The wall of policy

I recently read one of Spencer's blog posts Why aren't teachers more innovative? that one of my classmates had put up on diigo and it really got me thinking about what I will have to face when I have my own classroom. I keep thinking that once I have the opportunity to teach by myself, without my CT's strict, "follow the curriculum" mindset, that I will have the freedom to teach how I want. Spencer reminded me, however, that I will still have to face the "wall of policy" when I am out on my own. What Spencer wrote was a real reality check for me:

"I do what I can. I find loopholes. I blend the learning into a project-based framework. I use technology and advocate for a more authentic pedagogy. However, ultimately, even a bolder teacher like myself must face a wall of bad policy. True, we can stand up like the teachers in Washington. However, we are also in a hyper-red state, in a low-income area. Standing up will cost us our jobs. And I have a hunch that they would rather have a compliant warm body than a non-compliant professional. "

 

That last sentence is truly frightening. How, as a brand new teacher, am I to stand up for what I believe in without losing my job? I don't want to spend the first 5 years of my teaching career being a "compliant warm body", but is this the compromise I will have to make?

"Dealing" with Parents

photo by Mom's Clean Air Force

Spencer's section on Parents this week reminded me of a situation I was in recently.

We have one girl in our class who has repeatedly not turned in math homework. When I went to talk with her about it, she told me that she does her homework but fogets to to put it in her backpack. I was skeptical if this was really the case but she is a very bright girl and always does well on her math work in class. So I told her to put it in her backpack right when she finishes it, that way she will not forget it. We also informed her mom of her missing assignments and she told us she would work on helping her daughter stay organized.

Fast forward a few weeks and we have seen some improvement, but still many missing assignments. I am constantly reminding her to bring her math homework, but there is only so much I can do. I started to get really frustrated with the mom. Obviously this girl needs a little help with organization. Yes, it is partially her responsibility to turn in her homework, but in 3rd grade I believe it is also a parent's responsibility to help their children develop good habits. Doesn't she care about her child's education?

Then I met up with one of my friends last week for coffee. I was telling her about my difficulties with my student not turning in her homework and she confessed to me that they recently had a similar problem with their son. They currently have 5 children with another one on the way. She has been sick the whole first trimester with the baby and her husband is a firefighter with obviously very long and stressful shifts. I know them both to be wonderful parents who are totally committed to their family and to their children's education. It was eye-opening to hear about a similar situation from a parent's point of view. All of a sudden I felt ashamed of the way I had judged my student's mom. I have no idea what is going on in her life right now or what she might be dealing with. Without any background knowledge I had come to the conclusion that she didn't care about her daughter's education and that was completely unfair.

Parents are one of our biggest assests as teachers. Who else knows our students in the way that they do? We need to stop seeing them as a hinderance and start to see them for the assests that they are. It is not always easy, I will be the first to admit, but they ultimately want the best for their children, the same as us.

Garage Band in the Classroom

Picture by Ed Yourdon

 

I had such a fun time creating our podcast this last week on garage band that I wanted to know what else I could do with it. I found this article on 14 ways to use garage band in the classroom, which had some great ideas and it also made me think of a few other ways to use garage band. Here are a few that I thought might be neat:

• Informational writing. My students have to write an informational piece this year and as a fun way to present their final draft, I thought they could record a reading of it with background music to fit their writing topic. (For instance, if they chose to research a person, they could look up the style of music that was popular at the time and choose a song from that genre.)
• For studying different genres in reading, you could have students work in groups to create a podcast that teaches the rest of the class about their assigned genre with appropriate music or sound effects.
• For help with tricky math or science vocabulary, have students create songs that use the words in the correct way.
• With imovie and garage band, instead of creating a final poster at the end of a social studies unit, students could create a commercial for next year's students describing and showing all the things they will learn about during the unit.

These are just a few ideas that are starting to form in my mind, but they already seem much more engaging than traditional types of lessons. The best part is that I don't need to have an ipad or computer for every single child in the class. These are all ideas that could be worked on at different times with different groups of students. I hope this gives others some ideas as well!

Writing Conferences

It was interesting to me that this last week I had a 3 1/2 hour meeting at my placement school on writing conferences with students and one of our readings this week in Literacy class was Routman's Chapter 9 "Conference with Students". While I got some good ideas from the meeting, I really pulled a lot out of the reading. Routman has some fantastic ideas about different types of writing conferences, different goals for writing conferences, effective modeling, content vs. editing conferences, and helpful language to use.

Before, when I was conferring with students, I didn't even know where to begin. They are only in 3rd grade, so of course there are going to be lots of mistakes with spelling, conventions, and grammar. I tried not to focus so much on those things, especially for rough drafts, but often times their sentences didn't even make sense. Their writing is also very mechanical right now with basically the play-by-play type of narrative. First this happened. Then this happened. Then this happened......and so on. It was all so overwhelming! So I would try to make suggestions like, "Can we choose a better word here?" Blank stare. Reluctantly I would offer a few suggestions and of course the student would pick one of those because I had suggested it. I would also say things like, "Read this sentence aloud to me and tell me if it sounds right." The student would do so and realize that it didn't make sense, but again, when asked how they might reword it, I would get the blank stare until I would finally offer up some suggestions.

I realized after reading this chapter that we are not scaffolding our instruction enough for our students to feel confident in their writing. In our lessons we model our teaching point for the day and then just release the kids off on their own. This is not consistent with the gradual release system that is supposed to be implemented though. Our students need to have the chance to work through a piece of writing together as well. I loved Routman's idea of a whole class share. One or two students share their writing to the entire class and the teacher (as well as the students when they are ready) give compliments first and then give one or two teaching points that might help the writer. By doing this with the whole class, the other students also benefit from the teaching points. Eventually, when the students become more involved, they learn how to give helpful peer feedback as well.

This is one of many helpful teaching strategies I got from the chapter. I hope to implement a few when I return to my placement and am actually looking forward to writing conferences now that I actually have a few ideas of how to help my writers!