Yesterday was the first day at my new placement in the 6th grade classroom, and it was incredible. The students are so enthusiastic to learn, and most of them seem genuinely enthusiastic about reading and writing. I believe that this placement will challenge me in ways that I had not previously considered because these students have a work ethic like none I have seen.
Advice on being successful in the new
classroom, from my students.
I also think it will be challenging because of my teacher. She is an incredible teacher who pushes back against the idea that instruction needs to be traditional in order to be effective. She incorporates centers as a regular component of her honors classes, but she knows her students so well that she is aware the general class can't handle that freedom (she said it was a learning process). While this is her first year at this school, she has been teaching for several years and is even writing her second book. Where she finds the time to write and to lecture and to be such an awesome instructor, all while maintaining a personal life, I'll never know. She is truly an incredible person, and I know that I'm going to learn a lot from her.
While I know that I am going to learn so much from her in general, there are a couple of specific techniques I already know that she can teach me. The first, and the most important to me, is classroom management. While there are several students who have IEPs or 504s in her classes, you would never know by just observing her classroom. She has the students so engaged that she rarely, if ever, has to discipline. She actually told me the other day that she never raises her voice to her students because she never has to do so. This fact alone makes her markedly different from the teachers in my previous two placements.
The second technique I want to learn from her is how to really generate assessments that incorporate the College and Career Ready Standards in an effective way. Instead of making her sixth graders do traditional reading and writing activities, my teacher has them post blogs both individually and collaboratively, read independently as well as to each other, and assesses them via projects rather than multiple choice tests. While she does administer multiple choice tests, they are used as a diagnostic tool on the students' parts rather than as a summative assessment that yields a finite grade. The really incredible aspect of this type of assessment is that my teacher has told me that her students perform well on the standardized tests although she doesn't "teach to the test". This is not to say that my teacher is concerned at all with the numbers game that has been created by a desire to measure achievement quantitatively; she is so student-focused when it comes to planning, that their good standardized test scores are simply a bonus.
A final aspect of the school I'm at that makes my cooperating teacher's classroom such a wonderful space is the principal. In my first day, I saw the principal multiple times, two of which were actually inside of my teacher's classroom! In my first placement, I never saw the principal once. In my second placement, I saw the principal at lunch, but she never came into my classroom. This new principal is someone who seems very involved in every part of the school, without being overbearing. He trusts in his teachers, and he sets high expectations for the faculty and students in the school. As a former ELA teacher, the principal understands the important role that reading plays in the development of strong communicators. Above all, the principal recognizes that the College and Career Ready Standards are a baseline of expectations, and he makes that clear to his staff.
One final thing, and I will end this first blog post. Because my teacher is so involved with using technology as a way to develop yourself professionally, she has encouraged me to set up a Twitter account and consider starting a blog. I have now done both. My PD Twitter handle is @Rachel_A_Hudson .
I am so looking forward to this semester! I feel so honored to have been placed at this school and with this teacher. They're doing amazing things there, and I hope that I will get to carry this pedagogy with me into my own classroom.
