Stealing Learning

The teacher I am student teaching under at the moment has a great expression she uses with her first graders when they blurt out an answer while a classmate is trying to construct an answer or when they let a classmate copy off of their paper.  When she sees this happening, she admonishes them to “Stop stealing ______’s learning.”  I love that this is an explicit norm in their young classroom community -- that every child is capable of learning and that every child has the right to learn in their own way and at their own pace.  It reinforces the idea that every learning activity is not a race to the finish line, but a journey to be shared.  It is also a journey to be experienced a bit differently for each student.  

The idea of “stealing learning” is one that we, as teachers, must heed as well.  We are learning in several of our methods courses about the importance of posing open-ended questions and fostering discussion of all responses, right or wrong.  We need to create an environment where mistakes and misunderstandings are valued as learning opportunities.  The most important question we can ask in teaching any subject is “Why?”  “Why do you agree or disagree?”  “Why does that make sense to you?  Explain your reasoning to us.”  These questions expand, rather than contract the learning of all involved.  As students are pressed to articulate and defend their thinking, their ideas become clarified and cemented in their brains and the sharing of ideas helps all to extend their thinking in new directions as they consider the new thoughts presented by their classmates.  

As a teacher (and a parent), I often want to jump in to help a child who is struggling, but I am learning that this is stealing their learning too.  It is so hard to give only a vague guiding hint and harder still to answer a question with another question, but I am learning that these are the greatest gifts we can give to a struggling student.  We need to leave them in the struggle, providing only enough scaffolding to keep them engaged in the task. They need to search for their own way to make sense of the problem at hand.  On the other hand, we don’t want to let them get so frustrated that they become defeated and give up.  We must take care to keep them in the Zone of Proximal Development (Zygotsky) -- challenged slightly above their current abilities, but not so far above so as to be unattainable.  I am finding it very hard to find just the right way to nudge students in the right direction without telling them too much.  Also, every student will have a slightly different ZPD so we must carefully consider what types of scaffolding we are providing to each individual student and differentiate accordingly.  We also want to make sure that we aren’t putting students in a situation where they are seeking the one right answer that will please us instead of grappling to make meaning and sense for themselves.

These are skills that I need to continue to work on and also norms that I want to be core values of my future classroom.  I want to foster a community of inquiry and collaboration, one that values different learning levels and styles, and one that values learning over finding the right answer.  I don’t want anyone’s learning to be stolen on my watch!

Great Expectations

One of the greatest surprises I have encountered in the first grade classroom in which I am currently placed has been the incredibly high level of expectations our dyad teacher has for her young students.  I am always impressed by the classroom management skills of primary teachers -- how they keep those wiggly and energetic little bodies all moving in the same direction throughout the day -- but what I am seeing extends far beyond behavior expectations.  Our dyad teacher has great academic expectations for her students -- all of her students.  This month our first graders are doing a unit on spiders.  As you would expect, the room is decorated with spider webs and painted pumpkins, black cats and, of course, plenty of spiders, large and small.  What I was surprised to see is the depth to which our teacher takes this study and the level of academic vocabulary she uses.  She and another first grade teacher have raided every library in the area it seems as they have stacks and stacks of non-fiction fact books on spiders for the children to look at and read.  She frequently reads one aloud to them pointing out text features such as the table of contents, index, glossary, bold-faced type , information bubbles, etc. and modeling how to use these features in order to find information they are looking for.  She has a huge sketch of a spider on the wall which they are drawing ”together.”  As they find out more information as a group, the teacher adds the details and labels.  You can imagine my surprise when I walked into the classroom last week and saw labels such as arachnid, spinneret and cephalothorax!!  Her high expectations extend beyond vocabulary and non-fiction skills.  This extensive spider unit which also includes almost daily art projects and lots of writing activities including a spider fact book that the class is writing together (they compose it as a group, but each child has their own personal copy that they must copy the text into as they go) is completely teacher-created and above-and-beyond the required curriculum.  In other words, our teacher is not required to teach any of this spider related material or do any of these fun October art projects but she wants to expand her students’ worlds by exposing them to science, art, the features of non-fiction, challenging vocabulary and so much more.  All along the way, she expects high quality work from each and every one and explicitly states her expectations at the beginning of each activity.  The students come from a wide range of backgrounds and possess a wide range of skills, so they cannot all meet her great expectations, but I think they are better off for having a teacher who is stretching them to their fullest potential.  

Spider Diagram
(a work in progress)

Using Technology for Formative Assessment

After thinking some more about my previous post, I decided to search my Google Reader for blog posts on formative assessment to see if I could mine some good ideas from seasoned educators.  I came across this one from the blog "Free Technology for Teachers" which involves the use of mobile technology devices:  Mobile Formative Assessment; A One Device Solution.  Among others, it suggests using Evernote (which we will be learning about in our tech class soon) as an assessment tool.  

How Best to Assess? (So Much to Assess and So Little Time)

This past week I had the opportunity to take over a portion of the teaching day in my 1^st grade dyad placement.  I taught an hour-long math lesson introducing money (nickels and pennies) that incorporated prior lessons on addition, equations and counting on.  I also led an interactive read-aloud on Miss Spider’s Tea Party by David Kirk, highlighting (among other things) the difference between fiction and non-fiction, noticing patterns (rhyme and sequential numbers) and making predictions.  I feel fairly confident that most of the students understood the lesson objectives but without an assessment that provides data on each individual student (such as a quiz or one-on-one conversation) it is very difficult to know.  Most informal written assessments (worksheets, etc.) for which we, of course, do not require students to use “privacy cubbies” of some sort, have the flaw of students being able to easily look at and copy each other’s work.  Although one-on-one conferencing gives us the best data, time rarely allows it.  One of the most surprising things I have learned about teaching is the importance of almost constant formative assessment to inform our teaching, especially with regard to providing extra support for those students who need it.  I have learned that assessment can be as simple as having a group discussion of a book or math lesson, or looking over children’s shoulders as they work on an assignment.  However, this usually does not capture accurate data on every student in the class.  I feel that in my teaching this past week I was able to get a good general “pulse” of where the class was, but I see that I will have to be a lot more conscientious in seeking out formative assessment data on students who might otherwise “fall through the cracks.”  I like Jean’s suggestion of carrying around a notebook at all times that has the students’ names listed down the side to take impromptu notes on their work and our conversations with them.  Other ideas?  What assessments are easiest for you to do "on the fly?"  Which are most effective for you?  Which do you find more difficult to carry out?

Really Seeing Our New Students

As we are diving into our new placements and getting to know a new set of students,  I am reminded of what we learned a few quarters ago from William Ayers' book To Teach.  In his chapter titled Seeing the Student he admonishes us not to fall into the trap of defining students by their incompetencies.  He reminds us that "labels are limiting . . . they conceal more than they reveal (p. 42)."  He goes on to note "the deficiencies list tells you almost nothing about me . . . it doesn't offer you any insight or clues into how you might engage me in a journey of learning or how you might invite me into your classroom as a student (p.44)."  I am reminded of this because before meeting some of the students in my new classroom for the first time, I heard them characterized by others with some pretty limiting labels that negatively colored my first impressions of them.  Without at first realizing it, I found I was predisposed to look for negative behaviors and incompetencies in these students.  Luckily, I quickly caught myself and have since been making a concerted effort to get to know the competencies and unique positive qualities of these "problem" students so that I can ascertain how best to connect with them and teach them.  I need to find out what they do know and what is important to them.  Little by little I am learning more about them which is helping me to help them more each day.  As an added bonus, with a more positive outlook, I find I am enjoying the class even more -- and I think they are too. 

Deciphering the Curriculum

What I am puzzling about in my placement this week is how to get enough of a handle on a whole new set of curricula in order to be able to have an authentic teaching experience in such a short amount of time in our current "mini" dyad placements.  I am curious as to how other teachers and teachers-in-training approach this challenge, whether it be for a new job or a short-term assignment such as the one we're facing, or even as a substitute.  The curricula for math and reading, in particular, are so robust and multi-faceted that it is hard to find a point of entry.  I'd like to start dipping my toes in the water by implementing basic pieces and then layering on more complexity as I master the various tools available.

  

The fact that the curriculum authors give you more resources than you can possibly use is both a blessing and a curse.  It presents great flexibility and also great confusion.  I find myself wishing for a "Getting Started" or "Quick Start" guide like you typically get with a new camera or laptop computer that simplifies the multitude of options and features into a manageable portion with which to get started.  Certainly I will work with our cooperating teacher to decipher the choices, but I wonder if anyone has any "tricks of the trade" in how to best approach a new curriculum. 

Back to School (& Back to Blogging)

Our back-to-school "September Experience" officially came to a close on Friday and as I  must now also get back to blogging, that experience seems an appropriate thing to blog about.  I learned to put into practice so many things that we have been learning -- from backwards mapping a lesson (on latitude and longitude!) to building a classroom community from a group of 28 very diverse 4th and 5th graders.  

Borrowing from my Intro to Field Experience Final Reflection . . . September Experience was amazing, exhausting, enlightening, frustrating, humbling and inspiring.  I learned that 4th and 5th graders try to act older than they are but are really still kids at heart.  I learned that with 28 kids in a classroom, everything takes a lot longer than you think it will.  I learned that, more often than not, things do not go exactly as planned.  I learned that even the toughest kids have a soft side and even the quietest kids have amazing things to say.  I learned that what we say is often less important than how we say it.  I learned that special needs kids are not a burden, but a gift.  I learned how easy it is to inadvertently ignore the quiet, middle-of-the-road kids.  I learned that there are an amazing array of teaching styles and that I need to learn to better appreciate and work with and learn from all of them.  Most importantly, I learned that I cannot possibly learn all of the things that I want to learn in just one year of student teaching!

I wrote that reflection before my final day of September Experience when my cooperating teacher was out for planning meetings all day and I took control of the class (with a sub to assist, of course).  In so doing, I learned a few additional things among which are that it takes a lot longer to plan a lesson than to teach a lesson and that managing transitions is going to be a vital skill to master!!