Now Where Do I Go?

As July quickly comes to a close, I figured its time to start focusing on where I really want to devote my time this year.  After coming across many fantastic ideas from countless educators I find my head spinning as I try to wrap my mind around all the great things people are doing in their classrooms.  The doors that have been opened since I became a twitter participant are endless, which surprisingly creates another problem because I know there is no way that I can realistically incorporate all of these great ideas into my classroom at this time.  That being said, here is where I plan to devote my time moving forward.

1.  I would really like to find a way to make my classroom more comfortable and welcoming for my students so that it is more student-centered instead of teacher-centered.  One thing that I would really like to see happen is getting rid of a HUGE teacher desk that I inherited by default my first year teaching.  The second thing is eliminating some, if not all of the student desks w/ the attached chairs from my classroom.  Most of my students, when given a choice of where to work in the class, choose the floor over these desks.  Plus, I hate the fact that they are so big and take up so much room.  It really limits the way that I can arrange the room and still allow for easy passage through it.  My hope is to bring in some tables, more comfortable chairs, exercise balls and possibly a couch.  The difficult thing about this though is that I really would like some student input on this, but I would also like the furniture in place before school begins.  I may just have to get input from some of my students that I am working with over the summer to get their opinion. 

This example is by Alice Keeler.  Absolutely amazing and where I would love to go with my classroom eventually!

2.  Since I incorporated some flipping of my math classes last year (Algebra and Pre-Algebra), I would like build this idea even more to make it an even more effective tool.  A teacher I have connected with on Twitter introduced me to the concept of Explore-Flip-Apply because it is what he is looking at doing in his classroom.  He directed me to a Ramsey Mussallam lecture on YouTube.  You can follow the link and learn more about this if you want.

 

I am hoping to keep exploring this concept and using it in my classroom this year.  My thought is that I will devote most of my effort with this towards my sixth grade Math class, and then as they progress through middle school move this concept up with them.

 

3.  There is A LOT of buzz about genius hour on Twitter this summer.  I absolutely LOVE this whole idea and really want to find time to build it into my classroom.  Right now I am leaning towards pitching the idea to my principal and middle school team as something we incorporate at least in the middle school.  Right now we have a time slot on Thursdays that is designated "Advisory Time" which is mostly a time used by students as a study hall.  The purpose was to allow students to receive extra support if they needed it with a specific teacher, or to make up missing assignments or tests.  Since all of our classes have Advisory Time at the same time, I thought this would be the prime time to incorporate our genius hour.  So, from this point forward I plan on looking into genius hour more and how I can get this great idea into my school.

 

 

These are my big three right now.  There are also some apps that I want to play around with more, such as Remind101 or Aurasma.  Realistically it is going to come down with me playing with them more, but I keep reading so many positive things about them, how can I not check them out?

 

So as summer starts to close, and as teachers we start heading back into our classrooms to prepare for the upcoming year, where do you want to focus your time and energy to make this your best year so far?



Post Interview Thoughts

So I recently went through three interviews for three different teaching positions, and the whole process really got me thinking.  Interviewing can be a very nerve-wracking process.  Essentially you are giving control of your future to these other people who are going to judge you after knowing you for a period of maybe fifteen to thirty minutes, based on answers you give to a range of questions that you may or may not have imagined them asking.  Now, I know I have done some innovative and exciting things in my classes, but it never seems to fail that when I get into these interview situations that I get extremely nervous and have a difficult time sharing these things.  Looking back at the interviews, and having heard back from two that they filled the position with other candidates, I'm sure I often err on the side of not offering specific enough answers for what they are looking for.  My answers many times feel rushed as I want to make sure I answer each part of the question, but sometimes, in hindsight, not giving adequate attention to the more vital parts.  As I walked out of my last interview, I thought to myself, "If only I could teach a lesson for them and really show them what I can do."

A-ha!!  Is this interview process not just like a final assessment we often give our students?  Like my students, I can attempt to prepare for this assessment by doing research (on the school), drawing information from past experiences (interviewing), and using information that I have learned in class (teaching), but in reality going in not actually knowing which questions will be on the "test".  I'm sure the anxiety and nerves that I feel are often felt by some of my middle school students as they walk into my classroom on a test day.  Many of them probably feel like they know the material, but wish that they could  show me what they can do in a setting in which they have more control, and therefore less stress.  This whole interview process has just shown me even more why I need to build in a greater variety of assessments into my classes. As I go forward this summer I really want focus on doing that, and finding ways to incorporate more projects and activities that give that choice and control to students.  After all, I want them to be able to walk away from their "interview" feeling positive, successful, and excited about the doors that will open up because of this.

http://500px.com/photo/1216104

What will it take to transform my teaching??

Earlier this summer I attended a workshop at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.  It was a workshop centered around using technology in our classrooms and moving towards 1:1 integration.  While I picked up a few new things, the keynote speaker Aaron Doering was where I took the most away.  First of all, he gets to travel the world and share his passion for adventure learning (how cool is that?). During his keynote he showed us examples of how he uses his travel to connect learners all over the world on different subjects.  You can see his various projects on his websites www.chasingseals.com and www.We-explore.com.



Picture from www.chasingseals.com

 



The thing that really struck me during his keynote was how we can begin to transform education.  I know many teachers out there are doing amazing things everyday (I can't even begin to keep up with all the things I am presented with everyday on twitter!). But, as someone fairly early on the learning curve of technology integration these are all things I know that I need to consider even more in my classroom.  Aaron spoke about how we need to do a better job of developing a story with our teaching because students want to become a part of a story they can follow.  Stories are imaginative and can be interactive.  They provide opportunity to dream, and who wouldn't want to be a part of that?

Aaron then outlined the 10 things that must take place for transformation to occur. His main points are bolded and then I added some reflection and where I would like to go with each.

1. Trust: There has to be mutual trust between teachers and students.  So much of what we try to do in schools is based on relationships, and one large piece of any successful relationship is the ability to trust one another.  I think students need to trust that their teachers truly have their best interests in mind, and teachers need to trust that their students are doing what they can to be successful.

2. Develop Experiences, Not Products: I know this is an area I really want to work on this year in my classroom.  Too many times I think I have focused on what the students are giving me at the end of a lesson/unit instead of looking at times we could have built experiences on the way.  Students aren't going to remember every project they produce, but if they experience something exciting during the process, that is going to stick with them much better over time.

3.  TPACK: This was a new term for me, so for those of you who have not heard this before it refers to Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge.  What do we know, as educators, about technology to successfully integrate it?  The difficult thing about this is technology changes so quickly.  I feel that sometimes I work so hard to really understand something, only to have it change.  Definitely a challenge area.

4. Learners as Experts: Why can't we let students act as the experts sometimes?  Let them help guide one another through lessons/units/problems.  Think of the success these students will feel knowing that their classmates can look to them as experts, and how its ok for people to be experts in different areas.  In fact, its better because we become a more well-rounded group that way!

5. Collaboration: I know this is an area that I worked on quite a bit this last year, and plan to keep building.  I tried to get my students to collaborate with one another more in certain areas.  Lets face it, in most work environments we have to be able to work with other people, and the earlier we can develop and refine those skills, the better.  One thing I really want to improve this year is collaboration outside my classroom.  I have read numerous blogs and tweets about teachers who have had their students Skype with various professionals or other classes.  Why not build a community where student groups can collaborate on the same project online, but from different locations?

6. Aesthetics: Another area I want to work on this year.  I really want to work on the aesthetics of my classroom itself and make it much more about the students and their needs.  My plan was to actually have my bulletin boards blank this year when students come in and let them decide what is relevant to them, and what types of things they would like to see on them.  Sometimes I feel I put all of this work into them, and after a few days they could care less.  I figure if I use chalkboard paper it might make it easier for students to add to and change them more frequently.  In addition to this I want to look into arrangements in my classroom that move away from strictly desk use.  When I flipped my math classes last year most of my students preferred working on the floor anyways, so I was thinking of giving them more optional work space.

http://glakes.net/preschool-classroom-design-ideas-with-colorful-themes-layout.html

 

7.  Self-Narrative: I will admit it unfortunately has been a little while since I listened to this Keynote, so I while I have all of Aaron's main points I cannot remember everything from when he expanded upon them.  So, when I look back and see self-narrative I believe that this means that we need to include some of our story into what we are teaching, but also give students a chance to make to make their education part of their narrative.

8.  Innovative Pedagogy: Innovative educators are going to push the boundaries when they can.  Just like when we ask our students to be creative with their thinking, we need to be creative and innovative with how we are presenting our material.  If we are doing everything the exact same way we did it last year, are we really being innovative, even if it is a successful lesson?  I think we can take pieces of what we do and use it from year to year, but I know, at least for me, there is always something I think I can improve to make it even better.

9.  Learners as Designers:  This relates to a direction I really want to push myself this year, and that is students taking a little more ownership of their education and helping design the ways they are going to learn.  I want to find ways to incorporate more project based learning, which hopefully means students will be dictating the direction they want to go with the material.  At the beginning of the year I know this will be a challenge because it will be totally new for my students and so many of them have fallen into what I would call the "spoon-fed" slump.  They disengage from school and just expect to be "spoon-fed" the information that they will need for a test.  I want them to find enthusiasm for learning once again.

10.  Design as a Learner: The last point Aaron touched on was making sure you design your lessons as a learner.  This makes so much sense because after all they are the consumers of our product.  We can't get stuck as educators focusing on what will work best for us, but instead think about how it will best come across to our students.

So many things to think about as I really work on transforming the way I teach.  This is going to be incredibly challenging, but at least I know that going into it.  Teaching six different classes, with six different curriculums, sometimes makes it difficult for me to want to put in the effort to make really innovative and exciting lessons.  It's a lot of information to get through and think about everyday, but I also know that if I just sit back, and "mail it in", I may have more time, but I won't be happy with myself. 

I want to close with the question Aaron asked us at the end of his keynote because it is something I really want to keep in mind this year as I do my planning:

"Would you want to learn from you???"



My Very First Post

Starting a blog has seemed like a pretty daunting task, but when I look how far I have come in the last year as a  teacher, I figured why not give it a shot.  I have spent the last six years teaching Middle School math and English in a small, private school in Minnesota.  While I love the small setting, there are drawbacks. For one, no one else in my school teaches exactly what I do, so bouncing ideas off of others is a little more difficult.  I feel that at times I fell into a rut of doing what I knew, which is mostly the lecture during class and sending students off to do their own homework.  However, this routine, which seems to be so typical of our classrooms, left me, as well as most of my students, probably, yearning for something more.  I wanted to be able to answer that question, "When am I ever going to use this?"

During my fifth year of teaching I took half of the year off to have my son and spend some time with him.  I will admit, going back to work in the fall after a wonderful seven months off was difficult.

 

At the end of the summer, before going back to work I attended an Apple workshop where I heard many interesting presentations.  My school had invested in a cart of Ipads and I wanted to know how I could integrate this technology into my classroom.  This workshop gave me back some of the fire I feel I had been missing; I feel like things just started to click, and I was suddenly very inspired to try a bunch of new things in my classroom.  After hearing about Edmodo I decided that I was going to use this as a tool in my classroom to connect my students even more outside of class.  It was here that I was also first introduced to the idea of the "Flipped" classroom.  While I did not plan on flipping my classroom right away, the idea of recording my lessons as I taught helped fill a void I had of how to help students when they miss class, or even more so, how to help one of my students with dyslexia who struggled to keep up in class with listening and taking notes.

 

So I flipped my 8th grade Algebra class, and then I actually moved them to a mastery approach because I had such a wide skill set in my class. I was frustrated with holding back students ready to move on, but still leaving others behind by moving them on before they were ready and the mastery approach helped with that.  While all of the students said at the end of the year that they enjoyed this approach, I did have a couple of students who did not get through as much material as I would have liked them to, but at least I know they had a solid understanding of the material they did "master".

 

This summer I have been expanding my horizons through workshops and introducing myself to twitter trying to find ways to improve my students' experiences in class even more. These workshops and twitter are also what motivated me to start this blog.  I wanted to have a place to ask questions, get input, reflect and share what has worked and was hasn't.  After all, as educators it is best if we share with one another; there is so much we can learn from one another. 

 

If you haven't seen it, I was introduced through twitter to Adam Bellow's keynote speech from ISTE13 about changing the world.  It is well worth the watch.  Forward to minute 23 to jump to Adam.

 

After all, don't we all dream of being a superhero and helping to change the world?