Is Teaching For Me?

This is kind of a tricky question for me. Right now, the political climate and the stigma with teachers is that they're overworked and underpaid and that more teachers are leaving the profession for other pursuits than starting the profession. Because many qualified teachers are leaving and not feeling motivated to stick around, the quality of education is struggling. I have a couple siblings in high school right now and their school doesn't have enough students interested in the higher level math classes for the school to be willing to offer two separate calculus classes and has combined them into one class. My mom is super frustrated with her local schools and is considering pulling her kids out of the local high school and driving them to a completely different school in a different district that is still offering the classes separately to give her kids the best chance of success.

There was also one day when I was doing service learning and was having a really hard time reaching the students I was working with and they had lost focus and were distracting each other and the other students at tables near us and I had a moment where I thought there was no way I could do this and maybe it wasn't for me.

However, I was reminded of the very first day of my service learning where I drove away from the school feeling so happy and fulfilled and grateful for the opportunity to be in a classroom with such bright young minds and be able to help influence them. I was reminded of a conversation with one of my good friends after some disappointing and discouraging news and cultural climate changes were going on when she pointed out to me that we, the future teachers of America, have the power to influence and shape the children of this generation for the better. I was reminded that if I want there to be positive changes in education in the future for my kids, I will do more if I can be part of it than I could by sitting at home just wishing things were different.

Overall, I do want to be a teacher because I want to be an influence for good for young minds. I know there will be days where it's harder to be positive and days where I will get down and discouraged. But I hope on those days to be able to focus on the tiny positives and things learned to be able to continue to help my students grow and to grow better as a teacher as well.

Lesson 8 Classroom Assessment

One of the things I really appreciated about this course was the opportunity to do Service Learning. It really helped when I went into the classroom to have something specific to be looking for our thinking about to report in my blog. I actually wish there had been more blog assignments because although I still felt the days I didn't have a blog assignment to be working on had value, I feel like the blog part itself helped to give an extra purpose and added meaning to my day.

I do feel that I was able to make connections between the course and my student learning. Sometimes it was a little tricky, like the weeks we were talking about diversity in classrooms. At first glance, the classroom I was in didn't seem to be particularly diverse. The course pushed me to look a little deeper and try to get to know the kids a little better to understand how they learned and why they learned and what would motivate them to learn. I feel like the first week I was there, I just saw them all as students but by the last week, I knew which students had a harder time focusing or might need a little extra attention and I knew which students worked better if I was just hanging out nearby, whether or not they actually needed any help. I learned that the students in the class were not just a bunch of first graders but that they were all individuals with thoughts and ideas and different backgrounds and strengths and struggles. I was also able to learn some of the tricky parts about being a teacher and different strategies to handle outbursts or disruptions. Some of that was tricky for me since I'm in my last weeks of pregnancy so my patience wears a lot more thin than it might otherwise. I was able to learn a little about myself through this as well and about what things I would need to plan ahead for in order to be successful and not feel out of control.

Overall, it was a really good experience and as today is usually the day I would have been in the elementary classroom, I am feeling a little bummed out that I'm not there right now.

Standards and Accountability

From Ms. Brown's Wednesday schedule, in the morning they do math, then they have art after first recess, after lunch they usually do reading and writing (sometimes on computers) and after last recess they have science before they have P.E.

Ms. Brown said they always have to start the day with math when the kids are the most alert and fresh because the standards for math are very high-much higher than they used to be-and the kids really struggle with it. I had the opportunity on a couple of my visits to work with some of the kids one on one on the math and they've recently been working with fractions as well as how to tell time.
The computer work mixed in with the reading and writing is really beneficial because they have a program called "Lexia" which is a progressive program that lets the kids advance based on how they're understanding concepts and it's all built around playing games.
Science is what I helped with today. They've been working on the concepts of pushing and pulling so we experimented with a STEM kit to learn more about forces. We had some blocks, ramps, and little carts to experiment with changing of speed and distance traveled. We also had some different sized plastic bugs, a target, and a launcher to experiment with projectile forces. The kids had a lot of fun learning this way and I tried to ask them questions about what they learned as we went and let them set up their own experiments. Ms. Brown told me she could hear what I was doing and that I had a very natural way of approaching it and helping the kids. 

I see art addressed when I come into class because Ms. Brown usually hangs up in the hallway the paintings the kids did earlier in the day. Today's painting was of robots because they had been talking about inventors and inventions. 

From my observation, Math, Language Arts, and Science are worked on every day. I haven't seen social studies addressed specifically, but I think this is because there are fewer objectives for first grade for social studies and some of them seem to be able to be addressed along with other things. It's also possible that it is focused on specifically on a day that I'm not there. I also know that P.E. is only once a week, probably because it's not tested the same way that Math, Language Arts, and Science are. 

Ms. Brown does a really good job of teaching the students rather than just teaching to the tests, from my perspective, but there is definitely some stress when there are students who struggle harder to get things. Ms. Brown said she's grateful to have extra helpers in the classroom to work with those kids. Because the standards are high and the curriculum is aggressive, she said it can be really hard for some of the kids to do well on the tests, but she always tries to give extra help where it's needed.

Ms. Brown's Class February 15th

Today when I walked into Ms. Brown's class, she said that I would be helping by taking over her class while she did reading assessments with individual students. So after she picked the students back up from lunch and explained the instructions for their language arts learning time, she let them know to direct all questions to me so she could do the assessments.
One way Ms. Brown's class is diverse is that she has learners of different ability levels. While I was in charge, I noticed that every student needed attention in one way or another. The students who were quicker to finish their tasks for the day often got distracted or started acting out when they were done because they were bored and so they needed me to help redirect them to a different choice or activity so they weren't disturbing the other learners. Some of the other students who were slower to finish sometimes needed me to sit next to them while they sounded words out or if they got stuck and weren't able to understand the instructions. I noticed that a lot of them didn't actually need help with the words (Even though they thought they did) but that they just focused a little bit better and felt a little more confident when I was there with them. There was also a little bit of "when the cat's away, the mice will play" attitude and so lots of the students struggled with staying on task and focusing on their work and there were a couple times when Ms. Brown felt she needed to step back in and remind them to be quiet.
While the kids were at recess, I talked a little bit with Ms. Brown about it because it was so chaotic at times. She's been teaching for nearly 30 years now and she said the trend the past little while has been for the curriculum to be very aggressive even starting in kindergarten. Since the curriculum in kindergarten is more aggressive, the students lose out on the ability to play and socialize like they were once able which makes it so she has to do more work to teach students about appropriate social behaviors in her class. She also mentioned that the aggressiveness of the curriculum has made it so that the gap between the kids has gotten more exaggerated and more pronounced-meaning the students who are quick to understanding things get bored if they take it slow for the rest of the kids, but the kids who are slower to understanding struggle even more because the material is inherently aggressive. Ms. Brown handles that during Language Arts by giving them a couple tasks to work on and then giving them a long list of options for other choices they can make when they're done. She was mentioning today that she wants to get more new books and have some more different options because some of the students are still getting bored but she can't really assign more work because there are some students who struggle to finish everything as is. A couple of the kids who struggle to finish I've worked with a little bit and I can tell they are really smart kids and they're not struggling to finish because they don't understand the material, but because they have a hard time focusing with all the other things going on in the classroom. With the kids who really struggle staying on task, she'll sometimes have them pull their desk away if they're distracting other people or send them to work one on one with me so they can have some accountability to help them stay focused.
After recess, Ms. Brown got all the kids in a circle to play a game called "Sparkle" with the students to help them work on their spelling words in a group. Ms. Brown told them the word they'd be spelling and then they'd go around the circle and each person would take a turn saying a letter to spell that word and if they said the wrong letter, they had to sit down. After they finished spelling the word, the next person would say "Sparkle!" and the person after them would have to sit down. One thing I observed in this cooperative learning activity is that they would all help each other if someone got stuck on one of the letters. I loved this cooperative learning game because it helped raise everyone up-the people who were quick on the spelling were able to help the other students which would help cement the spelling even further in their own minds, and the people who were slower to spell the words would get help and be able to get it the next time around without as much help. I thought this activity compared to the more individual learning activity they did before recess was a good example of how Ms. Brown differentiates the learning experience to help out her students with different learning styles and abilities.

Ms. Brown's Class February 8th

Today in Ms. Brown's class, we were studying alligators.

As far as I can tell, all of the students in the class are native English speakers. They do all read at different levels and because they go to school in 2017, there are lots of options for them to fit and challenge their reading abilities. Several hundred years ago, the students would have only had access to one level of book but in order to accommodate and help out different ability levels, the students had different options for reading levels for their books. There are a few students that struggle with reading so Ms. Brown sent them one by one to read out loud to me and I helped them figure out the trickier words.

After they finished reading the book, their next task was to fill out these sheets about alligators, identifying a main idea and three key details about alligators from the book they'd read.

This assignment was kind of tricky for the students because they didn't readily understand what was meant by the "main idea" so I helped them brainstorm some ideas to put there.
After they finished this assignment, they cut their sheets and glued them onto green paper to make alligators.

This class has also been influenced by Brown V Board of Education because the class isn't made up of just kids of one skin tone. The students might have differences in ethnicity, but they all get to learn together in the same classroom. 

I didn't get any pictures of this, but Ms. Brown recently was able to get a lot of new STEM games with the idea of creating something that could accomplish a certain task. One of the games involved making a raft that could hold 4 people for twenty seconds and another was about making a water tight roof. Ms. Brown said the students get really excited about those games and it's really fun for them to practice those. This is an example to me of the impact of Sputnik because after the Russians beat us into space, there's been a big push for STEM education in schools. Ms. Brown mentioned in the 25+ years she's been a teacher, she's seen higher and higher standards for math learning each year and that this year, the math that her first graders are expected to grasp is something that wouldn't have been introduced for a few more years.

I am grateful to be able to be in a teacher in time when students of different abilities and ethnicities can learn together in the same classroom. I am also grateful that STEM skills are still being pushed and practiced because I think it's really important to stretch children's brains in that way as we prepare future innovators.

Ms. Brown's Class February 1st

Today I wanted to write about some of the engaged learning I've observed in Ms. Brown's class.

The first example I wanted to share is one where the class was communicating and collaborating to share knowledge and work together. They have been studying penguins and Ms. Brown mentioned that many kids have requested that they talk about some of the animals that are predators of penguins.

For their research, Ms. Brown took several different books about penguins and read aloud to them the portions that talked about their predators. After reading, she would ask the kids to share what animals were mentioned and she wrote those up on the board as well as any other words that they thought they'd like to use when working on their report that might be tricky to use. This was a good example to me of engaged learning because even though they went back to their desks after to write up a little bit of what they talked about, they had just worked together to talk through some ideas about predators and some of the defense mechanisms that the penguins used.

The second example I wanted to share was a sensory activity. This is the one that I've shared before about the snow in the cups. It was a sensory activity because they had to collect the snow in a cup and then observe what happened. After they observed what happened, they did write ups with illustrations about what they had learned.

I know I've talked about this example before but I hadn't seen their write ups with illustrations and I thought it was a fantastic example of involving their different senses and was a great way to learn about the world around them.

The third example I wanted to share was one where they were able to think creatively and make choices. This activity was revolved around the Water Cycle. Even though all of the pictures below are depicting the same events, you can see examples of the kids making their own choices regarding to placement, shapes, and whether or not there was a snowman.

Learning the water cycle in this way will probably stick with them longer than if they had just done a write up on it because it helps them visualize it and make it meaningful to them.

One thing that was less engaging today was a spelling practice. Ms. Brown sent a couple kids to work with me on their spelling words for the week. I had a white board and a marker and a list of words and tried to help the kids remember which words were spelled with the "e", "ee" or "ea" to make the long e sound. I could tell that the way I was going about it was not reaching the students and I don't think they were any more prepared for their spelling test having practiced with me. As I drove away I tried to think of ways that might be more engaging for the students.

One idea I had, if I was able to work with the whole class instead of just one at a time was to write the "e" "ee" and "ea" on giant circles in different places in the classroom and when I read off a word, let the kids skip, hop, or crawl to whichever circle they thought it would be. This I think would be engaging because they would be physically moving and able to work together to figure out which word was what. 

Another idea I had was to write out the words with the long e sound replaced by a piece of plastic or other see-through substance. I would then send the kids in the group around to different stations to fill in the blanks with the different options for representing the long e sound and have them work together to figure out which one looked the most correct. 

The last idea I had was to find poems or silly songs that involved the spelling words and display the words on a smart board for the whole class to see and sing along so they can have extra exposure to those words throughout the week to help the correct spellings look more familiar.

Ms. Brown's Class: January 25th

I wanted to talk today about a couple times Ms. Brown offered choices in the classroom today.
Sometime earlier in the day before I came to the classroom, the students had filled plastic cups with snow from outside and were asked to make a prediction about how much water would be left after the snow melted-if there would be more water, the same amount of water, or less water than there was snow in the cup. I got to the classroom when the kids were coming back in from lunch and the snow had already melted quite a bit. When it was time for science, I helped Ms. Brown put all the kids' cups back on their desks and they met at the rug to talk about how there was a lot less water in the cups than there was snow and they brainstormed ideas about why that might be. She then told them that after they wrote about what they observed in their science journal, they needed to choose a place to put their cup in the classroom where they thought it might evaporate the fastest. Together, the children brainstormed some advantages and disadvantages to the different places.
There was also an opportunity for the students to make a choice today after they finished their language arts assignments. Ms. Brown gave them choices such as drawing a picture, writing a letter to someone, or reading a book.
Ms. Brown also gave me the choice to prepare a game or an activity for her class and said to just let her know if there was something special I would like to do with them while I was volunteering in her class.

I also wanted to mention some things that Ms. Brown does to make her classroom a positive community. I observed last week when I was in her classroom that one of the other students had pretty bad gas while they were all sitting at the rug together and the other students were laughing at him. Ms. Brown gently reminded the kids that sometimes when we have gas, we can't control it and already feel pretty embarrassed and that by laughing at him, they were not "filling his cup" but taking away from it. Today, one of the kids had a cough and one of the others yelled at him to stop coughing. Ms. Brown reminded him that sometimes we can't control our coughs and rather than yelling, we could make sure our friend is okay. I really appreciate how she helps them work on being a caring community.

The last thing I wanted to do was talk about some clear routines that I have observed. When the class comes in from recess or lunch, the first thing they do is meet at the rug. At the rug, they sing and do actions to a song together before Ms. Brown instructs them on what they will do next. During the instructional time, she keeps them very engaged and involved. She then will give them very clear instructions on what their next tasks will be. When she needs to make an announcement when they're doing their tasks, she'll say "Hey, Kiddos!" and they all call back "Hey Ms. Brown!" to show that they're paying attention. Even though its a first grade class and the kids have a lot of energy, Ms. Brown keeps them engaged and on task with these clear routines.