A longer update

My last unit was a bit weird because it really didn't have that much of a theme to it unlike genetics or natural selection. It dealt mostly with microscopic organisms and classification. For the first part, I was at least able to talk about bacteria and protists--both unicellular organisms. Classification worked well in the 2nd part as we could organize the similarities and differences between the two types. Unfortunately, I didn't know my content as well for this one as I did for the units at the start of the year. Luckily, I was able to find some good articles and we were able to practice reading strategies and foldables (as mentioned in another post). I haven't graded the tests yet, but many students seemed to be quite confident for the test so I'm hoping for some solid grades.

We had a three day teaching week with yesterday and today taken up by staff development. The sessions yesterday were led by our consulting group and our sessions today were led by the principal and the math and literacy coaches. Yesterday was about assessing rigor in released test items and reaching struggling learners.

Assessing rigor turned out to be a useful session even though I thought it was going to be completely useless. We looked at how states have similar standards/objectives yet they test those standards on different levels of rigor (ie how complex of a thought process a student must use to solve the problem). In math, a question with a low level of rigor might ask a student to find a simple pattern (1, 2, 3, or 2, 4, 6) to solve the problem. A higher level of rigor would ask for a more complicated pattern (add 1, add 2, add 3) and have more steps in finding the right answer. In English, it would be the difference between identifying a device used and making inferences from a passage.

For some reason, rigor had not made much sense to me up until this point (especially with multiple choice questions). Something just "clicked" and I saw that the more steps required to get an answer the more rigorous the question. This fault might have been due to being trained mainly with Bloom's Taxonomy rather than Webb's Depth of Knowledge. While I could see the different levels with Bloom, the idea of "steps of thinking" were made clear with Webb.

The afternoon session on struggling learners interested me greatly, but it didn't tell me much that was new. It seems as though that if my training is not stressing "released test items" then it's emphasizing differentiated instruction. While the latter is a good thing, those that have presented workshops on the topic give the same vague and general advice. Usually we get discussions on different learning styles, advice to use all three modalities when teaching, and then advice to tier assignments and pair weak learners with strong learners. This is all good advice, but it's the same each time without regard for the nature of middle school and specific subjects. We get very little application and specific directions during our workshops. While I am not making excuses for middle school behavior, it can be difficult to implement some methods of differentiated teaching in the classroom. Paired learning can easily erupt into talking or not happen at all when the two hate each other. I have classes where no students are "strong learners." I'm not trying to insult them, but the way my schedule is set up is that almost all (except for 4 or 5 students) of my GT (gifted and talented) students are in one honors science class. The others are spread around my other classes. While I realize I'm on a tangent about the ineffectiveness of one strategy, it just frustrates me when we get advice from consultants that doesn't match our particular situation.

I think I was spoiled by TFA at Institute. It seemed that efficiency was their main concern--not how to take something that could be explained in 30 minutes and turn that into 3 hours. Almost every session was focused on giving us methods we could put to use immediately. Each presenter also made sure to discuss the problems we might run into and back up strategies to use. I remember our literacy coach holding subject specific sessions for literacy use in the classroom. The reasons for this are varied but come down to the nature of an education consultancy group and TFA. TFA knew it had only a small amount of time to get us the best information possible to make us better teachers; the organization had to be efficient if it wanted to achieve its mission of one day all children having the opportunity to receive an excellent education. The consultants on the other hand were either already paid or had to spend a certain amount of hours to justify their cost. A high cost might feel "worth it" if you are talked to for 3 hours versus thirty minutes. Also, our instructors at Institute were recent teachers with experience in the classrooms we were going to enter once we left. Our consultants are former or retired teachers who have been giving workshops for the past few years and not teaching students like the ones we have.

I don't mean for this post to hammer education consulting--I do get some good ideas and resources from our workshops. However, it just seems that there's lots of stuff to sit through in order to get the small amount of useful information.

While not completely related to teaching, we had trick or treating on Wednesday. While most people did not go out of their way to decorate their houses and stores didn't stock many costumes, I still had kids coming to my house dressed up. Of course there were my middle schoolers and high school students I knew that came without a costume. They just wanted the free candy. It was pretty fun and I was able to meet more members of the families of my students.

As a first year teacher, I am just consumed by this job (in a good way). It's what I think about each night and even on the weekends. My other fellow teachers can't stop talking about it either. Our conversations revolve almost entirely around what our students are doing in our classrooms. While this isn't a bad thing (I usually get enough sleep each night), we sometimes have to stop ourselves from discussing school. These bans seem to last only 10 minutes, but at least we are trying. It's a job that demands that we do an excellent job every day we are teaching. In school, you are there mostly for yourself. You get to decide how much you want to pay attention, to study, and to work. However, with teaching you go to school and each class period you have students staring at you expecting you to teach them.