student in one of my World Civilizations classes who arrived here from Vietnam at the end of last year who can only say, "I don't know” in English. I've made it one of my goals this year to do as much as I can to help out Bao, but at times it has become extremely difficult for me trying to communicate with him and I've become very frustrated. I have taken some steps in the right direction however such as having a teacher who speaks Vietnamese translate a message from my mentor teacher and I to Bao, having him watch YouTube videos to help him visualize what is going on, and having him draw what he is trying to express in class so that we can check for his comprehension.
     Still, Bao is unfairly excluded from many classroom activities because of his inability to comprehend the language. Friday when my mentor teacher asked our students to retrieve definitions from the book Bao was able to find the page, but when he got to it he had no idea of what to do. I couldn't stand by again and not at least improve his language acquisition so I sprung into action and made my way to his desk where I looked at him and he shrugged to indicate his confusion. I stood there for several seconds unsure of what to do and then pointed to the list of words in the book and simulated the task of writing with my hand, this was a gamble because I didn't know if he would understand what I was trying to show him, but sure shootin' he began to write down the list of words. Success! I proclaimed, but I couldn't celebrate for too long because once he finished copying the words he again shrugged at me unsure of what to do now. I made my way back to his desk and flipped to the first word on his list in the glossary and read it and the definition then copied down the definition on his paper; he nodded his head so I flipped to the next word on his list and handed him the pencil and watched as he attempted to sound out the word and copied down the definition.
  It is moments like this where I remember why I want to be a teacher. Watching the transformation of a student and seeing them do something you've never seen them do before that's where the payoff is. I know Bao still has a long way to go towards actually comprehending what he has written down and being able to use those words freely in conversation, but the fact that I can see he is on his way makes it all worth it.
    Unfortunately this week at Sullivan despite Bao's breakthrough everything wasn't sunshine and lollipops as I was struggling with my starter questions. Starter questions are our gateway into class each and every day in room 303 serving primarily as a comprehension check of the previous day's concept or a window into what we'll be doing in class that particular day. As it was my idea to have these be a daily routine my mentor teacher has given me the responsibility of developing these questions and using them with the students, which I love, but this week something didn't feel right. My kids seemed to be getting confused by my questions and disinterested in completing them.
  Seeing that something wasn't going right I invited my friends Ann and Erin to observe me and help me figure it out. After doing the starter we sat down for a conversation and both pointed out I was very confident in what I was saying. They were right, how could the kids get excited about something that even I wasn't getting excited about?! The other major incongruity they pointed out to me was that my starter lacked a connection the student's could make with their own lives. As Ann noticed after reading my journals the students’ responses were much richer when they were able to connect the concept with something that was familiar to them.
  I spent a lot of time that day reflecting on what the two of them had said and decided the best way to correct these issues was to see them for myself, so the next day I brought in a video camera and watched myself do the starters. Two things I noticed, one I hate the sound of my own voice, and two my friends were absolutely right. With my first class I wasn't very confident in my starter and my students were lethargic and easily distracted while they were working in their journals. I watched the video right after the starter was completed and decided enough was enough and even though I still wasn't one hundred percent confident in my starter I acted like I was and the kids came up with tremendous answers and because of the way I worded my starter were able to make some beautiful connections to their personal lives. I still have a long way to go in terms of developing the best starters I can, but you know what now I think I'm up for the challenge.

You can teach an old dog new tricks

I start today not at my second home of Sullivan Middle, but instead at Chandler Elementary. I had been curious about exploring how things work at different schools and after talking with my advisor decided Wednesday would be a good day to get out and explore. With that my friend and fellow MAT Ann and I set out for Chandler Elementary to see where our students come from socially and academically. 

 We started out observing Josh Cohen a former MAT now teaching 3rd grade at Chandler. He like my mentor teacher has the same students he had last year and you could tell they knew exactly what was expected of them. Something very telling that I think we often take for granted when we're teaching is not giving the students enough independence. We as teachers too often make ourselves a crutch for the students to lean on and while I think we should be there to support our students we also can't make it so that they need us to function because when they are actually going to be applying this knowledge we aren't going to be there to give them the answers. That being said while at first I thought it was a little cold I now realize how important a bit of teaching it was when the students kept coming up to Josh during independent writing time and asking him how to spell words and he replied with "if you need help with spelling help yourself". Here not only is he nurturing academic independence, but he is also teaching the students to use the resources available to them i.e. dictionaries, other students, etc. 

   Speaking of resources, that brings me to my next point, which is neither about Josh's teaching style nor the students learning, but the physical space, which they occupy within the school. A common trend from classroom to classroom at Chandler, and for that matter most elementary schools I've seen is that the room is divided up with different resources in different parts of the room and groups of desk or tables scattered throughout the room facing the board. For example you might have a certain portion of the room dedicated to reading where you have a collection of books for your students to choose from and some beanbag chairs or a carpet where they can read comfortably, and you might have a section of the room with games to play with during downtime, and another part with resources your students can use to conduct a science experiment. However, when these students make the transition to middle and high school for the most part they're put into rows, facing the board, with a few posters on the walls and a stack of books in the back. Why? Why as secondary teachers do we not allow our students the resources and the sensory engagement to fully immerse themselves in our subject matter? I could imagine myself in a middle school history classroom with groups of desks in the center of the room, a library in the back corner dotted with chairs for lounging and researching, a computer station even if it just has the one computer usually placed in each classroom in another corner for students to use to explore the world wide web for answers to their questions, a mini museum in another corner with some artifacts created by students and some brought in by teachers so that everyone in the classroom community could fully immerse themselves in the lesson and those are just ideas off the top of my head, the possibilities are endless!

  Over the summer I read a book called "The Daily 5" which details a literary system developed by two teachers for use in elementary schools. Even though I aspire to be a middle school teacher I ended up reading it because my mother is the principal of Chandler Elementary and she brought me home a copy because she was using it as part of her summer Professional Development.  I was intrigued by the ideas presented in the book, but was unsure of how to utilize them in middle school and kind of put it in the back of my mind as the summer progressed. Flash-forward to Wednesday at Chandler and what was Josh using in his class? None other than the Daily Five! Josh started out by modeling how to pick a good fit book by using the IPICK system with the I standing for I choose a book, the P standing for Purpose, why do I want to read it? The next I standing for Interest, does it interest you? C standing for Comprehend, am I understanding what I'm reading? And finally K standing for I Know most of the words. Josh modeled his choosing a book by going through the steps while trying to choose a book he wanted to read and after each step going back and recapping the previous steps to emphasize the importance of making sure a good fit book is a good fit for you. Through this I noticed three things, the first being how reviewing and modeling each step of any process could be an excellent tool for aiding both special education and ELL students in your classroom. The second was how IPICK would be a usefully tool for any level of schooling as in the real world more often than not the steps we use for IPICK for picking a book for reading when we're reading for research and pleasure without realizing it.  Perhaps most importantly however, I saw how I could utilize IPICK in my classroom for helping students pick books for conducting their own research in history class and after realizing that hope to incorporate the daily five into my teaching sooner rather than later. 

    For the next portion of our observations Ann and I split up she went to go watch the art teacher Mr. Pooch and I headed upstairs to the sixth grade to observe Clark Smith teach Math class. While at first I was disappointed I was seeing Math as I want to teach History I was blown away by some of the things I saw in Clark's class. When I walked in Clark explained to me how they use Math Stripz or brain busters not only in his class, but also throughout the school to get students to practice their basic math skills and motivate them to want to be better by rewarding the class who completes the most problems with an ice cream party.  In this exercise the students are encouraged to finish as many problems in a row without skipping one, in Clark's words "you skip, I rip!' time is not stressed in this exercise as they are encouraging students to think and retrieve no matter how long it takes. I was fascinated by the concept Math Stripz as the students really seem to get into them and legitimately want to get better at Math. Immediately my mind turned to History and figuring out how I could use a system like this to do quick comprehension checks with my students during a lesson. It is going to take some trial and error, but it is something I want to work on over the course of the year. 

 After completing their Math Stripz Clark's class moved on to taking notes on long division. Clark like my mentor teacher Kevin uses Cornell notes in his class. Clark's notes were set up a bit differently however, and I actually liked his format compared to the one Kevin uses/ the one that is pushed at Sullivan. While the two styles are very similar Clark's also leaves five or so lines at the bottom of the page for a summation of the notes above. Far too often at all levels of schooling I feel like we take a batch of notes and just leave it at that without ever reviewing those notes or going back to them ever again. With Clark's format however, after the notes are taken the students are required to go back, pull out the most important bits of information they've learned and reiterate them. This helps two fold, one it forces the student to go back and reflect on what they've learned so that the information doesn't just go in a notebook somewhere never to be seen again, and two it also gives the student a cliff notes version of the lesson so that when they go back to study/review they don't have to scour the pages of their notebooks for the most important parts of each class they can just look at the bottom of the page and extract the information they need. 

  In both Josh and Clark's classrooms I noticed they strived to make their teaching personal. When a student brought up their trip to Puerto Rico during a writing workshop in Josh's room to the casual observer it may have seemed as though the student was interrupting with a non-sequitur, but Josh seized it as a teachable moment and used the trip as an example of how the students could develop their writing through personal experiences. While for each of Clark's lessons he uses an essential question for the class to explore throughout the unit. When I asked Clark how he develops the essential question he replied “it's simple I ask myself when would I use this? If I come up with a solid answer I know it is a powerful essential question and if I can't justify it I go back to the drawing board”. This harkens back to something we discussed in Mac's class about doing academic work for a purpose. If the students understand that their work means something they are more likely to strive for excellence as opposed to if they don't see the point and slowly tune out the lesson. 

   Before leaving Chandler I reunited with Ann to observe the first grade at the school. At first we just went because Ann thinks kids that age are cute, but even there I learned valuable lessons about teaching. In Carmelo Borges’s classroom his students were learning how to use the word because by writing sentences with because in them. I thought back to my Saturdays in June sweltering through my ESL DLP classes and the language theories we discussed. In most theories practice was at the center of mastering a new language. Without constant use of new words you forget their meaning and have to start all over again. I then thought about the vocabulary my students were learning at Sullivan and how much better it would be if they were constantly using those words as they were trying to understand their meaning. I'm not sure how I'll get them to use their vocabulary words in a meaningful way, maybe a creative short story or research journals, but I love this idea of putting vocabulary to good use as a way of acquiring its meaning, and to think I got it from a first grade classroom! 

  While I never would of guessed it at the outset of the day I learned a ton of new tricks to use in my classroom while I was at Chandler. From the first grade to the third to the sixth all had elements worth observing and I implore any MATs to get out there and explore other grade levels you'll be shocked at what you find. I have a ton of new techniques to try and others to develop that I know once I get the hang of will help my students and help me to be a better teacher. 

The calm before the storm

Hello out there, I'll be using this blog to track my evolution as a teacher and as a person as I complete the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program at Clark University. For those of you who don't know, I will be student teaching  at Sullivan Middle School in my hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts. In addition I will be taking seminar classes at Clark four nights a week.  It's going to be more work then anything I've done up to this point in my life, but honestly I can't wait. While it was an extremely difficult decision for me on whether or not to enter the Clark MAT program or the STEP program at my undergraduate alma mater Umass Amherst and I know there will be times this year I'll wish I was back in Amherst, I'm thankful that I chose the Clark program as I'm learning so much not only from my classes, but from the different people I've met here so far and know I will continue to learn from them throughout the year.
         So far this summer my fellow MATs and I have taken three courses that have completely shifted the way I think about teaching. Before entering the program I had substitute taught at Claremont Academy a public school near Clark in Worcester for a couple of years and absolutely loved it. It not only taught me about the challenges of being a teacher, but introduced me to a grade level (middle school) which I never thought I'd be teaching before and now couldn't imagine not teaching. When I taught at Claremont I thought I had done a pretty good job I filled in for an 8th grade history teacher who had been out for a few months and while it was a challenge to get the students re-focused on history I thought considering the circumstances, I had done well, having them develop their own projects on ancient American civilizations and preparing them for the city wide final exam.  After taking these courses however, I have seen how much my teaching can be improved and can't wait for the opportunity to develop as a teacher through both my successes and failures this year.
      Monday will be our first day at the schools we've been placed at and I can't wait. While it will be meetings for most of the day and the kids won't be there until Wednesday I'm excited to get a feel for the culture of the school, to learn more about the transformations going on at my school where there is a new principal, and to bond with the staff and my fellow MATs.  I'll be helping my mentor teacher for a few weeks at the beginning of school while he gets the students settled in after their summer vacation and teaches them about Christianity, then when that unit is done I'll be taking over my first class, helping them explore ancient Islamic Civilizations.  I've been working on this unit the last few weeks and I'm anxious/excited to teach it. I know there will be some things that work and some that don't, but at the end of the day if I can get the kids to understand what I'm trying to get through to them, I'll be a pretty happy camper.
  So there it is the start to what should be a roller coaster ride of a school year and I hope you'll stick with me as I explore my life both in and out of the classroom this year.