Reflections

This Fall has been a judgmental time for the American public educational system, especially with the release of "Waiting for Superman." It appears that the public perception vs. reality in some areas can be very skewed. As an educator I'm not sure how to correct this perception. My theme for this school year has been "Taking Small Steps." I can't control what the American public as a whole thinks, but I can work on effectively communicating with the most important public - the parents of my students. I have found that at the Mid Level, it has been hard to keep the lines of communication open and continuous with parents. To remedy this, my team has been using a community page on Facebook to post not only classroom assignments but updates on what is happening at the school. We have 86 fans of our page, so by using this one tool we are consistently trying to actively involve the parents (which is one of the 16 characteristics of Successful Schools for Young Adolescents).

With that being said, something that I kept coming back to this semester was: There is ALWAYS room for improvement. I think being willing and open to try new things in my classroom to improve student learning is one of those small steps in the right direction. Last month at the staff meeting, I presented the literacy strategy RAFT (Role, Audience, Format, Topic) to my colleagues. The funny thing was - I had never tried a RAFT in my class. So at the end of our Edgar A. Poe Unit, I had the students pick a character from one of the Poe stories/poems we had read (role), had them present to the class (audience) a Facebook page (format), including information from the story/poem (topic). The students had a lot of fun with this and were able to make connections and inferences that they might not have made if I had just asked them to write a plot summary! It was a riot to see who they chose to be "friends" with the character and ads that targeted the character. Through status updates they were able to share pertinent parts of the story/poem in a way that made sense to them and in an engaging way.

One small step at a time in the right direction...

Just for Fun

I watched a couple of podcasts - Ken Robinson on RS Animate - "Changing Educational Paradigms" and Sugata Mitra's "The Child-Driven Education" TED Talk. Though these had different topics, they both were strong proponents for students working in collaborative groups. In the work world, we are hardly ever asked to do tasks by ourselves, so why are we still asking kids to discover, brainstorms, and learn solitarily?
My Math class is entirely basked on group work. I have 4 groups of 4 and have recently tried separating the groups by gender. (The jury is still out on whether that is helpful or not - the girls are working well together and my rambunctious boy is still eagerly leading his group off task...) This afternoon when 1 group was not focused, I went over to them, sat down, and told them the story of Sugata Mitra's experiments in India and abroad that showed that students can figure out complex concepts by themselves. (Of course, I left out the part that said, "children will learn to do what they want to do" - because my guys truly were not interested in solving 2-step equations using pictures!) Anyway, I built them up - that I knew they were fully capable, that working together was so much better than trying to work on their own, and that they could figure out anything without a teacher spoon-feeding them everything. I was pleasantly surprised that for the last 25 minutes of class they were able to do just that - work together and discover the steps to solving equations.