There was an interesting editorial in the New York Times a few days ago about ACT test preparation in Chicago. A study came to the conclusion that test prep was taking away from class time, and NYTimes editors concluded that this was disasterous. This is a topic of great interest to me as I was given a course last year described by the counselors as "just an ACT class".
An even more interesting read is the reader response to the issue. Personally, I am in favor of test prep to a certain extent, particularly in underprivileged communities. You cannot "test prep" someone to a perfect score. I think that intelligence is still the major factor when it comes to testing well. Some might worry that too much time is spent on test prep, but if it means the difference between college or no college, graduation or no graduation, I think there should be no question. I understand the fear, but it's worth it to give everyone a (more) even playing field....
One of the reasons I find this blog hard to write is that I didn't do a very good job setting 'learning goals' for my students. I was so preoccupied with keeping my head above water all year, that I had a hard time trying to think ahead - and create those big goals. This year I've got big aspirations; not only am I going to spend July unit planning, but I am going to create units with tangible goals -- and measure them. I'll have my freshmen take a practice SATP the first week, and then work the four competencies as rotating units in my curriculum. I plan to see some improvement in their post-test, and I'll have the data to show me what learning goals were met, and which weren't, come December.
But I didn't do that this year, and as a result, I am a little less sure of what kinds of tangible progress my students really made. But I will take my best shot:
Most Successful
I think the learning goal where my students were the most successful, in all my classes, was definitely in the general area of reading skills. They were more comfortable readers, faster readers, and closer readers when they left my classroom. The number one reason, I believe, is that I am passionate about reading. My grammar lessons are about as fun as cement, but when I teach reading, I am bounding, cheering, pulling the students along in my excitement of the story. The days where they all laugh at me and look at one another shaking their heads, "She crazy. You crazy Ms. M". They roll their eyes, but they are enjoying it. I can't make grammar fun, I rarely make writing fun, and I often don't even make reading fun -- but I do show them how much it means to me, and how important I believe it is for them to read -- and that passion really makes a difference.
That passion also influences me to work harder at reading skills in general - I think about worksheet formatting, variety and pacing of worksheet questions, individual silent reading vs. reading groups, lessons on close reading and inferences, what types of texts, how much reflection, etc and so forth all the time- an amount of analyzation I would never engage in for a subject I dislike or even feel ambivalent about.
The other major reason my students' reading skills improved was the sheer volume of reading done in my class. We read a sizeable amount almost every single day. In addition to poems and short stories in all classes, my learning strategies classes read 2.5 books and a play (the .5 was their own book at the end of the year- to be finished on their own time in the summer), my English 4 kids read a long epic poem, a play and a longish novel, and my English 3 kids read a looong novel (250ish pages), and a play. It may not seem like much, but three months is not a very long time for all this, in addition to the other English skills. And I think, at a certain threshold, pure time invested makes a big difference.
Least Successful
The least successful learning goal in my room this year was probably my students' writing style. My students could spit out a 5-paragraph essay with good topic sentences and supporting details and the whole drill. No problem. But the actual sentences they were writing were, at best, bland, and at worst, horrible. Even though most of my seniors had subject-verb agreement down fairly well, and their spelling/mechanics were decent -- their sentences were canned, short, and boring. And the worst part is, I know exactly why. Without a state test looming over my head, I barely touched grammar and sentence structure except for the necessary basics. Also, I was just overwhelmed by the sheer logistics of improving so many different levels of ability for such an individualized skill. I have trouble differentiating among three big basic divisions (the talented, the mediocre, and the struggling) in my room, let alone 20 different kids with 20 different writing abilities/styles/issues. So I took the easy way out and let it slide.
This year I am going to spend more time on sentence construction - especially since I have ninth graders. We are going to practice all different "types" of sentence, making the kids construct lots and lots of them until they feel comfortable, perhaps, using a sentence that flows with multiple clauses in a paper, without prompting.
I am also going to work on that grammar thing.
TMAO writes an incredible blog: a letter to a first-year, Teach-for-America-type teacher, describing in detail how life is about to change.
I am practically speechless at the perfect way he has captured so many of my own thoughts and feelings - I laughed out loud at moments, felt guilt twinges at others, and genuinely agreed with everything he has to say. I hope someday I might be able to write the the same clarity and insight about something so difficult to describe.
During this past school year, I taught English II, the state-tested sophomore year of English, largely without a complete map of when I would hit each objective. My district was in the process of composing its first ever pacing guide, and my peers and superiors often had differing opinions about how to proceed. In the third week of school, my principal told me that I was to teach only grammar for the first nine weeks, which I dutifully began to do. However, during a meeting with the administrators at my district's central office during the fourth week of the term, I was shown the finished district-wide map, which turned out to differ somewhat from my principal's interpretation. As the year wore on, I met with mentor teachers at the district's other high school, who tried to steer me towards their own plans of action, which also differed from the district map in some ways. It wasn't until the third term, with the state writing test looming upon us, that I discovered that the district map gave the bizarre directive to teach essay writing in the fourth nine weeks, after the writing test would already be over. I realized, somewhere around this time, that I was on my own to map my curriculum sensibly, and I did my best to cover what was left in the time remaining.
Mapping the English curriculum offers distinct challenges from the other disciplines. These challenges come in several forms. Mathematics teachers can reasonably teach new types of content in a specific order. Math skills, generally speaking, either build upon one another vertically or have no bearing upon one another at all. As is also true with history courses, the textbooks themselves may offer a logical course of study, so that I would be surprised if teachers of these courses worry much about the order of their units.
English, however, is not simply cumulative. The four competencies of the Mississippi curriculum - vocabulary, reading, writing, and grammar - may be discussed in isolation but are truly learned in combination by most students. Even a glance at the suggested teaching strategies attached to the frameworks suggest that the objectives are inseparable. Vocabulary objectives are to be taught in the context of text study, grammar objectives are to be taught as editing skills during the writing process.
Furthermore, the English skills studied during the elementary years do not differ significantly from those studied in the secondary school. Students are reminded of the same topics year after year, which places the burden of novelty on the teacher to structure the year according to increasingly difficult, but interesting, texts and writing assignments. The teacher is given two textbooks of such length that simply planning to work through both from beginning to end is largely impossible. Instead, the "curriculum" in an English classroom must be constructed by painstakingly culling selections from the textbook and uniting these selections into cohesive units which cover all four competencies.
Some of the confusion I experience in this regard may be the fault of the MS frameworks themselves. Although I haven't had the chance to study any other state's frameworks thoroughly, I suspect that a more rational vertical alignment and integration or definition of purpose is possible. But I also wonder whether the entire concept of an English curriculum in isolation from other academic goals doesn't need rethinking.
English is the medium, or the primary medium, of our thought, and we do, of course, possess the ability to reflect upon this medium, but there is not necessarily a single "English" purpose, as there is a purpose for the study of math, history, and science. English, in other words, is not a body of knowledge in the same way that the other arts and sciences are. Instead, the topics we today understand as English would seem to correlate with what classical eduction would refer to as the knowledge preparatory to the activity of learning. To this end, the introduction of text study prior to the complete mastery of grammar would seem to be irrelevant. Not that no books should be read, but that the purposes of reading be cast with sensitivity to cumulative goals is what I'm suggesting. In the present case, the Mississippi frameworks seem to require the mastery of far too many objectives at every level of development, resulting in the extremely mediocre attention paid to each.
Writing the curriculum map for the Holly Springs Summer School's Middle School English course has been enlightening and rewarding. It has been the first time that I could, with the benefit of some knowledge and experience, reflect upon the logical connection between the framework's objectives, and I am eager to discover how my choices play out over the summer.
I really enjoy the role of "instructional coach". It seems to perfectly bring together two things that I love: helping people, and analyzing situations to come up with solutions. This is something I could certainly see myself doing more of in the future...
As an instructional coach, I generally tend to get a bit too excited about my advice - which I think is both a positive and negative. It is obvious to a potential mentee that I am doing my best to help them. And, I think, it's clear that I care. Unfortunately, I think I sometimes go way overboard, and probably overwhelm them with information. My observations and ideas are often minute and trivial, but I just can't hold back when I think something that just might strike a key. I guess prefer to err on the side of too much advice, than to let things go that might really help. But I do worry about discouraging first-years with a mountain of things they need to work on - when in reality, they are all doing just fine (way to go English III/IV first years!).
It's funny, during my informal observations last week, I started thinking about all the things that I personally need to work on in the classroom. I found myself starting all kinds of sentences with, "Well, to be honest, if you watch me teach, I am really not a great example of this, but...." or "You'll see that I will often make that same mistake..." or "I tend to XYZ, too." I repeatedly saw myself reflected in the first-years' various missteps and rough edges. When I got up to teach on Friday (having mulled this over much of the week), I was acutely aware of everything I was doing --consciously monitoring and modifying those things I had pointed out to the first-years. .....And I taught the best lesson on Outlining an Essay I'd ever led (a topic which I have had perennial difficulties "teaching" well to my students from both the fall and spring semesters). I finished that lesson feeling fantastic. Here's to instructional coaching!
After realizing that I didn't give much in the way of tangible advice, (and, getting inspired by Karl's advice) I am adding one last piece of advice for new teachers:
Use rewards.
First semester I refused to give rewards. I thought it was childish. I thought that by showing these high schoolers respect, and challenging them daily, that they, in turn, would rise to that challenge. Well, I was wrong, and Wong, Dr. Monroe, Ben Guest, and the Reluctant Disciplinarian were right. My transformation came sometime at the end of November. I was at my wit's end with a certain class -- they had gotten into a pattern of lazy, chit-chatting groupwork. They weren't getting much of anything done. A heroic third-year teacher (to this day, I am in debt to RK) suggested that I quietly set small pieces of candy on the desks of a hardworking group.
Within 48 hours of that advice, the entire classroom environment had changed. When I said, "Go ahead and move into your groups" kids would rush to get their desks together, hurry their partners, and immediately start reading and discussing their books aloud. They asked eachother questions (I often dropped a piece of candy down for questioning a group member) and began to actually get into the book. It was amazing. Of course, I was spending an arm and a leg on mini-Snickers, and mini-Reeses, but it was worth it.
With this revolution in mind, I re-vamped my classroom management plan in January. I began using a ticket system -- something I had hitherto chalked up as childish, time-consuming, and annoying. I never have a moment where no one raises their hands -- students race to get their hand in the air for a chance to get a ticket each day. Now I still think this is childish, but my students love it so much that I just don't mind anymore. On my end of the year evaluation sheets, a large number of students wrote some derivative of "More candy, more movies, more fun stuff" (note answer #1 and #2 can be earned with tickets) so things can't be going all that badly....
Perhaps someday, if I end up teaching in an environment where learning itself is a reward and an excitement, I will stop using tickets and rewards. But in this environment, the kids are not intrinsically motivated by the material - so, in my opinion, something else must do.
Although my specific techniques for classroom management changed subtly over the course of two years, each change would fit within the same basic philosophy. In managing my classroom, I aim for the following:
Give students plenty of choices to do the right thing. I have 4-5 sequential consequences that students work through before they are sent out. (Most recently, this has included copying increasingly longer paragraphs about the importance of education) By giving them multiple, sequential consequences, they have plenty of options to “back away”. If a student begins to explode over a consequence, chances are, he or she will calm down and concede once given a second punishment, and a moment to reflect. Sending that child to the office after the first explosion simply magnifies the problem – now they are missing class, and their punishment is out of my control.
Keep classroom behavior under my control until absolutely necessary. I also use this long ladder of consequences to prolong sending a student to the office– which would take their punishment out of my control. I want the students to clearly see the strength of my authority – not the fact that I have to rely on the office to handle problems. If most behavior problems are handled in the room, the students will recognize that I have authority. When a student does reach the office step, that consequence will carry more weight by its infrequency.
Keep the mood firm, but lighthearted. I made the mistake, at the start of the year, of being just a little too strict, something that summer training made me believe was not possible. My students reacted each day with frustration and anger and took the wind completely out of my sails when I needed it most. What I eventually came to realize is that a little positive energy goes a very long way. A joke here, and smile there, can change the entire atmosphere of a classroom. Humor can defuse an agitated student, and kindness can warm (most) angry hearts. Students treated with these small gestures will then respond better to directives and are much more likely to follow my rules.
My warning to the first years: do not look at my last bullet point and take that as vindication that you don't have to be tough with your students. You need to be tough. I am MUCH better off for having started out harder. If I were to do it again, all would be the same. Start hard, but make sure the students know you have a heart. A kind word after class, a moment spent asking about their weekend, a comment about their work or their shoes or whatever.... will go a long, long way, even if you just assigned them a detention and called their mother twice this week.
So, the biggest change in my classroom management plan was learning that "strict" and "kind" can coexist, that showing love is not showing vulnerability, and that sharing my own experiences and interests isn't necessarily undermining my authority. In fact, doing all of these things will encourage my students to follow rules, respect my consequences and generally "do right". It makes the job of classroom managing a whole lot easier.
In five Mississippi counties, the average resident spends more than 13 percent of their income on gasoline. According to the graphic, one of them appears to be mine.
This week I wrote a curriculum map with my fellow teachers for our summer school classroom. I have been asked to create a curriculum map once before - in October or so. At the time, I was swamped. I couldn't think past the next two days, let alone a full week, or god knows, an entire semester. I am not a natural procrastinator, and every moment spent on a curriculum map (that I may or may not have used) was one less moment spent planning for the week ahead. To top it off, my administrators only gave us about three days -- not enough time for such a huge task.
So, my first curriculum map was basically worthless. I stuck to the truth for the first few weeks, then just typed in random objectives. I never looked at it or thought about it again.
This time around, I had more time, a group, and a much more manageable curriculum to map out. It was easier. That being said, I find it incredibly difficult to map out English objectives. The four competencies are all so dependent on one another, that is difficult to divide them with any success. And because you rely on texts to teach the material, and often texts will take multiple classes or weeks to complete, it can be hard to map out specific objectives without first choosing texts. If you plan to teach irony, symbolism, and foreshadowing in the first few days of week 3, you better go find a short story that clearly and easily displays all three to read for those days. I still haven't found the best way to search for texts based on English concepts -- a Google search doesn't usually cut it, and rarely will I even find the full text of the story even if I discover that it contains the concepts I need. (insert plug here for my "national teacher's wiki", where full-texts will be catagorized and searchable not just by author and subject, but also by objectives and English concepts).
So the fogginess of the English curriculum was probably the most difficult challenge. The only other challenge we ran into was that we wanted to give our first-years the flexibility to choose their own texts, and design their own projects in the final weeks -- so constraining them to certain objectives seemed a bit unfair.
I think curriculum maps are basically a great idea, but I think, to do an English one well, its necessary to start with a lot more time. (As in, way more time than we have in a summer school session). I am planning to start my fall curriculum planning NEXT WEEK. And I won't even get close to done by the end of the summer....
According to The Law of Schools, Students and Teachers in a Nutshell:
..if academic penalities have an academic connection, then the school regulation will prevail. Where a school board withheld credit from a student for missing twenty-four class periods, explicitly stated the purpose was academic, and the student's grades were reduced for each unapproved absence, then the court upheld the procedure.....
I think I may scour my district handbook for any reason why I wouldn't be allowed to do this. Imposing a grade penalty on absences might actually be a good idea for me. Especially if I end up teaching seniors again next year -- whose parents don't mind signing them out of school mid-day for no good reason, and who seem to disappear for vast stretches of time come April and May.
One of the biggest problems in my district, in my mind, is the unbelievable absenteeism. Students are not punished for missing school in my district. At all. We threaten their parents that something MIGHT happen, but they know as well as we do, that nothing will. This book talks of parents getting arrested and students thrown in jail for truancy -- for half the number of absences that many of my students accrued this year. We have none of these sorts of threats to hold over our student's heads, and teachers are held responsible for catching those students up -- and pressured to pass them.
I think, a clearly stated grade penalty for a certain number of absences might just keep the kids in my room. Maybe. I'll have to keep mulling it over....
