RSS Feed

Tag Archives: education

Balancing Act

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Jackie

At the beginning of this school year, I looked at my own work schedule and noted down Parents Night, which I alternately enjoy and dread every year. I love getting to meet the parents and am always nervous about making a good impression, plus it’s a long evening in the middle of a long week in the middle of a long month at the beginning of the year, when the pace is just frantic.

Then I got the flier from my kids’ school, which talked about Parents Night…..which was on the exact same night, at the exact same time. I took the news like a blow, immediately upset. I have not missed any of my daughters’ Parents Nights, and as a parent, it is always one of my favorite nights. I feel like a part of the community, I see friends I didn’t see much over the summer, I get to see faces and demeanors for those names that I’ve been hearing so much over the past few weeks. I get to meet the teachers, and show them that my girls have engaged parents. I tried to comfort myself with the fact that my husband would be able to go, but it still really bothered me that I wouldn’t get to go myself.

Then my husband got sick today, and now neither of us will be there. For the first time, my kids won’t be represented. And yes, things come up, and yes, you can’t control everything, and there are plenty of other chances to meet teachers and see friends. Perspective, etc.

But still. It really matters to me, and I missed it.

11 Comments

Posted in family life, teaching, writing and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Review: Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Jackie

I know I promised almost two months ago that I would review this book, but the past few weeks have been full of orientations and back-to-school craziness, so while I read the book in August, I am only getting around to the review now.

Excuses past, Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements: How to Teach What Really Matters About Character, Setting, Point of View, and Theme was an incredibly useful book for me, and I’m so glad I kept it on my list after reading I Read It, But I Don’t Get It. On my last post about this book, I was heartened to see how many of my friends (all learned scholars and teachers) felt the same amount of discomfort or puzzlement when it came to teaching these elements, how to define them usefully for our students as tools for understanding literature.

The book is structured so that for each of the titular elements, there is a chapter discussing the term, with research and theory as accompaniments, followed by two practical chapters on teaching the concept, both in isolation and with specific texts and units. This structure makes the book valuable for a variety of teachers, but also, it’s easier to take the ideas one element at a time if you feel you don’t have the time to digest the book as a whole. Having the practical sections in their own chapters also makes the book easy to use as a reference, and the size of the book and pages make it very easy to scribble notes in the margins.

I’ll use the material on “setting” as an example of how the approach is both meaningful and practical. When discussing setting with students, it can be difficult to move them beyond a phrase like “Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s” into thinking about what that means and why it matters. In Fresh Takes, the authors develop a definition of setting that includes understanding it on a micro, meso and macro-level, while also thinking of the social, psychological, temporal and physical elements of that text’s particular setting. While this expansion alone is a useful one (with handy organizing chart included, ready for student input), the authors also include an array of activities to use in engaging the students on this concept, include activities centered on visual arts, dramatic staging, textual excerpts, writing prompts and more. I’m doing a seventy-minute period’s worth of activities on setting as one of my first classes, using our summer reading books as our texts to focus on, and I think we will be able to refer back to these concepts throughout the school year.

If you find yourself struggling to clearly express how to define these elements and use them as meaningful tools, then I would highly recommend picking up a copy of Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements: How to Teach What Really Matters About Character, Setting, Point of View, and Theme, which has certainly become a key part of my teaching library.

Related articles

3 Comments

Posted in book reviews, teaching and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Review: I Read It, But I Don’t Get It

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Jackie
Cover of "I Read It, but I Don't Get It: ...

Cover via Amazon

Decision made: I ended up going with I Read It, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers first because it had some direct application for a project I’m working on with a colleague this summer. We’re developing a proposal for a summer program that would target struggling readers/writers in the first two grades of high school and give them a concentrated summer instructional experience to try and build whatever skills seem to need the most development. I think I’ll be going with Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements: How to Teach What Really Matters About Character, Setting, Point of View, and Theme next, so look for the review in the near future.

Anyone who has taught high school English, no matter where you are in the country or what demographic you’re teaching, has probably heard a student say, “I read it, but I don’t get it.” What part was trickiest? What was most confusing? Why do you think you didn’t get it? These are tough questions for most struggling students to answer, but without them, it can be near possible to help a student strengthen their reading skills. Cris Tovani tackles this task head-on in this book with a mix of anecdotes, strategies and assignments that she has tested for years in her own classroom, as well as in her work with training teachers.

If you’ve read about different adolescent literacy strategies, you may already be using some of the tools Tovani recommends here; I was pleased to see anticipation guides and double-entry journals, both of which I’ve used very successfully before. However, I also found some really potent examples of framing language and classroom activities that I think will become key elements of my reading discussions in class. I’ve long pondered how best to scaffold my students’ reading in our Bible as Literature unit, and I’ve got some fresh new ideas based on this book. Another crucial point was that while struggling readers will benefit most from these techniques, we’ve all seen even stronger students hit the wall when they come to a particularly challenging text, and these strategies can work for them as well when built into whole-class work. The language Tovani uses to identify for her students what “good readers do” and how to model those strategies will be invaluable to me, and will definitely help frame how I address these stumbling blocks in class.

Another big take-away for me was that students want us to go over the reading in detail in class, not always because they haven’t read (though that can also be the case), but because they don’t have confidence in their own abilities to construct meaning from the text. The more we do that work for them, the more they give up on being able to do it for themselves. In other words, this is another argument in the ongoing sage on the stage vs. guide on the side debate (that is often more polarized than it needs to be), but an argument that shows concrete ways to be that effective guide-on-stage. For me, as a fan of Paulo Freire, and especially his theories opposing the banking model of education, this supports my own philosophy of education as well. That said, when a student asks me about a part in the text she didn’t understand, my first impulse is to explain it to her, which is probably a byproduct of being a big book nerd in the first place, as many English teachers are. Now, with Tovani’s voice guiding me, I hope I’ll be able to resist that impulse more often.

All in all, I’d add this title to the list of essentials for any English teacher’s bookcase, and even go further by saying that if you’re in a reading-intensive subject, you and your students could greatly benefit from this book as well.

4 Comments

Posted in book reviews, education, teaching and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Teach Like A Champion, Revisited

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Jackie
Cover of "Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techn...

Cover via Amazon

Last summer, I read Teach Like A Champion, and wrote that entry about how much I expected it to influence my teaching. Towards the end of this school year, I found myself reflecting on this book again, and how it had affected my teaching.

Overall, what I found was that the phrasing of these techniques in short memorable phrases helped me remember them often during the school day and therefore employ them more consistently; what I found in reading the book was that I had employed many of these, but did not honestly employ them daily in my classroom.

The strategies I returned to again and again this year were: Lemov’s phrase for the ideal teacher’s demeanor, “Warm But Strict”; Cold Calling (calling on students even if they hadn’t raised their hands), Right Is Right (only stopping when a student has given the right answer) and 100% (striving for 100% engagement in the room). In my original entry, I talked about the need to protect each classroom minute, and by the end of the year, I was very comfortable saying, “We’ve only got five minutes left and I need every one of them” when I felt my students’ attention wandering.

Looking back on my original entry and some of the ones I linked there, I realize that I have still not solved the bathroom visit issue, so I need to think again about whether I want to use a hand signal or some other visual cue, rather than a raised hand. I also see that I intended to revisit the book during the year: better late then never? Perhaps this is another goal of mine that can be served in the teaching journal goal I’ve set for myself. Also, now that I feel I’ve mastered those strategies, I’d like to revisit the book and see if I want to add any others. I remember Miss Teacha saying in her post that out of the 49 strategies, she already used 14, and would recommend that new teachers aim for mastering at least 15. While I’m not a new teacher, I think it would be interesting to count up how many I feel are already in my toolbox and then think about what I’d like to add.

While I’m reflecting like this purely for my own interest, I think the fact that the book has lingered so long with me reinforces my original statement: it’s a must-buy for any and every new teacher, or indeed, any teacher who wants to feel more confident with questions of classroom management (which is probably all of us, from time to time).

1 Comment

Posted in book reviews, education, teaching and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Professional Development: Why Do It

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Jackie

It seems to be a given that professional development is a must for the continuing growth and progress of teachers: witness the plethora of resources and attention devoted to it on the federal and state level. Knowledge in our fields is constantly growing and changing, and ideas on how to effectively teach are ever-changing, so if we want teachers stay abreast of these swings of the pendulum and be able to incorporate them into our work, we must have access to dedicated time during the year for professional development.

At my independent school, I’ve had access to some wonderful professional development sessions through AIMS, which comprises over 120 schools in the MD/DC area. One that stands out for me in particular is the annual Making Schools Safe workshop, which has greatly informed my work in sponsoring our school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, but also has helped me think carefully about making my classroom and school a safe place for all students. I also had the thrill of presenting at the AIMS annual conference one year, which I hope will only be the first time I get to share my efforts with other teachers, and have heard some inspiring AIMS sessions in the past as well.

I try to keep a running “wishlist” for different aspects of my professional career, and my PD dreams include attending NCTE’s annual convention as well as someday presenting there, and publishing lesson plans on sites like ReadWriteThink and the NEH’s EDSITEment (remember, it’s my dream list!). I strive towards presenting and publishing for several reasons; I have gained so much from the contributions of other teachers, that I want to be able to return the favor for the greater community of teachers as well. However, I think that striving towards this also helps me work towards being more creative and rigorous in my teaching as well, so that I have something new and valuable to bring to the conversation, and keeps me invigorated in a profession that can be notoriously draining.

I’ve heard/read teachers before who say they take the whole summer “off” from going into school or going to workshops, but while I do log many pooltime hours, the summer is when I have the mental space and energy to do some of the big-picture thinking about my teaching practice, the kind of meta-thinking I just don’t always get to during the school year.  Professional development has been a big part of that, inspiring more of that big-picture perspective and giving me the tools to put ideas into action.

In fact, I just returned from an amazing PD week-long session that I’ll blog more about soon. It’s inspiring just to be around the kind of teachers who flock to PD sessions, who are dedicated and creative and thought-provoking, who are able to tell me about a story I’ve never read or give me a perspective on a text that never occurred to me. I took so many notes and pictures during the week, and even on the plane ride home, I was jotting down ideas and connections to better plan the upcoming year. Who knows how much I will actually realize for the fall, but I know what I’ve learned will continue to provide inspiration for years to come.

Related articles

6 Comments

Posted in education, personal goals, teaching, writing and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Keeping a Teaching Journal

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Jackie

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

6 Comments

Posted in education, teaching, writing and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

End of Year Gifts

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Jackie
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.

4 Comments

Posted in education, teaching and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Evaluations

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Jackie

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.

2 Comments

Posted in education, teaching and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Blogging With My Students

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Jackie

Way back last August, I wrote a really optimistic post about all the new endeavors I wanted to try this year in my teaching. In the spirit of reflecting on my teaching being one of the main reasons I still blog, I wanted to look back at this list and see how many I actually implemented.

Sigh. Sometimes reflecting is depressing.

First, my major accomplishments:

  • my students did blog all year, a blog for each text as well as a year-long blog for grammar and writing workshop activities.
  • we did connect with another 9th grade group in our study of Macbeth, which is currently ongoing but also currently unbloggable.

Now, for the misfires.

  • I set up a teacher blog for myself and just never used it; I think I had too many vague ideas for how to use it and need to instead focus on one concrete strategy to start with, and then I could add more later.
  • I didn’t do anything with wikis; the way they are set up on my website are much less intuitive than I had hoped they would be.
  • I didn’t add current events into my student blogging at all.

The aspect I’m most sorry I didn’t implement is blogging with my students. I’ve done this before in my college classes, and I’ve been blogging myself for about eight years now, so it only seems natural, but somehow it just hasn’t gelled yet. I read great articles on the advantages and practical pieces on the challenges, and I see what students can do and what teachers have done, but I still haven’t figured out the best way for me to begin.

This year, I am proud of what I did manage to accomplish, and will try to remember in the future that being overly ambitious can leave me frustrated and even overshadow anything I do manage to complete.

Better luck next year, I guess.

3 Comments

Posted in education, teaching, writing and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Group Projects

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Jackie

If you just shuddered at the sound of those words, then you are not unlike many of my students, who complain at the very hint of a group project. They’re too much work, one student always gets stuck with all the work, there are always students who end up doing nothing, it’s too hard to get everyone organized, etc etc etc.

On the teacher side, they can be hard to plan, hard to assess, and hard to manage: how to make sure hard work gets recognized, to assign the right students to work together, to make the project interesting but challenging, to make the group aspect organically part of the learning experience, not an externally forced element.

My students just finished a group Edgar Allen Poe Project (click for document), so these questions are on my mind, especially as I begin grading them. Do we assign these projects to torture our students, as many of them suspect?

If collaborative skills are part of what we should be working on with our students, then group projects have to continue to be part of our curriculum, right? I’ve added peer evaluations to my toolkit when I do assign them, and I’ve tried to make sure there are plenty of tasks, some that require collaboration but others that can be completed individually. I’ve also tried structuring the project in segments, and allowing group members to choose which they’d prefer to be involved in while requiring that they do work on more than one segment. I also tell my students why I’m assigning it and why I think the group project format is helpful, and also that just like public speaking (another student terror), the more you work in groups, the easier it gets.

Any tips or tricks or helpful horror stories on assigning, developing or surviving group projects?

Related Articles

2 Comments

Posted in education, teaching and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.
← Older Posts
Newer Posts →
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 487 other followers