Dreams

This post is part of the 30-Day Blog Challenge from TeachThought. To learn more about the challenge go to www.teachthought.com/teaching/reflective-teaching-30-day-blogging-challenge-teachers/.

DAY 30: What would you do (as a teacher) if you weren’t afraid?

I've often dreamt what learning in the classroom could look like if there weren't any outside influences exerting expectations. I'm not sure if being afraid is what's holding me back from realizing this dream, but rather the traditions of how "school" is done. I suppose I could throw caution to the wind and implement these changes, but I'm pretty sure my job would be in jeopardy if I did. So on second thought, maybe fear does play a role in this...

My ideal classroom would be free of standards, units, assignments, and assessments. Students would pursue their interests without any limitations in content. They'd use technology to explore content, connect with people outside of the school building, and create products that they could share with others.

My ideal classroom wouldn't be called a "science class" because students would be reading novels, writing plays, creating art, researching historical events, and manipulating mathematical equations, all in support of their science interests. The classroom would be truly interdisciplinary.

My ideal classroom would have a two-way door, through which students could exit often to explore what they wanted learn from the community, and through which the community could enter to interact with and share expertise with the students.

My ideal classroom would have students engaged in work that is relevant for themselves and the community. Creating products that have a purpose, engaging a real-life audience, and providing community service would be natural components of each student's learning process.

My ideal classroom would allow me to be a mentor for my students, guiding their learning, helping them to ask probing questions, getting them connected with the resources and people they need to pursue their interests.

Most importantly, my ideal classroom would be built upon the philosophy that human beings are naturally curious, and as a teacher in this classroom I would do everything in my power to cultivate that curiosity. Because of this mindset, students would become life-long learners, not just Biology students.

Photo from Ragesh Ev on Flickr. Licensed via Creative Commons.

Then & Now

This post is part of the 30-Day Blog Challenge from TeachThought. To learn more about the challenge go to www.teachthought.com/teaching/reflective-teaching-30-day-blogging-challenge-teachers/.

DAY 29: How have you changed as an educator since you first started?

The easier question to answer here would be, How have I not changed since I first started teaching? It's easier to answer because my response would be much shorter. I change as a teacher every year, and the accumulation of changes over my past 10 years of teaching is challenging to describe in one blog post. So instead of discussing the myriad of ways in which my teaching practice has changed, I'll describe one consistent pattern. That is, the longer I teach, the more student-centered I become. Here are some specific examples of that shift:

Technology & Curriculum = Predator & Prey?

This post is part of the 30-Day Blog Challenge from TeachThought. To learn more about the challenge go to www.teachthought.com/teaching/reflective-teaching-30-day-blogging-challenge-teachers/.

DAY 28: Respond: Should technology drive curriculum, or vice versa?

Like many things in education, I don't think this is an either/or question. In my experience, both of these conditions can be true and also be effective. It's a bit like "the chicken and the egg" question. Technology and curriculum should feed off each other.

One of the topics that my students study during the Ecology unit is predator/prey relationships. Classic relationships of this sort are characterized by an evolutionary "arms race." Over millions of years, predator species evolve to be faster and more powerful to increase their success in capturing prey. At the same time, prey species evolve better camouflage or more toxic poisons to better protect themselves. These adaptations escalate over millennia due to the complex, interweaving relationships between the two species.

I see the relationship between curriculum and technology in much the same light as a predator/prey relationship, minus the antagonistic nature of the relationship. The two spheres push each other to be more powerful, more efficient, more creative, and more diverse.

While this relationship can be beneficial for both technology and curriculum, the one caution I have is that students should not get lost in the shuffle. As both entities continue to push each other to be bigger and better, they still need to keep their focus on what is best for student learning. More technology or new curriculum might be exciting and newsworthy, but if it doesn't help students to ask deeper questions and make more connections, it's not education.

Photo from Elizabeth on Flickr, licensed through Creative Commons.

Guilt

This post is part of the 30-Day Blog Challenge from TeachThought. To learn more about the challenge go to www.teachthought.com/teaching/reflective-teaching-30-day-blogging-challenge-teachers/.

DAY 27: What role do weekends and holidays play in your teaching?

Let me lay it all out on the table tonight: I feel guilty for the amount of time I spend working on school-related responsibilities while I'm at home with my family.

My official work day starts at 7:40 and ends at 3:40, but I usually get home at 5:00 or later. I always make it home by 5:30 for supper, unless I have a meeting or an extracurricular commitment. Later at night, I usually spend at least an hour or two finishing up more work for school, varying from evaluating student work to adjusting a lesson that was prepared to searching for an answer to someone's technology question.

The weekend hours are quickly consumed with assessing student work, planning for the upcoming week, and writing my weekly parent update. Every other weekend, I also write and distribute a district technology newsletter.

I have colleagues who have drawn a line in the sand and declared that they won't do any school work at home, or they'll always keep the weekends work-free. I don't know how they do it. I don't feel like there are enough hours in the day to finish everything I'd like to get done now, much less completely blocking out two entire days. But at the same time, I have this tremendous guilt. I should be playing more games with my sons. We should be going outside more often. I should be doing science experiments with my sons. My kids have been asking me for months to teach them how to write in cursive. My husband and I haven't gone out to a movie in months. It pains me to even type all of this out.

I've been teaching for 10 years, and I still haven't figured out how to balance my home life with this crazy-demanding job. Being a teacher is a part of who I am, and it's difficult for me to be "less" of who I am by simply devoting less time to it. At the same time, being a mom and a wife are also part of who I am, and I feel I am "less" of myself when I let the my teacher-side take the reins for too long.

How do we do this? How do we devote ourselves to the people we love and maintain our passion for our chosen profession at the same time? The stress of this constant internal debate wears on me.

Today was a Saturday. I knew that I wanted to accomplish five things:

• Spend time with our First LEGO League Team during their weekly meeting. Both of my sons are on the team and my husband and I are coaches.
• Work out at the fitness center.
• Play a new game with my family (they've been waiting for me to have time to do this all week.)
• Practice guitar with my sons.
• Read some chapters from my new book.

As I thought through my day this morning and realized everything I'd like to do, I said to myself, "Okay, it will be fine to leave the school work until Sunday. I should be able to get everything done if I have the entire day tomorrow to work." Things were going great until I realized this afternoon that we do have another commitment tomorrow afternoon. Immediately, my brain went into panic-mode. How was I going to be able to get all of my work done now? Would I have to sacrifice one of the the activities I wanted to do today so that I could get started on my school work early? It's like this constant, nagging tap on my shoulder, never completely letting me be "in the moment" because I'm anxious about all the work I know I still need to get done. So, you see, even when I do make a conscious decision to set aside my work for a period of time, the knowledge that it's waiting to be done is still clinging to me, affecting everything I do.

Sometimes my head clears enough to recall that many people in other professions don't have this incessant conflict in their minds. When they leave work, work is done. They don't have to think about it again until they're physically back at their job. What a luxury this would be.

How can I be the teacher I want to be, but not short-change my family the attention they deserve when I'm at home? How do I take back my weekends for myself, my husband, and my kids - or is this just the way it is for all educators? If any of you have any suggestions, I'd truly appreciate hearing from you.

Photo from Bing Images (dangerousharvests.blogspot.com). Labeled as "Free to share and use."

Early Morning Resource Routines

This post is part of the 30-Day Blog Challenge from TeachThought. To learn more about the challenge go to www.teachthought.com/teaching/reflective-teaching-30-day-blogging-challenge-teachers/.

DAY 26: What are your three favorite go-to sites for help/tips/resources in your teaching?

My day is fueled by routines. I am one of those people who feels out of sorts and crabby when her routine is disrupted. I'm worse than a toddler who misses her nap. One of those routines is my morning ritual, helping me ease into the day. I wake up a couple of hours before I need to be at work. Some days, I go to the local fitness center. Once I'm home again, I make my breakfast (always the same thing: fruit, plain yogurt, and granola), feed the cat, and grab my iPad for my daily wade into a stream of various ed-tech resources.

First, I check my e-mail. There are two Paper.li newsletters that I subscribe to and receive daily via e-mail: "The Teacher Technology Daily" published by Jason Seliskar and "#flipclass" published by David Prindle. I think I stumbled upon them while scanning Twitter about a year ago. Next, I open up my Newsify app and skim through all of the blogs I'm subscribed to. Finally I open up Zite and read through any articles that catch my eye.

Essential to each of these subscriptions or apps is the ability to easily e-mail or tweet out the resources to my colleagues, and/or add the resources to my Evernote account. Although they seem like simple resources, these blogs and news articles have been my most reliable source of up to date ed-tech news, trends, and just plain old thoughtful teaching. When I look at how much I've learned throughout a year of diligently maintaining this routine, I'm amazed. It easily beats out any other professional development I've participated in with simply the volume of information I've been able to have access to.

I love taking the time to read through all of these resources in a quiet house early in the morning before anyone else is awake. It is during this time of the day that my brain is the freshest and most ready to process new information. If I ever miss this routine for any reason, it feels like my entire day is off-kilter. I guess it's really not all that different from the very traditional reading of the newspaper over cup of coffee in the morning. I've certainly come to rely on these resources for news, as well as my daily dose of inspiration.

Photo from Bryce Bradford on Flickr. Licensed via Creative Commons.

Scratch-Off Collaboration

This post is part of the 30-Day Blog Challenge from TeachThought. To learn more about the challenge go to www.teachthought.com/teaching/reflective-teaching-30-day-blogging-challenge-teachers/.

DAY 25: The ideal collaboration between students - what would it look like?

The following is what one of my students submitted for the end-of-week team evaluation on Friday:

"We had some really great discussions Thursday, 

everyone participated and 

we all shared ideas and learned, 

it was really good."

Now I could go on and on about what I hope to see from student collaboration in my classroom, and it would probably be laced with a bunch of edu-babble (as I tend to do). But I think this student pretty much sums up what I would describe as ideal collaboration. The key words for me are: participated, shared ideas, and learned. I especially love his comment at the end: "It was really good." This is what I want for my students when they interact in teams. I want them all to be involved, I want learning to take place, and I want them to feel good about what they accomplished when everything is said and done. 

So what did this student's team do on Thursday that he thought was "really good?" They took a quiz. But this wasn't your typical team quiz. This quiz is based on the Readiness Assurance Process (RAP) designed by Larry Michaelsen as part of his Team-Based Learning approach. I learned about it for first time this summer while taking a Biotechnology class. For a field trip, we visited an active-learning classroom at the University of Minnesota and learned about their science courses that utilize team-based learning. I was inspired and immediately knew I wanted to incorporate portions of this approach in my own teaching.

One facet I wanted to use was the quizzing methodology. After a period of inquiry into a topic, my students are given a content assignment. This assignment gives them options in how they learn the content associated with a given topic. They may read a textbook, watch a video, explore a website, or read an iBook. Regardless of the mode of delivery, students are all expected to come to class with new information they've learned. They then take a 5-point quiz on that topic in class. They record their answers on paper, as well as in an online quiz on Schoology. Finally, the students complete the same quiz one more time, but as a team.

For the team quiz, the students use an IF-AT form to record their answers. The IF-AT form is a way for students to receive immediate feedback on their quiz answers, and requires that teams continue to answer quiz questions until they reach the correct answer. It accomplishes this with a scratch-off process. A team discusses a question, settles on an answer, and then scratches off the box on the IF-AT form that's above their answer. If they've answered correctly, a star will appear. An incorrect answer results in an empty box after being scratched off. If a team answers a question incorrectly, they continue discussing and choose a second box to scratch off. This sequence proceeds until the team scratches the correct box.

Sample IF-AT form. I only use five questions at a time.

What makes this quiz great at eliciting team collaboration isn't the IF-AT form directly, but the discussion and debate that have to take place among group members while completing the quiz. Students still have their personal answers in front of them on a piece of paper, but not everyone in the group always has the same answer. The students have to debate and defend their answers before scratching off the team answer.  This discussion process requires that they think back to the reading or video they completed as homework and use what they learned to support their opinion. The depth and intensity of these discussions are amazing to hear in progress. As well as the cheers when a group scratches off a correct answer. 

These quizzes only make up a minute portion of the students' grades, but I tell them outright that I'm more interested in hearing their debates than the status of their final score. The recall of the new information they learned and defense of their understanding of that information encourage deeper learning of material and better long-term storage. Finally, the comradery the quizzes create fosters improved team interactions and positive attitudes. If students come away from a team interaction feeling good about themselves and the interactions of the team, I know they have had a successful collaboration experience.

Photo by Dawn (Willis) Mancer from Flickr. Licensed through Creative Commons.

Learning: It's Too Much Work

This post is part of the 30-Day Blog Challenge from TeachThought. To learn more about the challenge go to www.teachthought.com/teaching/reflective-teaching-30-day-blogging-challenge-teachers/.

DAY 24: Which learning trend captures your attention the most, and why? 

I recently had a conversation with some of my students about making corrections on a lab report they had written. A report that had no "score" as of yet because the students had not completed the work to a "proficient" level. It had been peer reviewed multiple times, and I had given the students many comments on how to improve their reports, but they just hadn't done the work to improve them yet.

The conversation went something like this:

Me - "I saw that none of you have completed your corrections on the lab yet. Is there something that you had questions about?"

Student - "No, not really."

Me - "Is there another reason that you haven't done these corrections yet? Something I should know about?"

Student - "No, I just don't want to do them. They're too much work."

Me - "Well, I just want to make sure you understand that you have the opportunity to redo this work until it reaches proficiency, with no penalty for your previous attempts. You get that, right?"

Student (looking away, under breath) - "Yeah."

Me - "You don't sound very excited. Do you sometimes feel like you'd rather just do it once and have it done, regardless of how well you do it?"

Student - "Yeah, sometimes."

After this exchange, I continued to ask questions and eventually found out that they did have some questions about my comments. I worked with the students 1:1 for about 5 minutes each, cleared up their questions, and their corrections were done.

This is why I think the trend toward Standards-Based Learning is so important. My students, growing up on a steady diet of "once and you're done" grading have come to see education as a series of tasks they have to check off their list instead of a spiraling process that turns back in on itself over and over again. When given the opportunity to be successful in class, they cut corners because they're used to an educational system that values efficiency over depth of understanding. Standards-Based Learning is more than an alternative way to assess students, it helps students and teachers think about education in a completely different way.

SBL emphasizes learning as "work in progress."

SBL encourages students to think about their thinking.

SBL prompts teachers to consider the depth at which their students are learning.

SBL allows for multiple pathways to learn the same concept.

SBL makes learning goals visible for students.

SBL cultivates a growth mindset, in teachers and students.

This is what excites me most about Standards-Based Learning. It's more than just a "trend in education." It has the potential to shape how students view education for the rest of their lives. My hope is that eventually my students will not see learning so much as "work," as "work in progress."

Photo from Justin See on Flickr. Licensed through Creative Commons.