The Reflective Educator

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January 23, 2010 / 0 Comments

My first semester as a teacher – part 4

… continued from here ….

One of the things I learned about early was my power to kick students out of class.  I was amazed, no one would have done this on a regular basis in British Columbia, you’d make the kids stand outside the classroom.  Not here though, I had this god power that could make a kid disappear, at least for 20 minutes while he was processed in the Dean’s office, and more than likely, sent back to the purgatory that was my classroom.  I abused this power at least once a day that first semester, although there were times when it was warranted.

The first time I had a fight in my classroom, it erupted without warning.  I was shocked.  Two girls were suddenly shouting at each other about something and their classmates held them apart while they verbally sparred.  I ran to the door and yelled for security, as per my training during the summer.  I remembered well the warnings not to get between the combatants because you never knew if one of them was going to draw a knife.  Within seconds of the call for security, two security guards and one of the Assistant Principals ran into the room.  The Assistant Principal was not a large woman but she carried herself with amazing confidence and when she entered the room, some of the children shyed away from her.  The first thing she did was to place her body between the two girls, but she made sure never touched either of them with her hands.  The two girls tried their best to get past her, reaching their arms around this tiny woman, but she stubbornly kept them apart until the security guards managed to get them under control and out of my room.  I stood their in stunned silence, having never experienced such hatred come out of such young people before.

That year fights were commonplace in my room.  By the end of the year I felt a bit more confident and began to get a feeling for when it would be safe for me to intervene while I waited for security and when I should stay the hell away from the fighters.  I knew already that most of my students were pussycats in wolves’ clothing but a small number were predators in training.

I also remember the first time I connected with my students really deeply.  I was attempting to teach the students how to solve quadratic equations.  After unsuccessfully attempting to show them how to factor, and then failing to show them how to solve by graphing, I decided to go for 0 for 3 and teach them the quadratic formula.  I wrote down the formula and remembered the advice of the cool Assistant Principal from the summer, "Make it memorable."  I told the students that using the formula was pretty easy, and they mostly ignored me.  I then said that the hard part was remembering the formula itself and I was going to show them a trick.  As I started to sing the quadratic formula song, the students started to quiet down.  By the end of the song, they were hooting and hollering and begging me to sing it again.  I sang it 4 more times, and by the 4th time, 3 of the students joined in and most of them were keeping time to the music.

Now I can’t saw that the tune was very good, but I’m pretty sure it was the first time most of the kids had ever seen a teacher act a bit silly.  They were impressed.  So impressed that every single class for the next three weeks, the three brave students would enter class singing the song.  I’m in contact with some of my students from this year and they tell me they still remember the song.  It might be the only thing they remember from that entire year.  Not surprisingly, it was one of the few topics where most of the students were able to use the formula, as I made promises to sing it again after every time the class finished 3 or 4 exercises.

…more…

January 22, 2010 / 0 Comments

My first semester as a teacher – part 3

… continued from here ….

My first day of teaching I felt even less prepared for the experience than when I started student teaching.  I was very nervous as I waited for the students to trickle in.  Almost all of my students were on time though, and my 9th grade class started smoothly.  I remembered to introduce myself, set a good tone for classroom management for the semester and managed to get through my discussion with Brittaney whose name I still cannot say with the right accent.  Anyway, I was feeling pretty good and was pleased with my progress.

My M$AA class also went reasonably smoothly, but I had hardly any students.  Of the 17 students on my roster, only 10 or so showed up, which really should have been an immediate warning sign for me.  There were some hiccups.  I remember one of the students saying something to me and I had NO idea what he was trying to say, I wasn’t even sure it was English.  I later thought it might have been in Creole (when I learned later that student was bilingual), but whatever it was, the rest of the class cracked up.

After lunch, my M$C class started poorly.  I made a huge blunder.  The teacher across the hall was late returning from lunch, so I ushered his students into my classroom to safeguard them until he arrived which I thought was standard procedure.  It took 20 minutes, 2 security guards and an Assistant Principal to extract the M$AA students from the room so I could get back to teaching my grade 10 students.  Actually teaching is the wrong word to use.  Talking to a room full of people who paid me NO attention at all is much more accurate.  My M$AA class was difficult but at least I had good days with them.  With my 10th grade students, I didn’t actually get their attention at all (except from four dedicated souls sitting in the front, THANK YOU!) until near the end of November.

At the end of my first day of teaching I was feeling a little low, but I got some advice from one of the new teachers who actually had a fair bit of teaching experience from previous years.  She said, "Don’t try to make every day perfect just keep plugging away.  You’ll find that at first about 1 in 5 of your lessons works, and those are the lesson plans you should keep.  Throw the rest away."

The rest of the week, which in this case was two more days, went by pretty much the same as the first day.  9th grade class was okay, 10th grade and mixed class were pretty difficult. I felt like a failure a lot in those first few weeks, and at the time what kept me going was the fact that there were 12 other teachers going through exactly the same thing, and that every once in a while, I would connect with the kids.  These moments made me really happy and each of us who was experiencing the same horror story would share both our failures and successes during our Friday afternoon unwinding sessions.

…more…

January 22, 2010 / 0 Comments

My first semester as a teacher – part 2

 … continued from here ….

When I stepped into the office, the teacher was in the middle of scolding a student and the assistant principal was chatting up a school assistant.  As I entered, they both looked at me, and the look they gave me did not inspire confidence.  Right away I knew I had made a mistake.

The teacher gave me some advice (once she had hit the student on the head with a rolled up newspaper and told him to stop being so stupid) that I don’t really recall but was along the lines of "Don’t let them eat you alive on your first day."  The assistant principal shared a brief story about his first day on the job back in the really depressing 70s era NYC education system and then did his version of a long tour of the school which took all of 10 minutes.

Back at the international teacher training we learned about some basic classroom management rules, the first of which was to never, ever hit a child.  We also learned that anything which involved either being physical with a child or making the child being physical was considered corporal punishment.  This meant that telling a student to write lines after school, or asking a student to move in class, or just picking up something they had dropped, these were all official no-nos.  I began to feel a little bit scared but my youthful optimism won out and I got over my fear.

One of the people I met during this first week was an interesting individual who was an assistant principal at a high school in the deepest baddest part of Brooklyn.  He had some encouraging words to say about our students, the first I had heard since being recruited.  "These kids can learn, " he said, "and they can do it well.  You just need to motivate them, excite them, and grab their interest."  He brought in some of his own students, who he convinced to come and meet some teachers during their summer break, and showed us some neat techniques for teaching math, including singing the quadratic formula to get the kids to remember it.  I think of all the people I met the summer he helped me the most get through the semester, and I only saw him for two days in the summer.

Very quickly school started and the beginning of the year started with two days of getting ready for school.  We were all assigned classrooms, it turned out that there were 12 new teachers that year, all of whom were fairly new to teaching, most of us were not from New York.  I was the only Canadian, but there was apparently one "on another floor so you’ll be alright."  I spent my first day preparing my classroom which needed a lot of cleaning.  I noticed that I had a bunch of ugly desks and saw some classrooms with nice tables, so I made my first mistake of the year.  I went to the Assistant Principal in charge of Supervision, even the name sounds ominous, and asked him for some tables, which I did not get.  Needless to say, he and I did not get on well that year. Or the next.  Or the year after that.

My next day, after I had done as much as I could, I found out what my schedule was.  The person in charge of curriculum for the whole school came by our school to give us a pep talk and give us a copy of the curriculum for the year.  He handed me a piece of paper with 20 questions printed on it and in a thick Brooklyn accent said, "Make sure they can answer all of those questions by the end of the year, and you’ll be fine."  He also took a look at my schedule and immediately walked off with it.  He came back about 10 minutes later and gave me a new schedule with M$A, M$AA and M$C on it, instead of M$A, M$AA, M$AA.  He said, with my first schedule they’d be looking for a new teacher within a few months, so he was doing the school a favor.  He also told me I was lucky, the new textbooks would only take a couple of weeks to arrive.

Apparently M$A meant first semester 9th grade, M$C meant first semester 10th grade, and M$AA meant, all of the students who were whatever age but had no credits in high school at all, some of them after 3 or 4 years.  I was really grateful later in the semester when I could hear the shouting and laughing happening across the hall.  My M$AA class would come back and haunt me time and time again, but as the year progressed it got easier and easier to teach.

…more…

January 22, 2010 / 1 Comment

My first semester as a teacher – part 1

I’ve been thinking about my first semester as a teacher a lot recently.  I had a very difficult start to my profession, perhaps some of you can relate.  I can honestly say that the only thing that kept me in teaching was the money I owed my parents to move to NYC, and the cost of repaying my student loans.  At one point during the semester I was ready to throw in the towel and quit.  For some reason, I didn’t.

I grew up in British Columbia and spent most of my young adult life in Vancouver after moving their for university from my small town home.  In 2002 I finished my teacher training, and found that getting a job was going to be very difficult.  So after a friend pointed out an advertisement the New York Department of Education had posted in the newspaper, I decided to take a chance and put together my student teacher portfolio and resume.  I showed up at a hotel, looking professional in a new suit and with my ideas about education ready to share.  I easily got a job in a difficult school district in something called the Chancellor’s district.

At the beginning of August I moved to NYC after receiving special permission from the UBC Faculty of Education to graduate early, having compressed my summer courses into a single 3 week session.  NYC was hot, it was August and I was not ready! I had some time to rent an apartment because I was in New York early, so I promptly got myself ripped with a cockroach infested apartment in Williamsburg.

We had a week of training ahead of time where we given some preparation to what we were going to experience, and we were encouraged to go visit our school and find out what it would be like.  I was in a cohort with a few hundred international teachers, and nothing the NYCDOE could say would whole prepare us for our experiences in inner city Brooklyn.

I arrived at my school and it was a gigantic block, it looked like a prison.  Bars on the windows, horrible peeling paint, depressing atmosphere.  I had some trouble finding my school in the building because there were three schools in the building and no signs pointing to any of the schools, at least none that were obvious.  Eventually I found the unmarked main office for the school and had a chance to talk to one of the teachers and the main assistant principal for the school.

…more…

January 22, 2010 / 4 Comments

60-Second Education podcast

Do you think teachers would download and listen to a 60 second podcast about education?  We’d basically take short bite size pieces of ideas, and turn them into interesting audio clips that teachers could download and listen to in their short amounts of free time.  Well, anyone who is interested in joining could participate, we all have some great ideas on how to make education better, we just need a wider audience.

If every teacher was in the same social network, or had the same preferences for how they received information, then I’d say "Let’s all get on Twitter" and share our information that way.  To be honest, I know this won’t work because our colleagues are so different.  We still need to reach our colleagues though and perhaps subscribing to a short podcast would be easier than learning a the mechanism for change that Twitter represents.

The podcasts could be great conversation starters for professional development for example.  Any thoughts?

January 22, 2010 / 0 Comments

Research based teaching

I’d like to be a research based teacher.  This means, if research comes out which is compelling and reliable and which suggests that an alternate approach to what I do will work better, then I’ll experiment and try that out.  If research tells us that people learn in a certain way, then I’ll need to look at my practices and adjust them correspondingly.

Here’s an example of one change I’ve made recently because of research I read.  The research is a meta-study of the relationship between the time between a learner makes a mistake and when they receive feedback on their mistake.  If there is more than a very small amount of time between making a mistake and getting feedback on that mistake, interference between the mistake and the feedback is likely to occur and the feedback may not be what is remembered, instead the mistake may be remembered.  "Teachers who want their quizzes to help students learn should try to arrange conditions so that students receive feedback as quickly as possible after they answer quiz questions." Kulik & Kulik, 1988

I don’t assign homework anymore of a quiz or exercise nature which doesn’t provide immediate feedback.  So this entire year, I haven’t assigned a single exercise from the textbook.  I still provide a textbook in case the students want to study, or practice with their tutor or parents, but we only use it during class-time.  During class I can roam the classroom and provide feedback when students are making mistakes, and I can make sure students are checking their answers with the back of the book on a regular basis. If I want students to practice assignments at home, they get an online self-correcting quiz.  Fortunately for me, all of my students have internet access at home.

One problem with this approach is that so much good educational research is locked up in the vaults of proprietary publishers and difficult to access. I am lucky and can access much of this material through my university, but I can imagine that this could be a major stumbling block for most teachers, and of course schools can’t afford to pay for the expensive subscriptions to all of the educational journals out there.  Just having access to the database to search through the journals is difficult.

We need to, as a profession, come up with a solution to this.  Either money has to be spent ensuring that teachers have access to the best educational research out there, or teachers need to become better researchers themselves.

January 20, 2010 / 0 Comments

What would you tell a new teacher?

I had the opportunity to have a new teacher hang out in one of my classes today.  We had about a 20 minute discussion afterward where she asked some questions and I got to share a couple of resources.  She is being trained to teach Math and Science so we have a lot of overlap in our specialties.

First we talked about instructional strategies.  I mentioned that I don’t assign exercises from the textbook anymore, I haven’t all year.  I read brain based research which talked about how important immediate feedback (related meta-study) is in the learning process and realized that there was no effective way to have an exercise from the textbook tell my student what they are doing wrong, it just doesn’t work.  If I give any repetitive exercises at all, they are online quizzes hosted at either Thatquiz.org (if I want to create the quiz myself) or Assistment.org (if I want the students to have more open ended questions and more feedback).

I also mentioned that I focus on including real life examples of everything I teach.  In other words, every unit has at least one (usually many) examples of ways this math is used, or could be used.  I’ve got a bunch of examples up here, more to follow later.  The idea is obvious to me, connect what you are doing in class to what the students will be doing outside of your class, or at least to things they are interested in outside of class.

I talked about my strategy during my first years as a teacher.  My first year I focussed on surviving, I started my career in inner city Brooklyn so this was a necessary survival strategy.  My second year I started experimenting.  Every week I used a different instructional strategy.  In my third year I tried a new thing two or three times a week.  Every year I’ve been teaching I’ve created all of my lesson plans from scratch every day for every lesson.  It has forced me to reflect on my teaching and I think it has helped me to keep improving my practice.

She asked for some website resources and I gave her the ones I mentioned above, and she said that it was SO difficult to find resources in today’s age because there are so many resources to choose from.  The ranking algorithm of Google is good, but not perfect and doesn’t always help find the best resource for you.  So I pointed out Twitter.

I said that Twitter is like having however many people who are your followers acting to do some of your research for you.  Ask question, get an answer.  See a question, give an answer.  Follow 1000 people who Tweet regularly, multiply your productivity 1000x in terms of searching for resources and information, assuming you follow the right people.

What would you share with a new teacher?

More advice from Twitter PLN:

penphoe @davidwees re: new teachers, "5% lesson content, 95% dealing with people"

sharon_elin @davidwees I’d tell new tchr "Put bureacracy aside; it’s all about you & the kids." Relationship 1st, w/you as curiosity coach (not peer).

Philip_Cummings @davidwees Dear New Teacher – Develop a PLN & pick a really good mentor.

acmcdonaldgp RT @davidwees: I would tell a new teacher: Build GREAT, appropriate relationships and never take away hope!

rrodgers @davidwees Be adaptable and process-focused, and he end results will take care of themselves.

amichetti @davidwees I would say that the most important thing to remember is to be flexible!

misterlamb @davidwees "Teaching is your job, it’s not your life." Advice from my co-op from student teaching. Make time for yourself.

TSherwood @davidwees That it’s OK to cry. There will be more smiles than tears. 

 

 

 

January 20, 2010 / 2 Comments

Idea for alternate school structure – School without a daily bell schedule

So I was just walking up the steps and had an idea.  What would a school without a restrictive bell schedule look like?  I was wondering about this because I remember so many times this year having students working along in a great groove on one of my projects, and then suddenly time is up and the students all have to move to another room!  This is very frustrating, especially if another 10 minutes means they could finish their train of thought.

So what would it take to make this work?

First, teachers would need to have daily small group planning time built into their schedules, probably every morning.  They would need to plan how the schedule was going to unfold that day and to review on a daily basis the progress of the students.  Technology could be used to help keep track of where students are at so that teachers don’t have to push around gigantic piles of paper. Update: Or as John Holt suggests, we could trust students more and give at least some of them more ownership over this process.

Next, the curriculum would have to be broken down, not into subject areas (except for review possibly for external certification) but by project.  Each project would have to have the traditional subjects integrated into it, with percentages (and specific skills or content areas) for how much the project counts towards each subject.  Students would have individualized education plans because the teachers would have the time to construct plans for each student. Update: Again, this would be easier if at least some of the students, or all of them at some stage, had more control over what they were learning, and when.

Assessment would be standards based assessment.  Partially this is because it is a bit easier to assess a bunch of students who may be at difference places in your curriculum using standards, and partially because I believe that standards based assessment works better than norm referenced assessment.  Finally another argument for standards based assessment is that students should move through standards, rather than through grades.

Another thing that might be possible to remove in such a school is the barriers that we construct between students of different ages.  Clubs quite often have students working together with very different skill levels and ages, and quite a large number of school clubs work quite well.  So it’s not impossible for students of even very different ages to work efficiently together.  As well, it might be that students of different ages are working on very similar projects or even the same project (being assessed differently because the standards might be different for each student).  So what I envision is a school without grade levels and maybe with a very different layout or structure.

Perhaps this school is architecturally different as well.  Students would need some private space to work (maybe in multilevel groups so that older students have the responsibility to check on the younger student’s progress and model appropriate behaviour?), many small group sized rooms, and some wide open places as well.  The small work spaces could be offshoots of the general meeting areas which are in turn offshoots of a larger wide open space.

Every student should have to do some physical activity each day.  Physical education is SO important for children, their bodies are built to move.  It would be one of the core classes in a school like this instead of an aside that is government mandated.

What else do you think this school needs?  Are there any schools which are actually like this?

Update: Of course, I’ve made some pretty broad assumptions in the original version of this piece – one of which is that every student should learn exactly the same thing. While I do believe that a liberal education (in which one learns about a wide variety of things) is important, there are many, many different ways to achieve that outcome.

January 20, 2010 / 1 Comment

Authentic learning experiences

This year I have really tried to step up the process of bringing the real world into my mathematics class.  A major focus has been on using technology appropriately as a tool to help solve real life problems.

Here are some examples:

 

Distance formula:  Finding an optimal (or near optimal) solution to the Traveling Salesman problem for a small number of cities.  

Basically here the students were given the assignment of choosing 6 or 7 cities fairly near each other on a Google map and finding the x and y coordinates of each city, then using the distance formula to determine the distances between the cities.  Once they had this information, they were to try and figure out a shortest path, or at least something very close to the shortest path, and then justify their solution.

 

Linear graphs & Piecewise functions:  Compare 4 or 5 difference cell phone plans.

Students should take a few cell phone plans and compare the plans, including the cost for text messages (which may include similar graphs), the cost for extras, start up costs, etc…  I found the students end up needing to create piecewise functions in order to represent a cell phone plan which has a fixed rate until the minutes are used up at which point the customer has to pay extra for each minute.

 

Shape and Space: Design a new school building.

Here I showed the students the new lot our school is in the process of purchasing and our project is to design a building for that spot, and calculate how much their building design will cost (within the nearest $1000).  It involves finding area, volumes, perimeters, scales, perspective, etc… We are using Google Sketchup for the designs but I am now trying to work out how to import the students designs into a virtual world (like OpenSim) so we can have each student group lead walk-arounds of their building.

 

Polynomials:  Determine how many operations multiplying a 100 digit number times a 100 digit number takes.

Students are learning about computational complexity theory by analyzing the number of steps it takes to multiply numbers together.  They record each step in the operation and increase the size of the numbers of each time and re-record their results.  They then compare the different number of steps in each operation and try to come up with a formula, so that they can answer the 100 digit times 100 digit question.  Our object: Figure out why our TI calculators can’t do this operation.  It turns out that the formula itself is a polynomial, and their substitutions to check their various formulas count as a lot of practice substituting into polynomials, which was a perfect fit for our curriculum.

 

Quadratic functions:  Create an lower powered air cannon and use it to fire potatoes a few meters.

Here the students are attempting to use quadratic math to try and analyze their cannon, then the objective is to try and hit a target with a single shot later.  The cannons should be very low powered for obvious safety reasons, capable of firing a potato (or Tennis ball) a few metres at most.  There is also a slight tie-in to Social Studies where my students will be studying cannons in their unit on medieval warfare.

 

Bearings and Angles: Set up an orienteering course in your field or local park.

Students attempt to navigate a course through a park and pick up clues at each station, which they use to figure out a problem.  Students have to be able to recognize the scale on the graph, navigate using bearings, and measure angles accurately.  Also lots of fun, we did this in Regents park for a couple of years in a row.

 

Integration: Calculate the area (or volume in a 3d integration class) of an actual 2d or 3d model.

Basically you have the students pick an object which they then find the functions (by placing the object electronically in a coordinate system) which represent the edge of the object, then place the object in a coordinate system and calculate area of the object using integration.

 

Percentages: Find out how much your perfect set of "gear" (clothing) costs when it is on sale and has tax added.

Students take a catalog and calculate how much it will cost for them to buy their perfect set of clothing.  They can buy as many items as they want (with their imaginary money) but have to keep track of both the individual costs and the total cost of their clothing.  You can also throw some curve balls at them, like if they buy more than a certain amount, they get  discount, etc…

 

If you have any other examples of real life math being used in a project based learning context, please let me know.  I’m always interested in other ideas, especially for the more challenging areas of mathematics.  I’ll add more ideas here as I remember them.

January 19, 2010 / 0 Comments

Application to the Google Teacher’s Academy for Administrators

So last weekend I finished my application to the GTA for Administrators.  My major reason for wanting to go to this conference is networking and for some more ideas on how to best use Google’s services. In any case, the application process itself was actually kind of fun, and I’m pleased with the results of my work with the 1 minute video which you can see below.

Now I understand that Google has created this academy for entirely financial reasons, as has pretty much every major player in the educational software business.  Basically, if you hook the policy makers, you are more likely to see your services spread all of which are built to support either their search services or their premium products.  I’m okay with that if what you produce is really worth using, it’s better than vending machines and bake sales.

Update:  Unfortunately my application was rejected.  Still I’m happy to have applied, it was totally worth the reflection I had to go through.

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