5 Great Things For 11/11/15

Today reflecting back on five great things that were accomplished today.

• I actually am making this post again. Yay!
• We rolled out digital portfolios and every student started their portfolio including three subpages for their work.
• I found a few resources on Ancient Greece for student research and to teach from.
• Met with a book story group and received some good feedback about a teaching strategy involving listing prior knowledge and then crossing out misconceptions as you learn about the topic. You also then add in what you learn in another column. 
• I contacted all the parents who hadn't signed up for Student Led Conferences to try to get them to sign up.

On that note, time to get ready for tomorrow!

Five Great Things for 11/10/15

Today I noted five great things that happened in my classroom. Here are are:

• 100% of the students got out their agendas upon arrival to school prior to our morning meeting.
• Students for Math entered the room and began reviewing the previous video/notes while I checked homework and greeting students. We were able to start math promptly ten minutes after students entered the room. 
• Most groups in math were able to correctly identify the rules for products while multiplying integers. Two positive factors is a positive product, one positive and one negative factor is a negative product, and two negative factors is a positive product. 
• Almost the entire class completed notes on interactive maps about the Fertile Crescent and Ancient Egypt. They used a new strategy where they generate prior knowledge or predictions in one column then add what they learn in a second column. Students then crossed out, checked, or placed question marks by their prior knowledge to indicate if it was confirmed, a misconception, or still not sure. 
• During our Daily 5 work time two reading groups successfully met with me. 

Woohoo! Great work today!

Busy Work to Grade?

I have left this blog to the side while I rearrange some priorities in my life and made some significant changes. I wanted to put up a quick post and assure anyone who does follow this I am working on a series of posts about some of my thoughts on the differences in education I've noticed in working in 4 different states professionally and two more if you include student teaching. For now my post is short and poses a question I'm not sure many teachers ask themselves.

Picture yourself overwhelmed with work, say for example grading. You go home at night and you have your family to tend to. You mange to get dinner on the table and the kids aren't throwing a fit. In fact you found a way to keep them busy by letting them watch TV (or insert of activity designed to keep kids occupied and out of your hair). Now you finally have a chance to sit down and do that grading (or what ever other work you brought home). What a relief to be able to accomplish it and your family is perfectly happy. It feels great to be so productive.

Turn this around ... You are in your classroom and found an activity that keeps all of your students occupied, on task, and happy.  Great, now you can go sit down and grade papers.  Wait? Is that what is defined as quality teaching? Yet as teachers we can define that same practice as quality parenting? What would you do give your students busy work so you could grade? Or give your own children busy work so you could grade?

My personal response is that I more often do things to keep my son busy so I can sneak off to "do business" as he puts it. Mainly because it is so frowned upon professionally to keeps kids busy during class time allowing us to do work that can be done outside of class time. I know one priority I have in my head, but don't enforce much, is that my own children are higher on the list than my students. If I were to give students busy work and grade papers it would be doing work at work, so it's not like I'm getting paid to do nothing. Then I'm freeing myself up to spend more time mentally and physically invested in my family.

It's like in education it is frowned upon to try and accomplish any work that can be done when students aren't there while students are there. Doing this may leave us with large burdens to take care of outside of work hours. Which then makes us practice the exact same thing with our own families. Why do educators do this?

Planting Seeds

I sit here after reading an article about my grandfather and think I’ve put some of the pieces together. I am a lot like my grandfather. He was quiet and unassuming. Always looking to make something work better and trying to help make the world better. There are probably a lot more similarities that I'm not aware of too.

Lately I’ve been thinking about my current journey through life both personally and professionally. Honestly, I don’t think there will ever be a clear separation with the two based on my career path in education. I’ve been listening to the EduAllstars podcast and the stories of other educators while thinking of my own story almost daily on my commute into work. All in hopes of gaining clarity about my direction, purpose, and maybe help others here is my story.

It all started when I was a teenager thinking about what I wanted to do with my life. Most of my life had been spent wanting more and desiring more money than what I was used to. I figured I could go into business or sports journalism as I was a huge sports fan and loved money. Then in high school something changed. I went to volunteer at St. Francis Farm where my grandfather ran a catholic worker farm. It was basically a place that churches would send groups to do volunteer work, connect with the community, and connect with the world around them. I really enjoyed my work there, and was able to meet someone who I have lost touch with but influenced me more than he knows (recently found him on Facebook though). His name was Mike (he had a good name) and he ran a free soccer camp each summer for local kids. Mike asked me to volunteer there even though I had never played a minute of organized soccer in my life. That camp made me realize I wanted a profession where I could work with kids every day to influence and make their lives better. I felt I had a lot of life lessons to teach them and could connect with anyone. Seed planted.

Fast forward about 12 years later to when my son was born. That was almost two years ago now. The journey of the next two years I think has led me to finally begin sprouting some of the seeds my grandfather planted throughout my life even without his knowing. I do want to say that when this two year journey has been tough I just imagine how hard it has been for my cousin Meghan who has gone though a much tougher journey the last two years and we share my sons birth date as special for completely different reasons. Thanks to her for her unknown inspiration to me.

When my son was born I started to think about all the great things I wanted to show him and do with him, but I was too focused on myself and too far from my family to see what was coming next. When my son was 9 months old I lived in North Carolina and was a 12 hour car ride or a 2 connection plane ride from most of my family in New York. It was a few days before Christmas when my grandfather passed without the chance to meet my son. I already knew I wanted to be close to family, but I also wanted to continue on in his legacy serving others and helping make the world better. I am a lot like him in that we were both low key, I am becoming more easy going, and we would often times sit back and watch then get up and do it. I was learning the real value of being close to family, but struggling with trying to make an impact in education.

Then a few months later I got started on Twitter. It was a great way for me to connect with other educators. What I am realizing now is that I fit in because of lessons learned from my grandfather. While this was going on we were looking to leave North Carolina and move to Maryland so we could be closer to family. Then I decided that my impact on education would be greater if we went to Texas. I failed to account for the impact having family near by can have. While this journey in Texas has helped me change lives, influence others, make lifelong friends, and made me a better person I think I have learned the value of having family a car ride away. Which is what cost my son a chance to meet one of the greatest people I have ever known.

Here I am now, with a mission. I want to plant seeds in as many people as possible. I need to further my grandfather's cause and purpose to change the world and help others. Imagine if he could have leveraged social media to help him. That is my mission to help others. However, the people on top of that list to help right now are my family. I want to spend most of my time and energy making sure I am making their lives better. Then I will pour myself into education: helping students, teachers, and community members who need me. Hopefully in connecting these dots as I move forward will help me to properly thank my grandfather for all he has done.

Professional Learning

I have been thinking about what professional learning is for a few weeks now. If I were asked this a year ago I would have had a quick answer. It is learning related to my profession. However, now my ideas have changed some.

Professional learning in the field of education is learning about how to be a better teacher. To be a better teacher I need to learn about learning.  Then wouldn’t going through the process of learning improve my teaching? I keep thinking back to a time I had to change the starter in my car which was stuck in our garage. I remember searching online and researching for hours trying to find out how to do this. After spending most of a day I had accomplished the task and fixed the car. This whole process of doing a household chore taught me a lot about learning and failure. It took a lot of failure and retrying to figure out how to get the job done. So was this day a day of professional learning? I think so.

In addition, I know that learning and engagement are strongly related. Also we are most engaged when we have choice, autonomy, and purpose. Too often in our field the autonomy and even the choice is taken out of professional learning. In a field where the purpose is so obvious and important we should do a better job of providing educators with autonomy and choice in their professional learning.

My thoughts are that true professional learning is something done on your own choice with your own time. However, schools need to do a better job of providing educators with more time to pursue this learning. There are many days I find myself too tired and run down after what seems like endless scheduled meetings or things that must be done to complete my own learning. I wish as a teacher I could get some 20% time each week to work on whatever I wanted related to my profession. That would allow my teaching skills to really take off.

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#LoveTeaching

Alright so this week is celebrating the love of teaching by having teachers share why they love teaching. I’ll start out with a blog post and then try to tweet out some examples and maybe have a few more creations throughout the week. 

I love teaching because it allows me to build relationships with kids and create. I can make all sorts of cool things like quick instructional examples to help improve my teaching. Not only that, but I get to test out new ideas and constantly work on improving my instruction as I continually get to know my students. The science behind teaching is what makes me love it. Getting to know what makes your students tick and trying new things to help them learn. When you find something that actually works and motivates students is just amazing. Then I love teaching even more when the thing I found is something I created myself. Well maybe not created myself, but stole and adapted myself. 

Being able to build relationships and create such a wide variety of educational tools or resources for students is why I love teaching. I am excited for this week to keep reminding myself everyday why I love teaching and this has really come at a great time for me!

Reading Menus Part 2

So another week down trying to implement more choice and independent reading in my classroom. I have learned a lot this week about my students. They want to do their work on these menus that I have made for them. Unfortunately, they aren't sure how to select a book to do it with. This is probably due to them always being told what to read and not being asked to select their own text. I also realized most students have trouble picking a book. I asked them why they picked a book and most were not even sure. When I followed up with “What would you like to read?” most fell silent. These barriers have led to some mixed results and also information on where to go next. In addition as I continue my way through The Book Whisperer I gain more inspiration and confidence that I can find something that works for me and my students.

Here are my plans as I go forward.

I am going to get my library reorganized by genre the best I know how. This will help the kids and help me recommend. I started just picking up books reading the blurb and discussing what genre it was only to find half my students wanted to try that book. My students want to read, they just need practice picking their own books. I need to get things more organized for them and help them figure this out.

I am also going to simplify their response work. I will have a skill we focus on during the week and something related to that. Beyond that we will just write blog posts about their books. I'll work with them and encourage their blogging. Basically each week I'll have my students complete something to practice a skill we taught and then write a review, recommendation, or summary on their blog about their reading.

Finally, I am going to utilize some other reading programs that students have access to to help give students some other types of extra practice. In addition only giving me about a third of the class to work on reading with.

These changes might help make some improvements over the last few weeks. We will see how they respond next week.