Collaborative Project Reflection

Engaging seniors anytime after spring break is a seemingly impossible task. Therefore, Mary Davenport and I created a unit which allowed our seniors to use technology and be creative through the lens of Dr. Seuss' "Oh, the Places You'll Go". When I informed my seniors they would be creating a presentation using Movie Maker and Photo Story about their journey through AVID to present during AVID Family Night, they lit up with excitement. Using technology allows students to express themselves in ways they can't do with glue and poster board. They can find meaningful pictures, use appropriate/fun text, and bring it all together with some music. The students felt empowered by this assignment, and wanted to learn more about how they can use these programs when they are out of school. I showed them films I have made with my family, and the Photo Story I created at the beginning of the year for my students. They loved learning about the two programs, and were eager to begin making other films/Photo Stories after the graduate.

Through this process I started thinking about how I can incorporate more of the excitement I saw in mt AVID students in my other classes. So many times we are forced to stick to the curriculum and the pacing guides and we lose sight of our own creativity as teachers, which in turn makes it so we don't allow our students to be creative either. Next year, instead of paper after paper in my English classrooms, I will use other means and use my data to show why students learn more when they are excited about the assignment than when it is the same thing they did last time. Of course I will still have traditional assignments, but I want to make sure I am showing my students learning can be fun too.

May Blog

As this year comes to a close I am reminded of why we are all here, the students. Too many times the politics of school cloud our brains and make us forget why we work so hard, especially this year. We need to remember there are many teachers around us who ARE here for the students, and who do want to grow and work collaboratively with their peers. WE need to remember that we are not alone in our quest to help students grow and achieve their many dreams. We are not alone, and we need to stand together. My goal for next year, is to do a better job of creating a truly collaborative environment within the English department and throughout the school by using blogs and wikis. I started doing this at the beginning of the year, but was quickly buried. The more access teachers have to resources and the more open communication is between teachers and administrators, the more productive our classrooms will be for our students. I am going to keep this in mind and put it into action as I transition into next year.

April Blog

I had the opportunity to attend a "Differentiated Assessment and Grading" conference this month, and it opened my eyes to the flaws of our current grading system. Too many times grades are based on homework, participation, and formative assessments-when really they should be based on how well the students meet the standards based on authentic summative assessments. If a student can reach the standard without doing the formative assessments or other tasks provided by the teacher, why should he/she have to do those assignments? Or more importantly, why is he/she placed in that class to begin with? We need to be more cognizant of how we are calculating our grades, and what message we are sending our students.

Here are some quotes/information form the conference:
-"Students learn to be their own advocates in a differentiated class, which make sit possible for them to advocate for themselves in a non-differentiated environment."
-"Whoever does the editing does the learning."
-"A 'D' is a coward's 'F'. The student failed, but you didn't have enough guts to tell him."
-If we do not allow students to re-do work, we deny the growth mindset do vital to student maturation, and we are declaring to the student:
*This assignment had no legitimate educational value.
*It's okay if you don't do this work.
*It's okay if you don't learn this content or skill.
-Grades should be based on the 4.0 scale so the "F" doesn't hold so much weight (i.e. F ranges from 0-59 and other grades are only within a 10 point range)
-All students should understand the standards and be able to explain why or why not they have attained proficiency.

With this in mind, I and others who attended this conference, are proposing we move our grading scale from teacher discretion to 90% summative assessment and 10% other. This will be a difficult transition for teachers and students, but it is a step towards standards-based grading, which is what we all need to be practicing in our classrooms.

March Blog

Research, research, research! My seniors have officially started their final research projects and are loving it. They are researching the UN Millennium Goals and many of them are using academic journals for the first time ever. Too many times research skills are dismissed as a lesser skill because it is not evaluated on CSAP; but, I argue that if our students can research well they can: critically read; summarize; paraphrase; analyze reliability, credibility, and bias; synthesize; and evaluate. Research brings in the highest level of skills we can offer to our students if it is done correctly. Without the ability to research our students will be missing essential skills when they graduate from high school. If a student can research well, he/she can do anything. We need to fight to bring research back into our classrooms on a more consistent basis BEFORE their senior year of high school.