Monthly Archives: June 2011

Keeping a Teaching Journal

Posted by Jackie in education, teaching, writing and tagged with , , ,

On Twitter recently, a link to an article on keeping a teaching journal popped up, and I was instantly intrigued.

Keeping a work journal has been on my mind since I read about it while writing about my new gratitude journal habit, but I didn’t realize there was such a wealth of resources and articles on how specifically to reflect in a teaching journal. I’ve written before about how important it is to reflect on teaching, and my blogging has always been reflective, but I never want to risk my job or betray the privacy of any of my students or colleagues. Also, I like the idea of reflecting immediately after each class, even if it’s only a brief jotting down of quick impressions. When I was adjuncting and frequently teaching new classes, I used to write all my lesson plans in a notebook, and then reflect right after that class by writing a paragraph or so after I’d taught that plan. It was incredibly valuable in my growth as a new teacher, but somewhere along the way, I lost the habit.

I think I’ll try The Teacher’s Daybook, 2011-2012 Edition: Time to Teach, Time to Learn, Time to Live, because I admire Jim Burke so much and I know the earlier edition has been so popular.  I still like the idea of keeping a work journal, but that would be something I did at home, to make sure I could feel free to write in it without censoring myself.

As much as I enjoy blogging under my own name and feel it has moved me in useful directions, there’s something to be said for writing without censoring myself, not thinking of a finished product like a poem or essay, not worrying about proofreading or whether I’m expressing myself clearly, but just writing to figure things out and get the thoughts and feelings down on paper and out of my own head.  I kept diaries for much of my childhood and adolescence, lost the habit in college and graduate school, then started blogging after my girls were born.  But writing freely, the way I used to, scribbling furiously until my hand was sore?  It’s been years, and sometimes, I miss it.  I think it would help me process more about my job, and maybe more about my life along the way.

Related articles

End of Year Gifts

Posted by Jackie in education, teaching and tagged with , , , ,
Assortment of gift cards

Image via Wikipedia

I got the best end-of-the-year teacher gift recently.

No, it wasn’t a gift card, or a box of chocolates, a pretty scarf or expensive perfume, though I have gotten all of those things before. It came in an envelope, didn’t cost a thing, and will be a gift I treasure forever.

The parent of one of my graduating students, a girl I never taught but worked with extensively in other capacities, wrote me a letter, in lovely penmanship on a thick ivory card, thanking me for the relationship I had built with her daughter and telling me how much it had meant to both of them. It brought me to tears, truthfully, and it was such a wonderful surprise to find in my mailbox.  Yes, high school teachers like to be thanked too.

When my daughter Sophie was in first grade, she had a really great teacher, who had just graduated and was in that dreaded first year of teaching. You could see, however, that she had all the hallmarks of success, and so one evening, I wrote her a note over email with some words of encouragement, teacher to teacher, but also as a grateful parent. This spring, two years later, I ran into her in Starbucks with her own mother, and she told her mother what a nice email I had written her, and how much it had meant to her.

The lesson? Every teacher appreciate cash, or a gift card to a restaurant or even a grocery or department store. But the gifts that really touch us, that give us strength, that inspire us? Tell us what we’ve meant to you and your family, and thank us for any way in which we’ve helped educate your children. It will mean the world to any teacher worthy of the name and profession.

And if you want, you can slip a gift card into the envelope too.

Evaluations

Posted by Jackie in education, teaching and tagged with , ,

Like Miss Teacha, I’ve been spending some time with my end-of-year evaluations recently, and as always, it’s been intriguing and edifying.

I don’t have an official form I need to use, no combination of Scantron and narrative answers, and these evals are not as integral to my job security as they can be for adjunct or even tenure-track faculty. But I find them still to provide a wealth of information about everything from texts to assignments to my teaching style, and I’m surprised by some of the results every year. I never look at them before I’ve turned in grades, a lesson mandated when I was teaching college-level courses since that was standard policy, and one I’ve adopted now that I administer my own surveys. Happily, I turned in my grades a week ago and have finished up all my official commitments, so I spent some time collecting data from my stack of surveys, and then reflecting on the results.

This was the first time I’d used this particular survey (document linked here), and I’m really pleased with the results. There was an interesting thread on the English Companion Ning recently if you’re looking for other ideas as well. I prefer open-ended ones, and for now, I think I prefer paper over an online tool.

Here are some of the results that struck me the most:

    • Only one “boring” comment, which I’ve come to expect every year, and a ratio I’m happy with considering I have 48 student surveys in front of me (and, to be honest, since it was balanced by a few very effusive comments).
    • I was pleased to see that the three most effective or helpful aspects of the class were class discussion, seeing me for academic help, and reviewing the day’s reading, as these are areas in which I feel I am strong, and which I do feel have great potential to benefit the student.
    • When asked to choose three words to describe the class, the overwhelming winners were “fun” and “challenging,” which is the perfect combination, in my mind, and one that can be incredibly tricky to balance.
    • When asked to describe me as a teacher, the most popular choices were “nice,” “understanding,” “funny,” and the most frequent, “helpful.”  Again, these are the adjectives I’m striving to project, so it’s great to see that my teaching persona is in line with my hopes and expectations.
    • My students are much more afraid of in-class essays than I realized, so I need to think about how to better prepare them next year.
    • More than one student praised my focus on teaching them to annotate and attributed their stronger reading skills to better understanding how to do so, which was a heavy focus of mine during the year.
    • I tried two new poetry-related ideas this spring, my Edgar Allen Poe project and my Poetry Tournament, both of which were mentioned and praised in these surveys.  While I’ll be tweaking both for next year, this makes me even more glad I attempted them this year.
    • I suspected during the year that the way I taught grammar was not as effective and engaging as I’d like it to be, and this suspicion was reflected in these surveys as well, giving me even more motivation to revamp my approach for next year
    • They also reflected back to me that my feedback on smaller assignments might not be enough, which is also food for thought for next year.

Some of their more narrative responses also surprised me and touched my heart.  When asked to describe the course, here are some of their answers: “your grading pushed me to be better,” “we were all included,” you helped everyone in the class feel needed,” “you grade too hard for what you teach,” “you always asked how we are if we seem to be sad.”  Does the student mean that English shouldn’t be graded hard?  How did I make that student feel needed, and what exactly does that mean?  I saw that some students appreciated how I let them listen to music while working independently, and that others felt I didn’t do enough to motivate students who hate English.  I saw that even though they complained about some assignments, they saw the value in them.  And of course, I saw that they really like watching film clips!

I’ve got a few workshops coming up, so it will probably be July before I can really dig in and start making substantive changes to my lessons and assessments.  But my students have given me some wonderful starting points and some invaluable guidance, and once again, I’m reminded of how lucky I am to have happened into this stage of my career, where I’m exactly where I want to be.

Graduation

Posted by Jackie in writing and tagged with
40 red roses

Image by Morgaine via Flickr

Girls in white dresses carrying red roses: must be graduation time again at my school! Every year I get a littler tearier, I think, not just because it’s wonderful to see these amazing girls move out into the greater world, but because each year, it seems a little closer to when it will be my own girls, walking across some stage, preparing to spread their wings while I stay behind and cheer them on.

Congratulations to all the graduates!