Standard T

T: Knowledge of teaching 

 Teacher candidates positively impact student learning that is: 

1. Informed by standards-based assessment. All students benefit from learning that is systematically analyzed using multiple formative, summative, and self-assessment strategies.
2. Intentionally planned. All students benefit from standards-based planning that is personalized.
3. Influenced by multiple instructional strategies. All students benefit from personalized instruction that addresses their ability levels and cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
4. Informed by technology. All students benefit from instruction that utilizes effective technologies and is designed to create technologically proficient learners.

My Understanding

Only if I know what I’m doing can I effectively help students know or do anything.  Moreover, only if my instructional backpack includes enough valid options can I respond with useful flexibility to the diverse needs of my students.  First, I must know where I’m trying to lead my students and I must develop and use a valid positioning system to locate us on the trail and figure out how to move forward or whether we should backtrack to pick up lost hikers.  Second, I must be able to plot routes that get students who start at different trailheads all moving toward the same type of goal, even if their terrain may have to differ.  Third, I must provide a variety of signposts and maps in various learning styles so that every student has a personalized chance at reaching the goal.  And fourth, I should take advantage of technology and enable my students to use the technological tools of the trade for themselves.

Metareflection

RP progress report example

Unless teachers and students assess the progress of learning, they will get to the end of the term not knowing what standards have and have not been met.  Hence, ongoing assessment is critical to enable teachers to shape instruction and students to shape their learning. During my units, I employ a variety of formative, summative, and student self-assessment to discern learning gaps and help students patch them before I must assign a final score to their grasp of each standard.  For example, during the research paper process, students assessed their own progress with brief progress checks (see right), formatively assessed each other’s rough drafts with a peer review rubric, and had opportunity to revise before submitting a final draft for a summative assessment. Essentially, I know how to use different types of assessment at different stages of standard attainment so that both students and teacher can know where we’re going and how to get there.   

One of my favorite elements of teaching is the chances I get to truly personalize instruction for my students. While my content standards are the same for all my students, I often encourage students to demonstrate standard attainment in ways that make the learning relevant to their own lives.  That is, I personalize instruction from the planning side and from the student-product side.   For example, for a lesson in poetry writing based on newspaper articles, I sought articles that would appeal to specific students—specifically, quite a few sports articles and an article on a recent fire for one student who wants to be a firefighter. My rationale for this lesson documents my efforts to accommodate various ability levels, and my assessment of the range of student characteristics one of my classes can be found here.  That is, finally, understanding who my students are (e.g. student questionaire) and where their skills stand (see T1, assessment strategies) is prerequisite to being able to differentiate my planning for the range of my students. 

I effectively use multiple instructional strategies to meet my students at their own levels and on their own turf.  Whether it be tracking down a Bulgarian copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or researching current best practices for addressing diverse student needs in a general education classroom, I make it a priority to seek resources that will help my students succeed.  Also, during class time, I make sure students engage in the type of activities that allow them to use their backgrounds as assets instead of liabilities.  For example, they frequently share personal experiences in small groups when responding to questions that contribute to our curriculum goals.  The variety of their experience builds our collective understanding.  An especially comprehensive example of my instructional differentiation is the variety of options available for students’ summative Gatsby projects.  By drawing on multiple learning styles and cultural interests (such as fashion,  automobiles, and movies), I was able to design options that enabled each of my students to plug his or her individual skills into a unique means of demonstrating concept attainment. (student examples) 

As technology permeates the globe, more resources become available to students, and technological proficiency becomes more critical for people seeking to enter an increasingly information- and technology-oriented workplace. I regularly use PowerPoint and the internet during lessons, and I give my students opportunities to increase their skill with digital tools.  For example, I provide online references and audiobook links for Huck Finn and other readings, and students use the internet to research and PowerPoint to demonstrate their learning.  A computer lab attached to my student teaching classroom allowed me to send students to the computers whenever it proved useful, and I even allowed students to occasionally make legitimate use of their ever-illicitly-present iPods and cell phones to access audiobooks and lesson-supporting YouTube videos. As technology increases, I am committed to integrating new tools into my classroom in ways that give my students a leg up in this electrified world.

Week 6: Staying a Page Ahead

2/12/10

This week, my classes took their first quiz on Huck Finn, and I got a glimpse of ability and motivation levels. The students that I thought would do well did very well, and the students that I thought would do poorly did very poorly.  However, the results of the quizzes are also telling me what students have and have not learned and how I can help them. Most obviously, the quizzes give me a good idea of who has read the chapters and who has not. Once I noticed that just getting through the chapters was one of the greatest challenges for many of my students, I went looking for online tools.  A quick check for understanding—in which they wrote down what was confusing for them in Huck Finn—also told me their biggest problems were the plot, characters, and dialects.  Hence, Friday I gave them a plot overview, a character list with explanations, and a list of online links to the following:  full text, full text in modern English, and full audio that could be put on an iPod.  My goal was to get more students reading and/or hearing the text, and a number of students who had been struggling did tell me that the modern English and audio would help.

On the whole, I’ve been staying just a page or two ahead of the students this week.  I’ve scrambled to get them the footholds they need in the novel and to cast ahead for what else might be useful.  They needed plot work, so the day before the quiz, I had the class jigsaw the chapters, with small groups analyzing each and compiling the class data on a PowerPoint.  That activity helped me figure out who had read and how far and provided, hopefully, a gist of what was going on in the story to those who hadn’t a clue.  I’ll see next week whether students are reading and what they need next as we head toward writing a research paper.

Week 4: Trial by Fire

1/31/10

When I showed up Monday morning, a substitute/guest teacher was reviewing the notes my mentor teacher had left for the day.  I was glad to have met the guest teacher before, and we worked together well that day, but I admit it was rather disconcerting to go the day without knowing the reason for my mentor teacher’s absence or if she would be back Tuesday. (She was.  She had had a once-a-year migraine for the duration of the weekend.)

Our guest teacher began each class period by directing students to their journal writes, and after a short while I took over to hand out their final study guides (which my teacher had left on her desk and which I had not seen before that morning.)  First period was especially rocky, because I was going through the study guide myself for the first time and hearing their exclamations of, for example, “We never studied that.”  I explained the gist of the guide’s purpose and consistently referred specific questions to the teacher’s return.  Thankfully, the majority of the period could legitimately be given them to work on finishing up their posters and preparing for Tuesday’s presentations.  They at least were glad to have been given a day’s reprieve before presenting.  After first period, I wrote the class’s agenda down and displayed it on the document camera, which made subsequent periods go much more smoothly. 

Essentially, throughout the day I facilitated what I could—passing out study guides and assuaging fears—but I was careful not to commit to anything of which I was not sure, especially regarding the content or form of the final.  One of the valuable aspects of this mentor teacher-less day was that whereas students had still tended to direct their questions to my mentor teacher while it was the two of us in the classroom, they adjusted when the choice was between the substitute teacher and me.  I became for a day the preferred source of answers, an experience which will come in handy as I take over a good portion of the class beginning next week.

Week 2: Scaffolding Results

1/16/10

This week, I had some significant experiences in guiding students toward producing worthwhile results.  On a whole-class scale, my “Research Check” worksheets have seemed to help students compile and organize the information required for their projects; and on an individual scale, my brief personal conversations with students have helped at least two make connections between their class work and their long-term life interests. 

The English 3 students are in the middle of a research/poster/presentation project on various eras in the African American experience, and I created a worksheet for them to record and report to my mentor teacher and me the progress they have made so far.  The worksheet laid out the requirements from the assignment sheet in large tables.  Each student received a worksheet, but I instructed the groups to divide up responsibility for filling out the sheet so that each group could turn in four partially complete sheets, the information on which would add up to a complete worksheet—this structure was designed to reinforce a teamwork mentality for the project.  In the library that day, as the groups hit the computers to make sure they had the info to fill out the worksheets, my mentor teacher expressed awe that the students were actually doing research and—after she had seen a few periods of this—turning in a product.   Even most of the generally unmotivated students turned in something to testify that they were contributing to their groups. 

At first glance this worksheet scaffolding seems to be very effective at getting students to buckle down and produce results, but I don’t yet know why it worked this time.  There are quite a few possibilities: maybe the students obeyed my requests because I’m still a relatively unknown factor so they don’t know what they can get away with; maybe they did the work because each student would be held accountable by having to hand in a piece of paper with a name on it; or maybe some of them saw some usefulness in being able to organize their information in this way, to make sure they’d covered the requirements.  I will keep an eye out for the answer to this “why it worked” question as I use similar scaffolding exercises in the weeks ahead.

My personal conversations with students have begun to bear fruit, but I don’t know yet how much hope to place in long-term results.  On Wednesday, I started a conversation with a student who has a 504.  He wasn’t doing anything, so I asked him how he was and found out the following in less than a minute:  he’d taken the wrong bus, arrived late to his 1^st period (science), and loves science—especially chemistry.  I then suggested that he look up whether there were any African American chemists in his group’s era (the last 30 years).  I looked up one for him that night and brought a printout of an article for him the next day, and was awestruck that he had a list! He had actually done at home the research that I had suggested.  Less than two minutes was all it took to help him make a connection from my class to something that was intrinsically interesting to him.  This connection is a little victory, but it’s also a connection between the two of us, on which I may be able to build.  He now knows I care.

Likewise, a two-minute conversation with an at-risk student (whom I’ll call Daniel) led to his deciding to seek an internship in his desired career area.  In a journal write, he spoke of feeling caged every day, as he is forced to attend school and learn stuff that won’t be useful to him, among other hardships.  The only feedback I wrote was a one-sentence question, “What do you want to be learning?”  I handed the papers back Wednesday, and Daniel promptly turned the sheet back in with a written paragraph in answer to my question.  He said he wanted to learn “important stuff” and that he couldn’t see how writing a persuasive letter would help him as a “car mechanic/race car driver.”  That tidbit of information allowed me to open a conversation in which I asked if he’d considered doing an internship.  “I don’t even know what an internship is,” said Daniel, and what struck me about that comment was that it was said without hostility, with even some curiosity perhaps, so I explained briefly the purpose and usual parameters of an internship.  The very next day, when I asked if he’d thought about it, he said he and his mom were working on a résumé—this even from a student who has a very hard home life.  On hearing this story, my mentor teacher exclaimed, “He talked to his mother?”  Again, I don’t know whether this will play out well in the long run, but if such minor—and potentially major—victories are possible from two minute conversations, then bring them on!  If I know what matters to students, then I will be able to better shape my class to suit their needs.  I can differentiate using student interests.  For example, when we work on argumentative papers again next semester, I may be able to steer Daniel toward an automotive topic.  At least it’s a start.  I think the more I know students, the better I’ll be able to help them learn.