The Final Countdown: Summative reflection on my teaching experiences this semester.

After two semesters of limited teaching in a first grade classroom I’ve learned that I still have a lot to learn. I would say that the area in which I learned the most this semester was classroom management. In general my teaching partner and I approached the classroom in an amiable way—attempting to show students that we respected them and hoped they would do the same to us. Weinstein & Mignano actually reinforce this approach, stating that “motivating resistant, underachieving, or apathetic students requires “resocialization”… in short, showing students that you care about them as students and people.” The problem with this approach is that it must be complimented with a strong set of classroom management strategies that will help teachers deal with the “bad days” their students are sure to have. My partner and I found ourselves to be significantly lacking in these strategies. We first set out to be social with our students, which made it very hard to discipline a student when he decided to crawl around on the floor or write “boog” as his name on every assignment. We learned that being friends is not the best classroom management strategy. On those bad days, every student was distracted and we were at a loss for how to pull the wandering individuals back on track. The biggest change that we would make to our unit if we could reteach it would be the way we approached management. A small tweak in everything from the language we chose (no “you guys” or “bud”) to adding a little seriousness to our friendly attitudes would make all the difference.

Lesson Five: Summative Clay Day

Today we did a number of activities—a sort selected response assessment, a group sort, and clay modeling—that sought to deepen students’ knowledge and understanding of US patriotic symbols. Out of it all, the clay was the coolest part. Kids love that sort of kinesthetic, playful application of their knowledge. Many of them made some amazing small-scale models of patriotic symbols. A few of our students revealed hidden artistic talents that we never knew existed. As the students were molding the clay, my teaching partner and I circulated and asked purposeful questions regarding the particular symbols that each child had chosen to make. I personally was amazed and excited by the responses we received. We asked students to share several facts about their patriotic symbol, they quickly rattled off construction details or wingspans. The handful of ambitious sculptors who took on the task of recreating Lady Liberty were able to easily recite off Her height to the nearest inch.

The kids had fun, but truly were synthesizing, applying and being held accountable for their learning in the previous lessons. This lesson/activity went really well.

Lesson Four: ‘Don’t Cancel that Holiday!’ Letter

The big story today was one of our ESL students. We had students pretend that the President was going to cancel the patriotic holidays we had studied. In order to keep these holidays, we asked the students to write letters to the President to show him why these holidays (specifically the Fourth of July) were important. The ESL student I mentioned earlier struggled with this assignment. When it came time to write the letter, he just sat at his desk staring at the paper. I approached him to see if he needed any help or had any questions (and to make sure that he understood the assignment). He was nonresponsive to most of my questions. Then I attempted to walk him through the assignment. I asked him about the structure of a letter and he was able to explain this to me. But when I asked him about the content of the letter, he was very curt. I believe I specifically asked him why the Fourth of July was important; he responded, “it’s not.”

Throughout the previous three lessons in this unit we had been very careful to include our ESOL students. For some reason, it had slipped our mind that a first grader—who hadn’t been in the United States long enough to even witness a Fourth of July celebration—might not be able to step outside of his own experience to objectively evaluate the importance of a patriotic holiday to a country and culture that were not his own. Lucky for us, there happened to be a Korean mother in the room helping and between her and the classroom teacher we were able to get the student back on track and have him at least complete the assignment.

Lesson Three: Patriotic Holidays

This lesson got interesting very quickly. We were planning on doing a class sort with information about the three patriotic holidays listed by the first grade SOLs (President’s Day, Fourth of July, and Columbus Day). We opened the lesson with a preliminary discussion of each holiday. The students already knew almost every fact we threw at them. We froze. We certainly weren’t expecting them to already know it all… now what were we going to teach them? There was no Plan B, nowhere else for us to go. All we could do was finish going through our lesson plan.

I think that many of our students learned one or two facts and enjoyed the class sort aspect of the lesson, but we really should have had a back-up plan. In the future, I now realize, it is important to consider the “already now” situation when planning a lesson. We needed to have scripted a few deep-thinking questions, or had a few super-facts up our sleeves.

Our lesson in no way failed. It’s never a bad idea to ask students to review information they already are familiar with. However, as they review, students should be asked to deepen their understanding, elaborate on their knowledge and complete new tasks with the content. As teachers we must be prepared for our students to already know, understand, and be able to do that which we have planned.

Second Lesson: Patriotic Symbols

This lesson went pretty well. We were able to convey a large amount of content to students via the website that I constructed. Students seemed to respond pretty well to the technology. We created a website that was organized in the integrative lesson plan format so that students first examined facts about each individual patriotic symbol and then viewed facts about all four symbols side-by-side. Our formative assessment for this lesson was a worksheet that asked students to select and report on their favorite of the four patriotic symbols we studied. A number of students listed interesting and new facts that we introduced during this lesson as reasons for their choice of favorite. These responses gave us a sense that we had succeeded in conveying much of the information.

However, the one issue with this lesson was that the website, though engaging and new to students, was not interactive. Because of this, much of the lesson had students doing little to no work other than listening or reading. To avoid this disengagement in the future we designed a fill-in-the-blanks note-taking worksheet to compliment our website. This way, students will be actively listening and "taking notes" as they navigated through the website.

First Lesson - March 15th

This morning we taught the introductory lesson to our First Grade Patriotism Unit. Our lesson actually took the place of the class's morning meeting so we broke their routine a little bit. It also was the first time that Ana and I had done any whole-group instruction in this classroom. The fact that we were mixing things up both for the kids and ourselves coupled with the abstract nature of a concept like patriotism made for an interesting lesson to say the least.

We started with an opening discussion of what the students thought patriotism was. The responses we got were all very concrete examples of patriotism, but far from a definition of the concept itself. We also got a lot of blank stares. Regardless, with the help of the classroom teacher and a little bit of our own pizazz we were able to come up with a pretty decent definition of patriotism. However, we wanted to make sure that students understood that you can be patriotic for any country so we invented the marvelous country of FirstGradealonia. I then got into character (by donning a goofy hat) and proceeded to model the Pledge of Allegiance, a patriotic speech, and a traditional dance of my country, FirstGradealonia. I made the kids get up and join in the dance... it was awesome! That part of our lesson was by far the most exciting for the kids. Our classroom teacher commented that it was fantastic because it met them at their level. But the real test of it came when multiple kids commented that the thing they really learned during our lesson was that you can be patriotic for countries other than the US.

If I had to do this lesson again I would change two things:
1) I would script out the exact questions I wanted to use to guide the discussion about patriotism. While there is no way that I could ever anticipate responses like "My mom says that in a few years there will be a woman president." It still would be incredibly helpful to have a stronger set of guiding questions than the ones that I'm able to think up on my feet.

2) On our exit worksheet (formative assessment) we asked students to draw a picture of patriotism from their own lives and then write about something they learned during our lesson. Almost all of the kids spent the entire time on the picture (which was first on the worksheet) and barely had any time to really think about what they were going to write. The order on these two items should have been switched--requiring kids to perform the less-desirable task of writing before moving on to drawing, which they love.

Observation Tres / Pre-Assessment - March 1st

Today we administered our Unit Pre-Assessment during the Language Centers time by pulling 2-3 students at a time out into the hallway. It was interesting to watch as different students responded to the test items in different ways. Some jumped in and tried to work ahead of the questions I was reading a loud because they felt so confident about the material while others wanted the questions read to them two or three times as they tried to select the best answer(s) on the visual symbol selection and the true selected response section. I was also very glad that we included the drawing and writing response questions. The drawing question asked students to draw a Fourth of July Celebration and students' pictures were indicative not only of their knowledge of the holiday but also of their family traditions which was pretty cool. Coupled with the short writing question (what is your favorite American Tradition), I feel like these last two test items also helped us greatly as we sought to determine student attitudes towards our unit's content. As was expected, the class' two students from foreign families very obviously struggled with a lot of the content due to an almost complete lack of background knowledge. We will have to be sure to scaffold these two students during our lessons to bridge not only the prior knowledge gap but also the language gap.

The favorite American Tradition question solicited probably the most interesting answers... several of which agreed that "Halloween [was the best one] because you get candy."

Observation Dos - February 22nd

Today we dropped in during Language Centers time (our usual time to visit as it falls nicely during 488/502/501 class time and Ana and I are crazy-busy the rest of the week). We got to meet and chat with Mrs. Dixon's student teacher. She seems pretty cool. Her placement is definitely different than ours as she's only spending around 2.5-3 months in the classroom... not the whole semester. Much like Dixon, she was incredibly accommodating of our requests for class time to teach our unit and it seemed like she was pretty excited to have us come in and help out. Overall, I'd say she appeared very comfortable in the classroom and pretty much knew what she was doing... I hope someone can say the same about me when it's my turn to be in her shoes this fall...

As far as the observation went, Ana and I really didn't do very much watching. We talked with Dixon about our lesson ideas and she gave us all sorts of goodies from her filing cabinets that should help us as we go to teach an assess. She was also in the process of giving a Summative assessment for their previous lesson and it was really interesting to talk to her about how she does that kind of evaluation. Basically, she gives the same worksheet/quiz as a pre- and post-assessment. I'm not sure if that's exactly the best idea for our unit (patriotism) as it is a fairly abstract idea and there are many aspects of our KUDs that can't necessarily be assessed in a 5 minute worksheet/quiz format. Perhaps after giving the Pre-Assessment next week we'll have a better idea about what would work best for a Summative assessment.

The ironic moment for me during today's observation was when the classroom management side of things got a little rocky. With Mrs. Dixon, Mrs. Kidd (student teacher), Ms. Chicatelli (reading specialist), Ana and myself all in the classroom you'd think that there would have been enough teacher/adult-figures in the room to keep the atmosphere fairly subdued. Such was not the case. Mrs. Kidd at one point had to take her attention away from the reading group she was working with and raise her voice in order to avoid some serious behavior situations. I guess that just goes to show that having authority present isn't always enough to keep kids on task, sometimes you have to assert that authority.

Observation Numero Uno - February 16th

Today Ana and I finally made our way back into Mrs. Dixon's First Grade Classroom. We were excited to be there and to watch a new part of their class schedule that we were unable to witness last semester -- Math. Being in Dr. Berry's Teaching Elementary Math made this observation particularly interesting as we got to watch as students worked through different addition centers. For the most part, students were working on their own to fill out various worksheets and work through a computer addition facts drill. It was cool to watch as students employed various manipulatives and strategies to solve the problems. You could tell that Dixon had given freedom to her students to use any method they found useful to arrive at a correct answer. Some students were using counting blocks, others were using their hands, and some the traditional algorithm. But by far the most interesting strategy to me was employed by the students on the computers. They were using the number keys at the top of the keyboard as a number line to accomplish their basic addition facts. It really was a fascinating strategy that I had never considered before.

All in all, it was very useful to get in and observe how math time goes for Dixon's class. She did admit that sometimes she opts to spend the hour teaching in a more whole-group setting. For the most part she claims to use the centers approach to mathematics because she believes it allows for differentiation of instruction and plenty of concept practice as students move through varied center activities.

Teaching Metaphor: I, The Window

I am a first floor window. I am a teacher. The school is the house of which my classroom is one room. I, the window, am largely the focal point of the room--not because of any personal inherent value, but because of my transparent quality that enables students to see an outside world. As students enter my classroom they spend much time gazing through me at the sun dancing across playgrounds, fields, and colorful changing-seasons. My students each perceive the outside landscape differently because each sees his or her future aspirations and dreams as clearly as though they were lush rolling plains or jagged mountain majesty. As students learn within my classroom, their perception of the outside world is enriched and grows. Different notions of the outside world are encouraged as are different means of viewing applications of knowledge through me. The standards I am required to teach are the instructions students are given to clean me (to maintain or enhance my transparency), to open me (to perhaps pass into and out of the world from the house in an untraditional manner). I will emphasize filling in the rhyme and reason behind these standards while teaching them so that students will come to have an understanding as to why they would want to look through me to their futures in the world, why it is important to learn the standards (the basic maintenance directions of a window), and the relational nature of the standards not only to one another but also to other knowledge students have or will acquire.