Reflection: Thoughts on Common Core/New Bill

Since nearly all of my students are away at space camp for the next three days, I thought that I would address an extremely pressing issue that has been weighing on my mind for quite a while.

As an educator, I tend to avoid revealing my political views because I know that I have the ability to influence many people. I want to instill a sense of responsibility and good citizenship in my students, but I want them to be able to think for themselves. Spoon-feeding them my viewpoint on various topics will not help them become critical thinkers.

The Alabama state legislature is attempting to pass SB 380, a bill that would rescind the adoption of the Common Core and push back the adoption of those standards until at least 2017.

Over the course of the past couple of years, I have heard murmuring about the danger of adopting the College and Career Ready Standards (most widely known as the Common Core). In preparation for this reflection, I tried to find and read as many articles on both sides of the argument as possible. After reading the various arguments, I have come to the conclusion that those who are against the CCRS are, frankly speaking, ignorant of the facts.

In fact, Tommy Bice, the Alabama State Superintendent of Education, recently wrote an article for the Montgomery Advertiser that addresses the fears that Alabamians have about adopting the CCRS.

I could only hope to be half as persuasive and eloquent as Dr. Bice is in his article, so I will let his writing do the work for me (thanks, Dr. Bice!).
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As an addendum to the CCRS argument, I would like to address something else I came across during my research. A Gawker article was published a little after noon today announcing that the Alabama legislature passed a bill that requires all students and school employees in the public schools to spend fifteen minutes every morning participating in Christian prayer.

I will not even begin to address the first amendment violations that this bill commits, as those arguments tend to be a bit subjective. Instead, I want to approach this from a mathematical perspective.

Fifteen minutes.

FIFTEEN.

Do you realize how much time that is in the span of a class period?

An average class period in every school I have been in, either as a student or as a student-teacher, is between forty and fifty minutes. Being an optimist, I will use fifty minutes as the measured class period. First, let us subtract fifteen minutes for the government mandated Christian prayer (50-15=35 minutes). It takes at least five minutes to prepare students to begin and to end class (35-10 minutes=25 minutes).

Twenty-five minutes.

TWENTY-FIVE.

That means I have twenty-five minutes to teach your child how to read, write, and think critically. This is all while trying to instill good habits that will prepare them to be properly-functioning adults and employees.

Think about that.

We will be spending about thirty percent of first period in prayer.

My question is this: could the students not simply wake up fifteen minutes earlier to pray in the morning instead of taking away crucial instructional time?

   

Riding on That Struggle Bus

The most strenuous part of my internship experience by far has been trying to manage the behaviors of my 1^st/2^nd period class. As a secondary education major, I have not had much experience with classroom management until this semester, and that has really hurt me when it comes to gaining and maintaining control of those twenty-two ten- and eleven-year-olds. I have spent so much time trying to correct/modify their behavior in the past that I am afraid the knowledge I am trying to share is not reaching them. On top of that, I am wearing myself out trying to constantly address their behaviors.

In an attempt to regain control over this class, I am starting back on square one so to speak. Thursday, when all of the kiddos come back from space camp, we are going to go over the behavior contract Mrs. Ramsay gave them at the beginning of the year. From that point on, my primary focus will be to reinforce the procedures she established with the students at the beginning of the school year. I hate that there is so much backtracking that has to be done with them, but I think that doing this now will save us all from a major headache in the long run.

Another technique I am planning to try with all of my classes is to create a noise level chart. All of my classes have an issue with getting too loud, and I thought that having a permanent visual point of reference would benefit each of my students. My plan is to create this chart and with every activity without exception, we will set the appropriate noise level. This way, when students get above that level, I have a way of demonstrating to them that they went above the level we agreed was acceptable.

All-in-all, despite my struggles this week, I still love teaching. It’s difficult. It’s exhausting. However, in the end, I believe that I have so much to learn and to teach this group. I am so excited to see what is in store for the rest of the semester. 

Reflection: Classroom Management

One aspect (out of many) of my teacher’s practice I really appreciate is the value she places on reflection. In my biography for the College of Education, I wrote that reflection is one of the most valuable tools a teacher possesses. This was among one of the first topics she brought up the first time she met me. This is also why I have started this blog (Hi, Mrs. Ramsay!).

A benefit of having my teacher value reflection is the fact that she constantly asks me to reflect upon my instruction with her. If I was in a classroom where I felt insecure or unwelcome, I would not feel the freedom to be quite so frank about my performance.

I am gradually transitioning from being an observer/participant in the classroom to almost (maybe) being a real teacher. This week, I have taught second, third, and fifth periods, and starting tomorrow, I will be teaching the whole day for the remainder of the week.

Over the course of the past few days, something has become very clear to me: I need help developing my classroom management skills.

My first/second period class is a general class, meaning that many of them have abilities below the sixth grade level. This also means that there are several kids in the class who typically have behavioral issues. While I knew this going into the week, Mrs. Ramsay’s classroom management is so awesome that there are few incidents of misbehavior in the classroom.

Thinking more about what type of activity would be best for their learning styles and less about how my students would manage their behaviors, I decided to teach my first/second period class prepositions through a song and dance set to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”.

It has been interesting, to say the least.

The first day was really fun for me, but I was not very effective when it came to getting the entire class to participate. I had students wandering around the room, students refusing to dance and/or sing, and students actively trying to distract their classmates who actually did want to learn the song. Despite these glaring issues, I was completely oblivious to this behavior. It was not until I sat down and reflected with my teacher that I realized why kids had been knocking over desks, chairs, and even the class laptop. I was discouraged, but I knew that I couldn’t just give up.

Tuesday was definitely more exhausting, but I believe it was more successful. If you’ve never taught sixth graders before, the simile “It’s like herding cats,” is pretty accurate. I started to use classroom management techniques, such as saying in a soft voice “Look at me if you can hear me,” and explicitly telling students that they were to perform the song behind their desks. Additionally, I was very aware of the position and participation of each student in the classroom and tried to address issues as they arose.

Today was a little less tiring, but because of the choices I made prior to teaching the students the rest of the song, I never had full control over them. This lack of control lead to me having to constantly correct/redirect behaviors today. Two students in particular were moving all around the classroom. One student refused to participate, insisted on playing with the pencils in his pencil pouch, and was incredibly disrespectful to me when I attempted to correct his behavior (full disclosure: this is a recurring theme with this student). However, the fact that this behavior is frequent for this student does not excuse the fact that I did not impact him in such a way that allowed him to learn the song as well.

In the future, to counteract negative behaviors, I intend to establish a tone from the beginning of the period. The best way that I have seen to do so for this particular class is to play calm music and keep the lights low when they first enter the classroom. Another way that I plan to establish tone is via giving explicit instructions. Mrs. Ramsay has had me work on breaking my instructions down this week, and I have seen that this has made a huge difference in the number of confused looks and disruptions that occur during class. 

If anyone has classroom management techniques that have worked, please feel free to share your knowledge with me in a comment!

First Day of School/Internship (repost from my old blog)

    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.