This has been one of the best years of my life so I couldn't wait to share some highlights!
January- I started using my new curriculum and felt like I could breathe for the first time in eight years! I also started using a bullet journal which is so pretty and fun!
February- Went to a Google Appa conference that was productive
March- A blog post of mine was published in our first ever MTBos book
May- I completed my first ever 30 posts in 30 days for #MTBoS30 and to top it off celebrated my 30th birthday in St. Louis
June- I canoed for the first time and zip lined for the second time. I got new teeth!
July- I went to Minneapolis Minnesota for the first time to attend my fourth Twitter Math Camp
August- I lost 50 pounds in one year thanks to my Fitbit and walking. I also started writing posts for the Day in the Life series.
September- My grandma came to visit; my uncle fixed the power in my basement and built me a beautiful hall tree
October- I surpassed my all time best of 109 blog posts in one year! This makes post 114.
November- I got a new phone
December- I had one of the best end of the semesters, Christmas break, and Christmas's ever!
And now some ideas for 2017...
A bad habit I'm going to break: crossing my arms when I walk around the class
A new skill I'd like to learn: an instructional routine to use
A person I hope to be more like: Rebecka Peterson
A good deed I'm going to do: send home happy notes or postcards to parents
A book I'd like to read: Making Number Talks Matter
A letter I'm going to write: individual letters to my seniors
I'm going to do better at: getting to school earlier
My students wrote to me that my classroom is colorful and welcoming, they look forward to my class, they like math now, I've helped them be more organized, I explain things in a way they can understand easily, they know that I care about them and their lives, and they enjoy being around me.
Good-bye 2016! 👋🏻
Saturday, December 31, 2016
Friday, December 30, 2016
Am I Basic?
aka Am I a Fraud?
I always laugh at basic white girl memes and how I really am none of them....I don't like coffee, I've never bought anything from Starbucks, I don't really care for tacos or Mexican, I don't feel comfortable wearing leggings in public, I think Uggs are ugly, and I can't do a messy bun to save my life.
But when it comes to teaching...I just realized I might be basic.
I've been proud of myself for using a new curriculum, getting my resources aligned, reinforcing my routines, being organized and keeping my students organized, working less throughout the week, being more open with students....
But has my teaching improved?
I'm not asking higher order thinking questions {maybe I'm not really sure what they are}, I don't use any instructional routines {maybe I'm not really sure what they are}, I don't do any fancy three-act tasks or really any tasks at all {maybe I'm not really sure how to find/make/use them}, I'm not writing comments, I don't do low floor high ceiling, open middle, I'm not using Desmos on a daily basis, my students are creating anything, I'm doing pathetic job with number talks, and I haven't mentioned growth mindset since the first two weeks of school.
I just finished reading and grading all my students' first semester reflection papers and the comments were overwhelmingly positive.
I'm the teacher I always dreamed of being.
Until I met you MTBoS.
My students are happy with me and my abilities because they don't know any better. I'm an improvement over past teachers so they are satisfied.
They don't know what they're missing out on.
But I do.
And I'm not saying that in a feeling sorry for myself way, just an honest way. This has been one of the best years of my life and I'm happier than I've ever been.
But what now? Where do I go from here?
I'm not sure which area I need the most growth in. I feel incapable of even trying some of the things I listed above, let alone using them in a way that is beneficial for my students.
Which thing would benefit my students the most....that I can actually accomplish?
Can someone just create a to-do list for the rest of my teaching career?
I've been wanting to try national board certification but I'm too scared I will fail miserably because I'm not sure I'm as a good of a teacher as the professional learning standards requires. I would love to present at TMC but I have nothing to present. Every year I find less and less things to even share as a my favorite, let alone present for an entire 30 minutes. You can tell in my blogging that I have less and less to share....I'm using a curriculum so I'm creating less which means less to share.
I feel like I was on the front edge of the MTBoS when it started and now I've been left behind. I don't even get on Twitter anymore because it feels like everyone sharing these amazing projects and lessons and achievements that drown out my basicness. Also it is so filled with politics that I don't even feel safe posting much anymore.
Again, this is not for pity. At all. It's my brutally honest way of evaluating myself, my year, and my career.
How do I go deeper? What's the best route? What is sustainable?
How do I become the teacher I've learned I'm so far away from being?
I always laugh at basic white girl memes and how I really am none of them....I don't like coffee, I've never bought anything from Starbucks, I don't really care for tacos or Mexican, I don't feel comfortable wearing leggings in public, I think Uggs are ugly, and I can't do a messy bun to save my life.
But when it comes to teaching...I just realized I might be basic.
I've been proud of myself for using a new curriculum, getting my resources aligned, reinforcing my routines, being organized and keeping my students organized, working less throughout the week, being more open with students....
But has my teaching improved?
I'm not asking higher order thinking questions {maybe I'm not really sure what they are}, I don't use any instructional routines {maybe I'm not really sure what they are}, I don't do any fancy three-act tasks or really any tasks at all {maybe I'm not really sure how to find/make/use them}, I'm not writing comments, I don't do low floor high ceiling, open middle, I'm not using Desmos on a daily basis, my students are creating anything, I'm doing pathetic job with number talks, and I haven't mentioned growth mindset since the first two weeks of school.
I just finished reading and grading all my students' first semester reflection papers and the comments were overwhelmingly positive.
I'm the teacher I always dreamed of being.
Until I met you MTBoS.
My students are happy with me and my abilities because they don't know any better. I'm an improvement over past teachers so they are satisfied.
They don't know what they're missing out on.
But I do.
And I'm not saying that in a feeling sorry for myself way, just an honest way. This has been one of the best years of my life and I'm happier than I've ever been.
But what now? Where do I go from here?
I'm not sure which area I need the most growth in. I feel incapable of even trying some of the things I listed above, let alone using them in a way that is beneficial for my students.
Which thing would benefit my students the most....that I can actually accomplish?
Can someone just create a to-do list for the rest of my teaching career?
I've been wanting to try national board certification but I'm too scared I will fail miserably because I'm not sure I'm as a good of a teacher as the professional learning standards requires. I would love to present at TMC but I have nothing to present. Every year I find less and less things to even share as a my favorite, let alone present for an entire 30 minutes. You can tell in my blogging that I have less and less to share....I'm using a curriculum so I'm creating less which means less to share.
I feel like I was on the front edge of the MTBoS when it started and now I've been left behind. I don't even get on Twitter anymore because it feels like everyone sharing these amazing projects and lessons and achievements that drown out my basicness. Also it is so filled with politics that I don't even feel safe posting much anymore.
Again, this is not for pity. At all. It's my brutally honest way of evaluating myself, my year, and my career.
How do I go deeper? What's the best route? What is sustainable?
How do I become the teacher I've learned I'm so far away from being?
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Lessons from this year - supporting struggling students
One of the big issues that's been emerging for me this year is how to support struggling students. As a school, we've made a commitment not to track and to differentiate instruction so that students from a variety of backgrounds can be supported and pursue their interests fully. The desire to provide challenging content to all students is one I very much support and know the research backs it up. The problem, of course, is that if students are grouped heterogeneously, but the content is the same as what would be taught in an honors section, students who have not been successful in Math in the past do not magically overcome those challenges. What does end up happening is that half the class is frustrated and feels like the pace of instruction is too slow and the other half of the class has their preexisting images of themselves as unsuccessful Math students confirmed.
I have also been quite surprised to see that it's often students who are struggling who give pushback to teaching methods that emphasize choice, group work, student-constructed knowledge, and open problems. They feel unsuccessful with these teaching styles and crave direct instruction, structure, and concrete, repetitive problems. These students (and their families) have been asking for textbooks, lecture, and an explicit curricular progression in which students are walked through algorithms and given lots of practice. In teaching these students, when I see how much more scaffolding they need to successfully mediate their relationship with mathematics, I understand their perspective and needs much better than I did before. Their gaps are often not in prior knowledge (although that's there too), but in how to learn Math. As a department, I think that we've done a great job of building a rigorous and interesting curriculum that works well for successful Math students who jump into open problems, ask questions, tinker and test, iterate, confer with peers, look for connections and patterns, reflect on their understanding, and figure out what they do and don't know independently. When they lack some of these skills, they are receptive to feedback and observation of peers who model them. We have not yet, however, figured out how to teach all of these skills while simultaneously asking students who don't yet have them to grapple with difficult mathematics in an environment that requires these skills to be successful in that work.
One solution to this issue is to give the students what they want: a choice between a track of open/challenging/problem-based math and a track of traditional/lecture-based math. For many reasons, this is not a solution that I can get behind. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I have not seen incontrovertible evidence that there are some students who just can't learn Math without lecture and repeated drill. If we really think this, we are basically saying that these students can't learn Math and let's just teach them how to regurgitate some procedures so they can get by on their standardized tests. I would have a very hard time supporting a bifurcated system like this.
Other ideas I have had that might help this issue are:
I have also been quite surprised to see that it's often students who are struggling who give pushback to teaching methods that emphasize choice, group work, student-constructed knowledge, and open problems. They feel unsuccessful with these teaching styles and crave direct instruction, structure, and concrete, repetitive problems. These students (and their families) have been asking for textbooks, lecture, and an explicit curricular progression in which students are walked through algorithms and given lots of practice. In teaching these students, when I see how much more scaffolding they need to successfully mediate their relationship with mathematics, I understand their perspective and needs much better than I did before. Their gaps are often not in prior knowledge (although that's there too), but in how to learn Math. As a department, I think that we've done a great job of building a rigorous and interesting curriculum that works well for successful Math students who jump into open problems, ask questions, tinker and test, iterate, confer with peers, look for connections and patterns, reflect on their understanding, and figure out what they do and don't know independently. When they lack some of these skills, they are receptive to feedback and observation of peers who model them. We have not yet, however, figured out how to teach all of these skills while simultaneously asking students who don't yet have them to grapple with difficult mathematics in an environment that requires these skills to be successful in that work.
One solution to this issue is to give the students what they want: a choice between a track of open/challenging/problem-based math and a track of traditional/lecture-based math. For many reasons, this is not a solution that I can get behind. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I have not seen incontrovertible evidence that there are some students who just can't learn Math without lecture and repeated drill. If we really think this, we are basically saying that these students can't learn Math and let's just teach them how to regurgitate some procedures so they can get by on their standardized tests. I would have a very hard time supporting a bifurcated system like this.
Other ideas I have had that might help this issue are:
- Provide an extra Math class for struggling students that would focus on just content or just mathematical practices/habits; either make this optional or required
- Provide a summer bridge program for students who we worry might struggle in our program, focusing on building up their ability to learn and mathematical practices
- Start the year with work on mathematical habits and ways of learning Math with little to no focus on content for all classes.
- Work on improving our curriculum so that it incorporates more of the principles of Complex Instruction and can highlight students' strengths.
I would love to hear from others who have grappled with this issue and ways that they and their schools have approached it, either successful or not.
Saturday, December 10, 2016
#DITL Saturday, December 10th, 2016
I promise I didn't go through and pick out the 10th as a day that mostly falls on weekends...but it sure seems like it!
Today I had my alarm set for 9:30 but my dad woke me up at 9:00 to work on a pipe. I got up and got ready for lunch with my friend at 11:30. Leaving my house around 10:45, I had to stop by the school and set up a laptop for the music at tonight's Junior High Prom.
Lunch with my friend lasted until 1:30. I ran a few errands around town until 2:30 and headed back home to baby-sit my niece and nephew from 3-6.
My sister got off work and my parents joined us all to go to a live Nativity scene acted out at a nearby church. We finished there and went to McDonald's. Then my sister and I ran to Wal-Mart to get a few groceries. We got home at 11:00 and all I could think about was how grateful I was that I didn't have school work to do. This is the first weekend since school started that that has happened. We finished last week up with semester review and this week we are doing semester exams and papers which meant nothing for me to create/prepare.
I have been counting down the days since Thanksgiving for this break to come. Over Thanksgiving, we had a basketball tournament over an hour away and we played a game every single day except Thanksgiving. I also had to fit in baking desserts, cleaning house, decorating for Christmas, and my regular school work into each of those 5 days. Since each game took anywhere between 4-6 hours of my day, I didn't really get a break at all.
COME ON CHRISTMAS.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)