Amidst putting the final touches on my progress reports and beginning my major paper for my course due Monday, I was able to get as much as I wanted out of the one day I attended #bit15 this year.
Once again, I was blessed to have been able to share what I'm doing in my classroom. Here's a link to my presentation. I've reflected several times over the past year or so whether or if I'm ready to leave the classroom, and the answer is a resounding "no." The work I share at conferences would not be possible if I wasn't a classroom teacher. It would not be possible without the support of admin, parents and without the hard work of my students.
I'm not usually able to talk to my colleagues at my school about what I learn at conferences, they are just not there yet (slowly but surely they are getting there though!) I tend to turn to twitter to digest and think about what I can take back to my classroom and school. Doug Peterson's blog post today got me reflecting on Friday's learning and urged this blog post.
I think that the biggest piece I took away from Heidi Siwak's closing keynote, yes I was one of those people taking all those pictures, is that teachers in Ontario need classroom teachers like Heidi to share the message: innovation is happening in classrooms right here in Ontario! Education is changing one classroom at a time! Teachers like us, have the power to do that. If you want it to work, it will work! Like Mark Carbone's final words to us: what is your next?
My next is helping a colleague set up her OneNote classroom, helping my students access their first assignment and of course to keep preaching the message, that it's not about the technological tools but rather about transforming learning.
My wonderful college @mrsjacker4 is going outside of her comfort level with this task. She is one of the best teachers I've ever worked with and I want to make this experience as worthwhile, and assessment rich for both of us. We are focussing on oral communication expectations as well as reading strategies and we are hoping our students meet their learning goals.
We will not be able to blog with other classrooms, although we could use the blog feature on D2L for our students to blog with each other. Since I have the 6/7 and she has the 5/6 we may have some takers who want to connect with their friends from the other class. After some diagnostic assessments, I found that as a class, my students need to work on using evidence from the text to prove their predictions and connections. They also need some explicit lessons on genre, which I hope to cover using the independent reading incentive monthly reading log in our D2L discussion forum.
From the Ontario Curriculum, the overall oral communication expectations are exactly the same across all grades 1-8.
Looking at the specific expectation more closely we get this. We are hoping to Skype with other classes as well as connect via Twitter. We will also be doing small group and large group discussions. While the students listen to the story, I will ask them to jot their ideas on sticky notes and they may also respond to this. There are also several documents floating around in social media with other ideas. I may extend it for my grade 7s by choosing other oral texts describing the refugee crisis and events happening right now.
Here's the weekly breakdown. We will be reading Fish and the author has already connected with us via Twitter. Thank you @LauraDron! Before we decided on anything, we had to check with our librarian to ensure the book was acceptable to use with our classes.
It is ironic that my first course of my post-graduate is Constructions of Organizations not just because I remember a course much like it when I was taking my Bachelor of Commerce but because I always joke with my students that I would get an S in organization. I'm very inefficient when it comes to paper, and there is no paper filing system at home or at school that I'm able to keep up with, hence my need to turn to technology to help me in those inefficiencies. As I'm preparing to present a seminar tomorrow on the birth of scientific management, I always look to other sources to help me understand and I found this video.
I started questioning some of the inefficiencies in my classroom and which strategies I use to increase the productivity of myself and my students, such as
Ensuring students follow entry and entrance procedures, silent entry gives me more time for my lessons
Having a morning routine for students such as "bellwork," so I can collect the paperwork and check agendas
Organizing my classroom - it's a Science lab so if ever anyone needs to find anything, everything is labelled
Putting students in rows so there is minimal disruptions and distractions during my lessons and independent work
Establishing clear rules, procedures, expectations and consequences for when they are not followed...
But wait...I'm not a production manager manufacturing widgets, I'm a teacher.
Then why would my classroom look like this? Why would I try to make everything one size fits all?
Images labelled for non-commercial reuse
Equal isn't fair and fair isn't equal, there may be a student who is not able to follow the same rule or procedure as another, and the consequence will not be the same. I won't photocopy and assign a class set of Math problems because there may be a student who feels stress and anxiety when seeing that many multiplication/factoring/square root problems. Or they are not working at grade level yet and will not feel successful with that work. Or I know that I need to do some pre-teaching for that expectation before they can meet or exceed the success criteria. Or there may be a student who has mastered multiplication/factoring/square roots, for a few years now, and that worksheet will just make them feel less engaged in my classroom. We no longer read whole class novel studies perhaps due to not all students being at the same reading level, or perhaps they won't have the same level of engagement towards that book. There is choice during Language, where I conference with students and together we come up with a personalized goal for writing, reading, and word study. I no longer give a percentage, I give descriptive feedback which on average takes me twice as long to write than marking it wrong or right and putting a fraction/percentage/level at the top.
Sorry I can't remember the original source...
In order for me to personalize the learning of every student in my room, then I need let go of some of the strategies that have worked for me in the past that increase our productivity. But yet I'm a mother, a student, a commuter, I need to make my time at school as efficient as possible as there is no other place where I can meet my productivity goals. Perhaps I shouldn't do extra-curriculars? Maybe I need to work through lunch and recess or not spend that extra five minutes at the end of the day chatting with my grade partners. This in turn will bring down my morale which will in turn decrease my productivity and I will not meet the widget quota for the week...or maybe I will but my quality of life will decrease. I'm not sure, I think I know enough about my mental health to prevent myself from going down that path.
The bottom line is, as much as we try to organize classrooms, schools and the education system, students are not a production line.
I was very blessed last year, I had 20 bodies in my grade 7 homeroom, it wasn't perfect (always room for improvement!) but I was able to do as much as I could for every single one of those kids. This year I have 24 but it's a 6/7 split. That in itself would make me less efficient as it's double the curriculum. I don't doubt I will have a good year, I'm experimenting with spiralling Math, and personalizing learning goals for them, I'm confident I will be the best teacher for them and I'm up for the challenge. I've taught both grades before, which also decreases the extra time I would spend "teaching" myself the curriculum. But I'm already finding myself going to some of the tried and true strategies, such as giving them notes and practice problems, which I didn't do as much of last year.
If four more bodies and the added Grade 6 curriculum already has me going back to my scientific management roots, how do other teachers out there survive with 30+ kids in their room? I recently read this post by @zbpipe and I can't even imagine what 42 bodies would be like. My biggest class size is 32 this year for Religion, and it is currently being very teacher directed but I do hope to open up the floor to more student centered activities.
I joke about going into the business of education and I wouldn't be doing anything else. I just hope this year is as productive and efficient as the rest.
