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.
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