Final Novel Projects

So we've been working on the students' final novel projects for the past few days. I introduced the projects with a powerpoint and gave them a handout. In talking to Mr. Conrad, I decided to have the students write proposals that outlined their ideas and if they required classtime or equipment, and asked them to suggest a preferred manner of grading. Then I created a rubric with categories that combined my students' suggestions with my own ideas (Connection to Novel, Creativity, Visual Aids, ect). The project was worth 40 points total, but I allowed the students to move points around in order to weight certain categories in their favor. I thought the category weighting was a great idea initially, but after grading the projects, I realized that it didn't really help out their project grades. For example, a student might have weighted his project in the Visual Aids category because he didn't think the project was very creative, but it used a powerpoint so was therefore highly visual. This should have worked in his favor if the powerpoint was well done (In theory, he would lose no points in that category), but often students put a lot of points into a category that they had completed, but not very well. So in my example, that students ended up losing more points for a poorly completed visual aid rather than one or two for having an uncreative project. Anyway, another case of good intentions leading to overly complicated assignments.

So I definitely would have changed the grading system, but I would also include more directive instructions. In debriefing with Mr. Conrad, we discussed the struggle of having wide-open assignments that allow students to explore creative options for assignment completion, versus giving students concrete expectations and opportunities for success. I would like to strike a balance between those two goals, and I think this assignment landed too close to "wide open" on that spectrum and didn't provide enough structure. I know that the quality of some projects was beyond my control, but I feel like a few more models and concrete instructions would have facilitated more students' success. I am also worried that the assignment was so open-ended that I have not taught them to DO anything. They already know how to read and make posters, etc. I'm worried that beyond "connecting with the novel" there is no justification for why they did this project.

IEP Meeting

I attended an IEP meeting on Friday for a student who has fairly serious behavior problems and is having difficulty attending school and passing his classes. He has already been held back from graduation and receives modifications in most classes so he can get through them. However, the meeting was called to address a needed schedule change: the student had not been scheduled to take a required class for graduation;therefore, some of his classes were being taken out (during 2nd nine weeks) or redistributed. This required the student to be put in different levels of classes (ie. MI, LD, and on-level) even within the same subject area. Special and general educators in the meeting debated whether a student could be put in, for example, one 11th grade MI science class and another LD 12th grade science class. One teacher bluntly said, "You can't be MI and LD, it's impossible. You're one or the other." And another replied that his current class schedule was the only way to ensure his graduation. A lot of issues came down to following what is legal protocol, but it seemed like a difficult situation in which the student's needs were being compromised by previous teacher oversights. Additionally, tension had developed between the teachers who are responsible for this student and it seemed (to me) like their personal opinions had taken precedence over what should have been done according to the school, which further complicated the situation. I left the meeting seeing that rule bending may seem beneficial to accomplish short term goals, but it causes a lot of complications further down the road.

Commentary on Action Research

I've had a fairly tense relationship with my action research project all semester. At first I couldn't think of anything that I really wanted to do in Mr. Conrad's classroom because everything seemed so purposefully seamless (and it was effective). Then, I combined his teaching style with some of my interests and put together a project, but I was still worried about data sources and reliable feedback and just not having enough time to really concentrate on the project and my teaching at the same time. In seminar, I received positive feedback on my write up (everything except findings, discussion/conclusion), but I still have reservations about the process of Action Research.
I have always been a proponent of this project and think its crucial to learn AR during the pre-service phase of our teaching experience. However, I think that the experience would be more beneficial if (at least the first time) the projects were a collaboration in which pre-service teachers collected and analyzed data from their mentor teachers' classroom. In this setup, both teachers would be responsible for the design, but the mentor teacher would implement the new strategies while the pre-service teacher observed and collected data. Then both teachers would collaborate on the conclusions of their findings, and the pre-service teacher would do the final write up and share.
I like this set up for a number of reasons - mostly because I think it's very difficult for a pre-service teacher to measure the effectiveness certain strategies when she is still learning how to teach. I find myself analyzing data that indicates certain research findings, but in the back of my head I think that my results were caused more by the person I am than by the strategies I implemented. That is to say, my teaching is too new and too variable to collect reliable data. By collecting data from a seasoned teacher, the projects might produce more reliable results. Additionally, I often hear pre-service teachers commenting on the difficulty of balancing action research with teaching and the comments go something like this: "I'm tired of my action research because I can't spend time on my lesson plans." I'm sure this frustration is communicated to mentor teachers as well, and the idea that action research is a useful endeavor is subsequently lost amid the frustration of balancing new teaching responsibilities with time-consuming project implementation. With a collaborative project, I think both pre-service and mentor teachers could more clearly see the benefits of conducting research in the classroom.

One final note -- I think it's ludicrous to wait until the final semester to plan the action research project, even if it ensures relevancy to the internship classroom. I would have much preferred writing a proposal and having a project planned out in advance even if it turned out to be a bad fit for my class. The responsibility of brainstorming the action research project in the final semester is not only REALLY STRESSFUL, but I think it also contributes to the negative connotation of Action Research being unnecessarily difficult and perhaps rushed and superficial.

Disclaimer -- I really do like the idea of action research. I just think we should improve it!

A full load...

Teaching all 6 classes (3 preps) has become really stressful the past few weeks. I think part of my struggle is that I have high standards for myself. Sometimes I have difficulty separating my teaching from independent student behavior or student circumstances, and I end up intellectually and emotionally taking a lot of responsibility for student success. I know that, overall, this is a good trait and will push me to improve my teaching, but right now it makes everything seem a little unmanageable. I find myself spending a great deal of time trying to perfect lessons and predict student misunderstandings and...just prepare myself to be a good teacher...but no matter how much time I spend on preparation, I've forgotten something and something goes wrong and I feel that creeping sense of frustration and disillusionment. Hmmm...just realized how melancholy all that sounds.

Frankenstein

I taught the introductory lesson for Frankenstein today. For their bellringer, I had students write down three things they knew about Frankenstein, then I introduced the idea of theme and wrote down the themes in Frankenstein. They had to choose one theme individually, then they got into themed groups and decided whether there was a positive, negative, or neutral connotation and provide an example (So a student might come up with: the value of exterior beauty over inner beauty, negative connotation, ex. people are judged by their outward appearances and not the kind of person they are). Then students used their bellringer (something they already knew about frankenstein) and predicted how mary shelley might use that detail in the story with their theme (So a student might have said "creature is made of dead bodies" and then connected that to theme of inner vs outer beauty by saying, "Shelley will have people react negatively to the creature only because he is ugly"). It was a little confusing because students didn't like the bellringer to class cross over (they had put away their bellringers and didn't want to recopy) but otherwise this worked fairly well. I'm hoping to use this as a reference point for discussion later on, but I'm worried that I didn't have a handout or anything for students that were absent. I guess that's the danger of being absent all the time, but I worry that I should be providing substitute materials for students that miss.

Collaborative Classes, KWL charts

I am struggling with the collaborative classes. We are reading Olaudah Equiano's slave narrative and they (fairly obviously) do not like it. Sometimes I go into class with really high hopes and think they'll follow my (sometimes forced) enthusiasm, but no luck. Then I experience a mixed emotion of frustration and defeat...and it's difficult to rev my enthusiasm up again.

At the suggestion of Mr. Conrad, I tried doing a KWL chart with the collaborative classes. I wanted to show them a feature of GoogleDocs, so I used the spreadsheet and we created a KWL chart as a class. Although I intended to enhance the lesson by incorporating emerging technologies, I think everything would have worked more smoothly with individual charts (perhaps with inspiration from the class chart) and a 10 point participation grade.

Blog #6

Despite being “on vacation” from school this weekend, I found myself constantly surrounded by conversations about education. Most topics stemmed from the perfunctory, “What are you doing?” or “How’s student teaching?” questions but then spiraled into broad discussions of proposed educational reforms, the use of standard assessments, the value of games and gaming (ie. video) in education, and in-depth questions about my own thoughts and experience. Almost no one in my family has a background in education (and opinions on my choice of career vary), but most of them had quite a lot to say about the system.

My dad was especially vocal in his questioning of why I graded or taught in certain ways. He wanted to know why don't teachers use all standard assessments for writing? why do you make choices based on individual students? Why do you do this? Why do you do that? Talking to him felt like a dissertation defense – and I’ve had these conversations with him before. In fact, my Dad has never supported teachers or schools that I attend. But I think I won him over! At the end of this conversation, he said, “Well, I certainly respect all the work you’re putting in to this. I always thought that teachers have one of the easiest jobs in the world: show up, teach a little, go home…and they even get the summers off.”

My brother Sam was another critic of the school system. When my dad wanted a definition for a “bellringer,” Sam explained that teachers use them to settle students by immediately having a task to complete. He mentioned that he hated doing things he viewed as “procedural” rather than educational. I explained that my bellringers were definitely part of a classroom procedure, but they also served as writing/grammar review, as practice responding to text, and/or as a writing exercise that tied thematically with the topic of the day. I went on to say that his criticism of teachers “needing a way to get students settled” was unfair because although he may have been calm and collected, his teachers were really serving him by settling the class and starting class in an orderly manner. In a friendly way, I called him elitist and overly critical. He agreed and said, “I probably would have done a lot better if I’d just participated in class with this sort of thing.”

But anyway – I have some reflections on teaching, too. I just wanted to record my family’s changing perceptions.

I graded all the double-entry journals from my honors and collaborative students this weekend. It was a struggle. At this point in my teaching, I assume that students are not completing assignments correctly because I did not explain them well enough. I hesitate from docking points because I’m not sure whether students did not listen, listened and misunderstood, or simply do not understand. Then the ambiguity of comprehension leads to questions like, “How do I comment to help them?” and “Will they pay attention to comments if I do not dock points?”

Also, I’ve been worrying lately about the range of student achievement in both my honors and collaborative classes. I’m afraid that my instruction will be goldilocks-style “just right” for the middle of the class and I’ll lose students on the high and low end. I want to find ways to differentiate instruction and assignments for these students without causing mayhem in my planning/grading/classroom management.