STEP Summary Reflection

STANDARD ONE: Engaging and supporting all students in learning

For much of my student teaching year, I gave little thought to the engagement standard, as I considered it a strength that I could rely on. I have recently realized that I have barely scratched the surface.

I connect with students not so much by drawing on their own lives or particular interests, but rather by establishing quickly that I can offer value and I won’t waste their time. I am able to connect with student motivation by making academic achievement seem both logical and possible. I don’t try to convince students to accept my own values, but rather work within their own value system. I was (randomly) given a strong class, but the low failure rate is due in some part to my ability to motivate students who usually don’t bother to try. Moreover, some students are getting much better grades than they have ever received in math, even if they were never at risk of failing.

And yet, I never really thought about what my students would do with a different teacher, with different (perfectly valid) priorities. In playing to their preferences, I had given them the experience of success—but many teachers, for perfectly valid reasons—will not have the same values as I do. I had done nothing to help my students negotiate that hurdle.

Suddenly, instead of being a strength, my ability to engage students seemed too shallow. How could I help my students continue to succeed and grow once they’d left my classroom?

I have been spending the last six weeks removing much of the scaffolding I use to engage and motivate my students. I told them they had succeeded fantastically with the support I’d given them, and it was time to remove the training wheels. They squawked briefly, but have been amazed at what they have been able to do on their own and in groups. I don’t think that all my underachieving and underperforming students will carry on their new behavior to next year, but some of them will.

I now understand that this standard holds some of the great challenges of my teaching career. I have an outline for development in place, thanks to my experiences this year.

At the same time, I am very proud to say that some students have achieved far beyond anything they expected because of my individualized support. [Descriptive info of one student omitted] When I took over the class in January, I swept away all behavior obstacles from his path and adamantly informed him that I would not fail him, because an F would be a lie. I told him I expected him to work in class and to always try on tests, and that he was forbidden to make a liar of me. He was surprised, but obliged. Sometimes he sleeps through class, many times he goofs around with his classmates, and he is incredibly creative at finding ways to be disruptive with classroom equipment--yardsticks, ELMOs, calculators, you name it. But when I collar him before class and say I need him to work with his group, he obliges, and he always works hard on tests. So despite never doing homework and his occasional classtime naps, he's got a [grade omitted]. ]

A few weeks ago, I was checking in with all my juniors to ensure that they were taking math next year. [name omitted] told me he was taking Algebra II/Trig again. I told him he would be taking it again over my dead body.

He said "Well, I can't go on to pre-calc. I won't be any good at it."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm lazy."

I laughed. "You aren't lazy. You are incredibly disengaged, and you really don't see school as an important part of your life. But you are also extremely bright, and I really think you should contact your other teachers to see how many of them you can pass before the year is over."

He looked extremely taken aback. "I'm not lazy?"

"No, you goofball. So take pre-calc next year, or I'll be very annoyed."

That day, as my CT said, the waters of the Red Sea parted. [Name omitted] showed up at lunch and for the first time, did a homework assignment and asked politely if he could get credit for it. Granted, he was a major disruption, distracting students who needed the help a bit more. But there he was.

I don't know if my progress with [name omitted] will hold up next year. But I'm glad he has the experience of being a strong math student once. That's still an accomplishment I'm proud of. In the future, I will work to make sure students like [name omitted] will do well the following year, too.

STANDARD TWO: Creating and maintaining effective environments for student learning

I have a commanding personality that carries me through even challenging environments, such as classrooms dominated by students with little investment in academic success. My approach to classroom management is best described by a highway metaphor. In many classes with reasonably motivated students, they will understand the basic rules without my needing to lay them out. The classroom rules are similar to those of a freeway—plenty of room to maneuver. In a class that requires more management, the students are doing the equivalent of city driving. There are more rules, more control, more restrictions.

In the past year, I’ve noticed that teachers have widely varying tolerances for management standards. My CT and I have very similar approaches to classroom procedures and policies—namely, we have very few. I am not a person of ritual and routine and any attempt to impose numerous routines on my students would be risky, asI don’t have the temperament or interest to follow it up.

On the other hand, my CT is far less tolerant of random, occasional talking during direct teaching than I am. He finds it very annoying if the same students occasionally murmur or talk while he’s teaching—while he’s not perturbed if different students talk occasionally. It’s the disrespect that bothers him, not the talking. I make my judgments in a different context. If the same students occasionally murmur to each other, I tell them to hush, but I’m not particularly bothered by it. As an inveterate gabber, I’m more tolerant of chat. I’m far more bothered by students who are zoned out and paying no attention at all than I am of attentive students who occasionally whisper. (Note that this difference is to be considered in the context of an overall quiet and attentive classroom.)

I am going to be paying close attention to these preferences as I come across them, and compare them to my own. My CT and I had very informative, passionate discussions on the subject and I learned a lot, even if I didn’t change my priorities.

My placement school, Sequoia High School, has very few status problems. As the school has a decades-long history of diverse student bodies, no one group has universal status among all other groups. It’s impossible to be the “mean girls” at Sequoia, because there are easily hundreds of students who have no idea that the mean girls exist.

Thus, I have never had to deal with a status problem in my classroom, and it’s never an issue I’ve run into in my test prep classes. I’d like to think that this is in part due to my management. I do not allow the most involved and competent students to dominate class discussions. My class discussions always engage the broad middle as opposed to the top tier students.

However, status problems are notoriously difficult, and I will be ever vigilant for signs of status issues and actively seek advice and guidance if I ever experience it in my classroom.

Finally, I realize that nowhere in the above discussion have I mentioned classroom norms, behavior expectations, and procedures. I simply don’t have trouble establishing these without spelling them out, and was encouraged to notice that many of Sequoia’s teachers have similar experiences. I hope to continue with this unwritten, hasslefree, not-too-terribly earnest method.

STANDARD THREE: Understanding and organizing subject matter for student learning

Normally, I feel very comfortable about understanding and organizing subject matter. I love explaining things and as a private instructor, I considered this a strength. However, I have not felt as strong explaining things in a classroom since I began teaching in public school.

I have wondered about this quite a bit, and come up with several root causes. The first is the sheer size of the class. I usually teach classes of 10-20, and I have found it difficult to read the entire class with those ten extra people. Moreover, the CPM curriculum doesn’t allow for a lot of classroom discussion, which is something I have traditionally encouraged. CPM focuses on small group engagement and discovery. Finally, I am a creature of the whiteboard, and I have the ELMO at Sequoia. I was extremely uncomfortable with the overhead display at first, and am still nowhere near proficient. I like the space of a white board, the ability to work on one equation, move to another on a different part of the board, and then move back. None of that is doable with an ELMO. I am pleased with the progress I made over the year. By the end of the year, I was running CPS ("clicker") tests for my class, and ELMO was about as threatening as its counterpart on Sesame Street. However, it's still a challenge.

I find the link between lecturing/direct teaching and technology fascinating. I had never really considered it before this completely new experience.

I have also discovered all sorts of new niches to subject matter organization. One area that I've been challenged by is the introduction of new topics. I believe I have improved considerably in flowing through the introduction to the first classroom task, but it's an area I never had to worry about before. I've also discovered that I sometimes have blind spots about various minutiae of the subject and I need to learn to be more alert to these. Sometimes I've had to hedge my way through a question because I realized I didn't actually know the "proper" answer. This has been humbling, to say the least. I've learned how to identify the signals of "blind spot" and am paying attention when they come up. I've got a running list of items I find time to investigate and understand more thoroughly.

STANDARD FOUR: Planning instruction and designing learning experiences for all students

In one of my first C&I reader response papers, I wrote that I didn’t see much point to curriculum planning: “This is, after all, why God created textbooks.” I like textbooks.

As I worked with three other teachers with a centralized plan, I wasn't anticipating the need for much curriculum development. And yet, as I went through my C&I classes and talked with the instructors and other students about different ways to organize curriculum, I kept on thinking up activities. Sometimes they were activities that emphasize a more traditional approach. For example, the CPM curriculum introduced polynomial division using the area model. I thought this masked the relationship to a framework that most students were familiar with, so I completely redid the unit to begin with traditional division and follow up with the area model. I then briefly introduced synthetic division, just to show them that there was still another way. I then had a class discussion about preferences, and how our different strengths can be revealed in our preferences for learning or procedures. I then asked the students to "vote" for their preferred method, and the class had a near 50-50 split. The students were delighted to see that not everyone had the same preferences; I overheard students discussing which method they liked best and why.

Then there was the time that the CPM text called for the students to cut out circles and fold them into quarters to use the radius to measure the circumference of a circle. I thought that wasted a lot of time, and came up with the idea of giving the students two paper circles and challenging them to discover a way to use one circle to measure the circumference of the other in radians. I broke them up into groups of eight and they all figured it out within 15 minutes--not because it was easy, but because they were interested.

My probability unit was the only extensive curriculum I designed, and I’m extremely proud of it. The concept, that of a student working as an intern at a software development company, was unusual and engaging to high school students. The graphics were really beautiful.

I have resolved to make curriculum development a higher priority in my professional life. I will set myself the task of designing at least one unit a year, so that I can build up a library—which, of course, I will probably leave on a random workstation and not be able to find it, so again, “organization” in the literal sense is something I will work on.

STANDARD FIVE: Assessing student learning

One innovation I’ve developed this year is the “extra credit test”, aka formative assessments. If I need to know where my students are, I develop an assessment and give it to them without warning. The only responsibility they have is to show me what they know. Students who don’t try will be given fewer points. I have given four such “extra credit tests”, and they have all been informative and helpful. They’ve also given the students the experience of taking a test with the pressure off. I’ve talked with several of my “test anxious” students about using these tests to build up resistance to that anxiety.

The most immediate information I get is from classwork, which is an essential element of my teaching—far more than homework, which is close to optional. I circle the room and watch students work constantly, getting a sense for what the group understands and needs help with. I have often realized that a CPM discovery unit is not completely sinking in, based on my oral assessments of students during classwork, and supplemented with a summarizing worksheet.

I am generally a good test grader, fair and consistent. But for my own peace of mind, I have to grade tests several time to be sure that I haven’t overlooked something. I hope to become more precise as I gain experience in grading.

I participated in the weekly planning meeting for our course, and found the discussions to be tremendously helpful in understanding large group student assessment. I have also found the experience of the other teachers invaluable in understanding how to design summative assessments. I developed two different unit tests for the course in the past two months and I am certain I would not have been able to do this earlier in the year.

In terms of setting individual student learning goals, I made an essential discovery this month. As I passed out the last unit test, I reminded students that they could always come in and correct the results to one higher letter grade. I do this routinely as I return each test.

After class that day, [name omitted] approached me and asked if I really meant it. I looked at her in perplexity—of course I meant it. The next day, she came in with her last five unit tests and asked me if we could review them all.

[name omitted] is forty seven degrees of adorable. She participates in class, works hard, and we have had only positive, cheerful, laughing interactions. I was truly shocked that she hadn’t understood that I would readily work with her and help her get more points and a deeper understanding.

Her uncertainty made me aware that I had a gap in my classroom assessment, something that until that moment I thought was unquestionably a strength.

I focus my attention and learning goals on students who are underperforming or underachieving. I do not ignore my “working to ability” students (regardless of grade), but I do tend to assume that they’ve got their act together and are meeting their goals. I therefore allow these students to drive our interactions, giving them more autonomy—but less guidance—than my underachieving students.

This may have been the right decision, but I was struck by [name omitted] questions. I have met with all my “working to ability” students this year to talk about their learning goals and ask what they need from me before the end of the year. I I don’t believe any of them feel ignored, but I want to be sure that I am giving them the same choices and opportunities that I give the underachievers. I’m not going to assume that they would contact me if they have questions.

And a final note: [name omitted] answered several questions correctly based on knowledge she'd earned in our last few lunchtime sessions. She knew it, too, and marked each one with her trademark smiley face.

STANDARD SIX: Developing as a professional educator

My sense of community is casual, but genuine. This year has been a revelation, though, in how much more I can do.

At Sequoia, I learned how to make myself available to students at lunchtime, and my review sessions became really well attended. Some students come because they have decided they need help. Other students come because their parents emailed me, found out about them, and ordered their son or daughter to attend.

Recently, I have realized that I haven’t been as vigilant in ensuring that all my students’ parents have the ability to demand their kids come in for help. I am very good at ordering my students in when I think they need help, but that’s not enough. For example, [names omitted], two strong math students, generally get [grades omitted] on tests but slip occasionally—just enough to keep their average at a [grades omitted]. I will give them the opportunity to “test up” and both will almost certainly receive a [grade omitted] as their final grade. But that’s my solution. I may not have given their parents the ability to enforce their own solution. They may not have known about the lunch time sessions, or understood what options I offered for additional help. [names omitted] are both bright young men who aren’t so much underperforming as they are doing the minimum. I have been successful at motivating them (both were at risk of a [grade omitted] at the beginning of the semester). But I do not give enough thought to the larger community. I don’t deliberately give different parents different opportunities and choices, but that may be the inadvertent result of responding to parents as they email, rather than reaching out. I will be developing a parental communication plan to ensure that all parents understand what they can expect and request, and how I can help them help their children to succeed.

In other areas of professional development, I have three credentials and I want to eventually teach in all three areas. I am also passionately interested in college remediation and placement, a much-neglected area in which student readiness, student test scores, and college ambitions intersect. I took a two-unit directed reading with Professor Rich Shavelson on testing, particularly the SAT/ACT, test coaching, and the research on test prep and under-represented minorities. Our conversations moved into the larger issue of remediation, and Professor Shavelson referred me to Professor Michael Kirst, who has been a tremendous inspiration, suggesting that I email various players in this field and get them to acknowledge what we both agree is a problematic area.

I hope eventually to act as an advocate on this issue, first for whatever school I work for and ultimately for the district or larger community. Professor Kirst confirms my belief that most teachers and school counsellors have little idea of what impact remediation has on their students’ college dreams, much less what role the SAT/ACT plays in that game. I believe I am uniquely qualified to help students and parents understand the impact that test scores have on their opportunities.