Technology Team-Up

Beyond my laptop and a projector, my use of technology in classroom has been minimal. (Which is a significant amount of technology compared to what most of my English high school teachers used. How did they teach without projectors? How? Blows my freaking mind!) I don’t think that is shocking news from a teacher working in a critical needs school districts. We only had one cart of 30 laptops at the beginning to the school year to share between all middle school teachers. Very recently, two more carts of laptops were added to our school inventory, and now all teachers are trying to incorporate more technology in the classroom. So competition for their use, while not intense, takes some flexibility and compromise.

Last week, I used the laptops to practice vocabulary and state test questions with Kahoot. I know Kahoot is the new big bandwagon that teachers are jumping on. I first heard about it from Abigail Condit and then Alicia Sparer walked me through how to use it during a class weekend. Students really get into the game-show format of it, so I don’t lose their interest as quickly while practicing state-test questions. Points are awarded based on correct answers and how quickly they answer the question. The game updates them to their overall place and has a leaderboard they can look at after each question. But best of all, I can save the data at the end of each Kahoot and analyze what questions my students missed, the standards I need to cover more, and which students are struggling the most with understanding the questions. I have only used it twice in the classroom so far, but I would like to keep using it up until state testing.

However, there is definitely a time and place for when I use it. My students love when we use technology. Even if we are researching information for an essay or doing something educational, it becomes infinitely more interesting to them if it is on a laptop. I’m glad technology can increase engagement about once a week, but I don’t want to rely on it in the classroom. I want my students to be invested in their education and the lesson without the hassle of passing out laptops, teaching my students necessary computer skills, and recollecting the laptops without losing necessary time for the lesson.

Sometimes, incorporating technology can feel gimmicky for me, that the only reason my students to paid attention to the lesson that day is because they had some kind of electronic device in front of them. I worry about my students who want to go to college. What are they going to do when they have the kind of professor that just dives straight into the lesson and teaches? No gimmicks, no tricks, no opening sets. If they aren’t being entertained by the teacher, what’s going to get them engaged? When the professor isn’t doing everything in their power to encourage student engagement (which let’s be fair, would be near impossible in a lecture class), students will need the self-discipline to work hard and focus despite their boredom. Technology can become a crutch if it’s the only way I can get my students engaged.

The TV, the other type of technology constantly available in my classroom, has Google Chromecast and can't be used easily with my Mac laptop or Mac desktop computer. So it's used for Kahoot when I have a Google Chromebook.

7th/8th Block playing Kahoot

Kahoot data results for a section of my 5th/6th block class. It's basically a color-coordinated version of what Sam Williams taught us to make in summer school. Except it's a million times better now that I don't have to puzzle my way through Google Forms and Sheets.

Assessment Adjustment

At the beginning of February, I had a cumulative January test, which covered all the grammar concepts we had discussed, types of irony, and major details in “The Interlopers.” And my students bombed it. A majority of my students scored below 69% (an F at good ole H.W. Byers Middle School). Even my top students barely earned Cs and Bs. When I finished grading tests that Sunday, I was furious. I was mad at my students for their lack of attention in the classroom and inability to retain information. But I was also frustrated with myself. Had I made the test too hard? Did I not simplify the concepts well enough? Did I give too few practice opportunities?

When I passed back graded work on Monday, I decided to make a few changes:

First, no more class time would be spent on test corrections. If students wanted to make test corrections – which I wholeheartedly supported – they would need to come to after school tutoring hours to do it. Class just got too unruly on test correction days. Some students would be finished 10 minutes into a 103-minute block. Others simply copied correct answers from nearby classmates. Very few corrected their mistakes and learned anything from it. I also wondered if my students knew they would get test correction opportunities with every test, what encouraged them to give 110% on preparing and taking the test the first time around.

Second, I needed to review grammar concepts more thoroughly. Instead of doing 20 minutes of sustained silent reading at the end of my block class, which my students fought me on for the full 20 minutes, I used that time to have them complete a short grammar worksheet. I gave pointers on how to approach and think about the assignment and worked through several examples with them. Then I released my students to work independently as I walked around the room answering questions and monitoring progress. I finished off the short review by having every student stand up. Those who answered one of the problems correctly would be allowed to sit back down. This ensured that all students were participating and sharing responses, as well as allowed me to informally assess their understanding. Then, the grammar concepts I reviewed in depth that week would appear on the Friday test.

Based on their responses, students would be work alone (1), in pairs (2), or with me in a small group (3).

Third, I built in more time for practice of new concepts covered that week. Based on the February 3^rd test scores, my students needed more time to interact with new material. Instead of just practicing new material on the same day the students took notes on it, I had practice assignments ready for when we finished text discussions early. I also tried to work in some self-evaluation and flexible grouping (based on student responses). However, I didn’t proceduralize flexible groups well, and my students who claimed to have the strongest understanding weren’t happy to be working alone and kept chatting with the students working in pairs (this part of informal assessment will need some tweaking). The new concepts we covered that week would also appear on the Friday test.

Fourth, I would move to weekly tests. Eighth graders are difficult to manage on Fridays, so I made this change mostly for the sake of my own sanity. However, this decision was also part of an effort to get students on a weekly, predictable schedule: Mondays they began a reciprocal reading assignment (due Thursday), Tuesdays they would cover a new literary skill and review an old grammar or literary skill, Wednesdays they would cover new vocabulary or a new grammar skill and review an old grammar skill, Thursdays we would discuss the Monday text and review for the test, and Friday we would take the test. If I could stick to a schedule, then students could know what to expect on a weekly basis and not be surprised by the Friday tests.

Finally, I decided to add a state-test style passage to each of my weekly tests. This would allow me to easily assess their reciprocal reading annotations as well as expose them to the texts and questions they would see on the state test. Although the initial exposure is good, I need to find a way to incorporate a discussion of those materials after the tests have been graded in order to fully develop student understanding. I’m not sure how to go about doing this last step yet.

By making these changes, I produced a test with less questions to grade that covered old material (for the sake of student retention), assessed understanding of new material, and was still rigorous. Another bonus was that students weren’t able to speed through the test in 20 minutes thanks to the reciprocal reading passage.

At the time I am writing this blog – February 12, 2017 – I have only completed one week with these changes. I still have one class’s test to grade, but overall, scores are showing significant improvement. Scores could be higher, as many of the grades are Ds; however, this is significantly better than the 30-50% averages I saw for the previous test. If I continue to be responsive to the results of my assessments, hopefully student understanding and achievement will increase as I address and remediate student weaknesses in the classroom.

My new testing format:

The Marshall County Village: District-wide Collaboration

In mid December, I received a forwarded email from my principal. Our new superintendent, Dr. Lela Hale, wanted us to meet at Byhalia High School on our January 5th teacher workday, section off by grade level and subject, and share a best practice example with our fellow teachers. I remember rolling my eyes as I backed out of the email: there was no way I was putting together a presentation over my winter break.

Professional development instructions outlined by Dr. Hale and forwarded to the teachers and staff in the district.*

            Although I technically followed through on that thought – I promise, I brought my laptop and had material to share if needed! – I found Dr. Hale’s professional development to be thoughtful.

            We started the meeting with a discussion of the different types of teacher/administrative leaders: runners, joggers, walkers, and so on. (This all somehow correlated to these types of people riding a bus, with the administrators being the bus drivers. At the time, this all made sense, but upon reflection, the metaphor became labored.) Listening to what Dr. Hale had to say about leadership in schools and her expectations for student learning, lesson plans (she encouraged everyone to write out detailed lesson plans and said she was working on a district-wide format!), community involvement, and professional attire, I thought we might have a good leader in charge of our district.

            After her introduction, we broke off into our grade-level/subject groups. I was in a classroom with the other 7^th and 8^th grade ELA teachers in my district (Landon Pollard supervising and Liz Towle waving hello as she passed by). As a group, we discussed specific issues we faced in our middle school ELA classrooms. We posed each issue to the group and the recorder wrote them down on a larger sheet of paper. Once we voiced our issues, the group shared ideas and solutions for dealing with the various issues. I walked away with some ideas to try and/or consider for my own classroom.

Our notes from the 7th/8th Grade ELA professional development room.*

            When you are working in your school and trying not to get buried under all the grading, lesson planning, and documentation, you sometimes forget you are not an island. You are not functioning alone in your school and definitely not within the district. I appreciated the way Dr. Hale brought all the teachers together and gave us the opportunity to collaborate with others outside our school, but within our district. I think our school district could benefit from more collaboration among the schools, the administrators, and the teachers. My only hope is that Dr. Hale doesn’t stop with this one workday. To have a lasting impact on teachers within the district and to foster further collaboration, we will need district-wide workdays more frequently and more consistently planned.

*Hindsight is 20/20. I'm wishing now I had taken picture of the 7th/8th Grade ELA room, but I wasn't thinking at the time, "Ah yes, this event would make for a great response to our next blog post so I should take some pictures." These pictures are are the best I got, sorry!

The Curse of Knowledge and a Tactile Activity

Earlier in the school year I read the article, “The Teacher Curse No One Wants to Talk About” (URL: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/the-curse-of-knowledge-chris-reddy), which discusses the curse of knowledge concept. (Something I had never heard of either.) Essentially, once you have learned something and understand it fairly well, you forget how difficult it was to learn that skill. I recognized this problem in my classroom. I would give what I felt were fairly straightforward, simple notes followed by one, maybe two assignments. When my eighth graders didn’t master the material despite how simply I (thought I) taught it, I was confused. This article helped me realize I was moving too fast for my students, many of who were seeing the material for the first time. (For my high schoolers, a lot of the material was review/wasn’t their first time seeing it.)

This second term, we have been learning about point of view. In an effort to strengthen my students’ abilities to identify point of view, we have done several assignments (more than the one I assigned last year) and I incorporated POV questions into the daily bell ringers the last couple of weeks. Worksheets can get boring after a while though, so I tried a more tactile mini-project.

The assignment came from a Teachers-Pay-Teachers curriculum I purchased a month or so ago. The students were given 32 short passages. Their job was to identify the point of view in each passage, cut out the blocks, and glue them to a poster under one of four POV categories: first person, second person, third person limited, and third person omniscient. I made myself readily available to answer student questions, as well. I moved about the room answering questions as they came up or waved students over to my desk to work with them. (I felt more teacher-y than I have in a long time.) Initially, this was supposed to be a 50-minute-period project, but it became clear to me that most of my students would need extra time. I extended the project an extra day. I was pleasantly surprised by how attentive and careful most of my students were in completing the project. I even had time to work one-on-one with my IEP and struggling students.

Page one of the Point of View sorting assignment.

I think the tactile approach to learning was a refreshing change of pace for my eighth-grade students. A large majority of my students only missed 1 or 2 examples too. I was incredibly proud of the final grades! I hung up several of the 100s on my Star Student board (which had been neglected up until this point. Whoops!), making sure to pick students that may not be used to being recognized academically. And because we spent more time on this assignment, I made it a test grade to help those students out.  The few low grades I received were from students who didn’t ask for help, indicated they didn’t need help when I checked in with them, and/or weren’t working on the project diligently over the two-day period and just glued down squares randomly in an effort to finish the assignment. Although it was another identification of point of view assignment, my kids were more engaged overall than when they were asked just to read and write.

My slightly less neglected "Star Students" board.

Perceptions of Teaching

I often get frustrated in describing my job to other people, which is usually to family or friends. I am lucky to have a support group that understands teaching is a difficult job – for the most part – however, I can never get across to them just how hard teaching truly is. I think only other teachers or people who have worked with impoverished children in some capacity would understand. I need many people to take their definition of hard or difficult and multiple it by about 1,000. I am one third of the way into my second year of teaching and I am still overwhelmed by the workload, the never-ending to do list, the needs of my students, expectations from my administration but with little support, and all the extra tasks I’m expected to carry out as a teacher (parent contact, game duty, curriculum development with little experience, etc.). I think the best description for this job that I have used recently was “I am a part-time parent to 40 kids.” (#bless to all my teacher friends who are part-time parents to 100+ kids. I admire and I am in awe of what you are doing.)

When it comes to dealing with teaching misconceptions, very few come from my family and friends. I have told them various stories from my classroom, so they empathize more than criticize. Most misconceptions I deal with come indirectly from the public and politicians. Those misconceptions affect societal attitudes about teaching and determine the amount of money distributed to public districts, schools, and teachers. In general, people look down on the teaching profession or blame teachers for every academic deficit in this country. Sometimes, it’s difficult to work knowing I am under that kind of scrutiny, that so much of my job security is tied to students who may or may not show up and put forth their best effort on state tests and whose best effort still may not be good enough by politicians’ standards.

I have had to deal with my own misconceptions though too. My biggest motivation for joining the Mississippi Teacher Corps was to help impoverished schools and students. I thought I would show up to school with engaging lessons ready to go, have a majority of students that cared about their education, and that I would see a visible impact on my students from my efforts in the classroom. However, teaching is a lot of losing, frustration, crappy lessons, patience, give-and-take with the students, and disillusionment about what I am actually accomplishing in the classroom for very little emotional pay off from day to day. Teaching definitely is not a feel good job most of the time, so don’t let movies like Freedom Writers mislead you.

Pair reading The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.

Tough Decisions

I personally think teaching is nothing but a series of tough decisions, some carrying more weight than others. I constantly ask myself: Should I escalate the consequence or give another verbal cue? It is better to ignore or acknowledge this student’s comment? Does this student’s behavior today warrant a phone call home? Do I have enough materials for this lesson? Am I challenging my students enough? Am I challenging them too much? Am I actually doing everything I can to reach my students? (Ha, no to that.) I don’t know if it’s just a quirk of being a teacher, but I spend a decent amount of time second-guessing what I am doing.

            I am only about seven weeks into the school year at this point (when I was writing this blog) and at this point, I haven’t made any tough decision that stands out in my mind. The school year is still too new. And I think I have repressed many of the truly trying days from last year.

Overall though, one of my hardest decisions as an educator had more to do with me than my students. I have already touched on this briefly in a previous blog post (Something Old, Something New), so I am not going to get super in-depth. Last year, I was struggling with the workload, the stress, and classroom management. I was unhappy with my job and I knew I needed to do something different. I wanted to try teaching chemistry, or at the very least have less preps. That is when I started thinking about moving to a new school district.

If I left, I could potentially teach what I wanted. Or I could move to a larger school with more teachers and less preps per a teacher as a result. But this also meant I would be just another teacher leaving H.W. Byers. The English III and IV teacher before only lasted a year. Same with the one before that. So I started asking for advice and input from others. I talked to my mother, my friends from MTC, and I even sent an email to Sarah Jacobs.

Sarah happened to be very adamant on staying at the same school for the two years of MTC and based on her advice, I started to see if any other teaching positions were available within my school that were better suited to my preferences. H.W. Byers High School already had a veteran Chemistry teacher – who briefly toyed with the idea of retiring and ultimately decided to stay on another year – so that turned out not to be an option. Eventually, I learned of an opening in the middle school. I would still be teaching English, but I would be working with younger kids and I would have one less prep. Anything sounded better than what I was doing at the time, so I said yes and accepted the new position.

The most immediate consequence was that I wouldn’t be staying in the high school and staying with my students. But I only moved to the middle school, right across the parking lot. I could have moved a lot farther away. Instead, I still see my old students from time to time. And they actually seem happy to see me. On the other hand, though, they also jokingly ask, “Did we run you off, Ms. Lindsay?” And when they do, I feel like maybe I should have stuck it out in the high school for another year. I mean, it couldn’t have been any worse than the year before.

In the end, I think I made the right decision, though. I only have to plan for two classes this year. I am more firm with the eighth graders (although they are their own brand of crazy). I am a week ahead in lesson plans. I have some reusable material from last year and Liz Towle shared her materials with me as well. I have had less difficulty getting in touch with parents (because most are still involved at this point). I am already reading an extended text with my children. I have better procedures in place. I have a principle who is present and authoritative. Classroom management is a bit of a struggle, but this is only my second year of teaching. I have a lot of growing to do still. I don’t regret my decision to move down a few grades. If you’re miserable or unhappy, can you really expect to do your job well/to the best of your ability? Sometimes, you have to make personal decisions – do what’s best for yourself – in order to be the best teacher (or other choice of profession) you can be.

School Year's Resolutions, Updated

What are 2-3 specific changes you made this year? Why are you making them?

Increased parent contact: In my last blog, I said I wanted to do a better job of contacting parents. Originally, I thought about sending home weekly progress reports that would have updates on grades, missing assignments and general classroom behavior. I even went so far to make the weekly progress report form. However, that turned out not to be practical for multiple reasons: 1) I’m not a fast grader so the grades wouldn’t always be up-to-date, 2) the process of filling out 40 weekly progress reports regularly would be time consuming, and 3) my “block classes” are actually two back-to-back ELA courses – courses for which I have to record separate grades. So I nixed that idea for now and I am sticking to traditional forms of parent contact.

               Three weeks into my second year of teaching and I am already doing a better job contacting parents. I’m still scared to call parents, sure, but the ones I have communicated with so far are willing to work with me to positively impact student behavior in the classroom. In the next week or so, I hope to finally catch up on my grading. We are close to halfway through the first term and I would like to contact parents of failing or struggling students while there is plenty of time to intervene and help that student improve his or her grade. If I keep up with the parent contact, I think classroom management will be running more smoothly by the end of the year and I will have more documentation in case of a failing student.

Classroom library: This year I added my classroom library like I had been hoping to do at the close of last school year. Having books in an ELA classroom always added to the credibility of that class, in my mind. Is it really big right now? No, but I plan to add to it as the year progresses. (I also want to get beanbag chairs and more bookshelves.) By the first or second week, I already had students asking to look through the books and even borrow some. I also had multiple students ask when we were going to the school library! I love being in a situation where students appreciate reading more.

A promising beginning to my classroom library. I pulled  most of these books from my personal library.

More writing! We are three weeks in – about to start the fourth week – and I have already had two writing-based assessments. My writing elective is also in the middle of creating a five-paragraph essay. This is compared to the two whole essays my seniors wrote last year. I wanted to establish early that we are writing in 8^th grade, we are writing the whole year, and we can significantly improve our writing if we really push ourselves. I want my students takeaway for this year to be evidence-based paragraphs and that formal essays consist of introduction, body, and conclusion paragraphs. I will feel pretty accomplished as a teacher if my students can consistently produce well-structured writing.

How do you feel now as compared to last year this time?

You can bet that this school year already has its own set of frustrations, but I’m in a much better situation school-wise and living-situation-wise. There are more procedures in the middle school for students, such as how they are supposed to walk in the hallways (On the green line!), behavior expectations and a regulated referral consequence ladder, and a positive behavior intervention system (PBIS) implemented by the principal. The teachers are also held accountable in parent contact and behavior documentation and completion of weekly lesson plans. Writing lesson plans again has been a bit of an adjustment; however, it also forces me to be a week ahead in lesson planning, which is hard to complain about. Having structure and expectations from my administrator – which was practically nonexistent last year – will push me to be a better teacher. Teaching is still an incredibly challenging career, but surviving the school year no longer seems like an insurmountable task. I expect more high points and fewer low points this school year. (And maybe my students will actually learn something!)