Reflections on Week 9 Reading and Discussions

This week's reading focused on lesson objectives and assessments.  Reading the section on "backward planning" gave me some insight into why my school requires that we outline our units before we plan our daily lessons.  This begins with creating unit objectives and tests that will assess these objectives.  Then, as a history department, we discuss the objectives that need to be tested, and plan our daily lessons to make sure we reach our teaching goals by the review session date.  Since we adopted this method, we are finding that we rarely run out of time to cover all important topics in the school year.

Assessments can be summative or formative.  Summative assessment is used to determine whether or not the student mastered the required objectives at the end of a unit of study, and, in the case of my school, counts as a test score in our grade book. Summative assessments can be criterion-referenced (graded to determine how well a student understands certain material) or norm-referenced (graded to determine how well a student scores in relation to others). Formative assessment is used diagnostically--students are questioned or required to do some other activity that helps the teacher determine how much of the material the student has learned, and how well the teacher is teaching what is required.  In my school, we are not allowed to count formative assessments as grades in the grade book...only as a measuring stick to gauge how well material has been learned.  Formative assessments are most often criterion-referenced.

Discussion this week regarding the use of formative assessments reinforced how important it is to measure how much a students is learning and how well I am teaching.  I learned a few new formative assessment techniques (one, journal-writing, that I use every other day, but haven't thought to use as an assessment) that I will use in my own classroom this year.  It was interesting to see that my school is not the only one that is requiring the frequent use and reporting of these assessments.

Reflections on Week 8 Reading and Discussions

This week's reading focused on classroom management--making sure that students are able to learn through the implementation of structure, rules and procedures into the class. One of the most important elements of structure is using allotted teaching time for only that, not for trips to the office, pep rallies, assemblies, testing, behavior problems, and late arrivals to and early departures from class.  When a teacher guards his or her teaching time, students are more successful.

During my first year of teaching, my administration allowed a lot of classroom disruptions during the day. Intercom "all-calls," frequent meetings during instructional periods where a substitute would be sent to my classroom to relieve me while I talked to a parent, students being called out of the classroom without notice for testing, or to receive messages from their parents. I had a hard time keeping my children focused in all of that chaos.  In my second year at the same school, a new administrator took over. He promised to reduce the number of daily disruptions. He did this by installing phones in each classroom so that teachers could be reached without the intercom. He required that parents make appointments during teacher planning periods to discuss student progress.  Instead of calling students out of academic classes for individual testing, he had the school psychologist schedule testing during elective classes. This created an atmosphere that let the teachers and the students know that learning time was valued, and that nothing else was as important. The change in my students' focus was dramatic, and the faculty was grateful.

This week's discussion post was interesting, because I think it is important to share our failures as well as successes. Reading other teachers' posts reminded me that we all have common issues that we face--inattention, misbehaviors that disrupt the class--and we can all help each other to learn how to overcome these problems. Making sure that we teach rules and procedures at the beginning of the year, being consistent in our enforcement of rules and procedures, teaching the student, not just the subject, and teaching "bell to bell" goes a long way in solving a lot of the problems teachers face.

Reflections on Week 7 Reading and Discussions

In this week's' reading, I discovered the QAIT model of learning.  This method targets quality of instruction, appropriate instructional level, incentives/rewards, and time students have to learn the material.  These four aspects of teaching must all be present in order to have a successful lesson. Then, there was an interesting discussion on ability-grouping vs. heterogeneous grouping.  Studies have proven that tracking (between-class ability grouping) is not a successful way to group students.  Untracking is the practice of grouping students of all different abilities together, which becomes more difficult to achieve as students reach high school.

Individualizing instruction through differentiation is one way to keep students achieving at high levels in a mixed-ability (untracked) classroom.  Peer tutoring, and adult tutoring are two other good methods to help lower-ability students in a mixed-ability classroom.

In reading other students' posts this week, I realized that we all share the need to make at-risk students feel comfortable in our classrooms.  I have always heard that students don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.  I believe this to be even more true in the case of at-risk students.

In my classroom, I create an atmosphere of tolerance.  I believe that students can only learn when they have first felt accepted, no matter how different they may be or feel in relation to others in their class.  Meeting that need allows my students to feel comfortable enough to open up and have real learning conversations in class, without feeling that their ideas are "less than" someone else's.