ANN
BIANCHETTI
Diary #14
Mid-Year
Reflections and Lessons Learned
I took some time over the winter break to reflect on where I'm still struggling as a teacher and to brainstorm ways to resolve these conflicts.
As is common with most people, it's easier to focus on what I'm doing wrong. Instead of beating myself up, however, I'm using my reflections as tools to improve and motivate myself. I came up with two areas for improvement, all based on classroom situations. Area One — Goals, Objectives and (yes) standards During one advisory class I told my students that "if you don't have a goal or direction, you will end up driving around aimlessly, getting nothing accomplished. A goal keeps you focused on where you want to end up." It took a couple weeks (I can be surprisingly slow when it comes to self-revelations!) before it struck me that I was not practicing what I preached to the kids. In my head, and sometimes in my lesson plan book, I knew what I wanted my students to know at the end of a unit. But I often approached daily lessons haphazardly. After taking attendance I'd jump into the lesson saying something like, "Today we will learn about the decline of the Roman Empire," and then proceed to 'teach' about it. Sometimes I'd do a review of the previous day's lesson, but more often I did not. I never told my students what our goal was for that day. As a result, just as I told my students in advisory, lessons sometimes turned into aimless wanderings, accomplishing nothing. I realized that it's not enough for me to know, in my head, what the important historical concepts are and what the students need to know. I have to tell them, to give them a focal point, a goal to work toward during the lesson and something to measure accomplishment by at the end of the lesson. Just as I often jumped into the beginning of a lesson without setting a goal or easing in with an opener, I often closed lessons abruptly when the bell rang or I had finished. There was no checking for understanding, no wrap up, and no closure. Most of us who went through teacher education in college remember writing those tedious lesson plans that were five pages long and included objectives (both long and short term), opener, activities, procedures, materials, and closing/assessment. Most of us also felt a sense of relief upon graduation that we were through with that, that it was an exercise in college, not something to be applied in real world teaching. I am now finding just the opposite. While I don't expect myself to write five-page lessons for each day and each class, I now realize that each and every lesson should have a clearly defined goal and means of assessing whether we've met that goal at the end of the class period. Those goals must also be communicated to the students, perhaps written across the top of the board. This will not only help my students organize their learning and thinking, it will keep me on task and lessen the temptation to stray o far on tangents. This brings me to state standards — what my state calls New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards (CCCS). There has been much criticism of the standards. Some claim they are too vague; others say they are too specific. Some teachers say that they are unrealistic and compromise the learning situation by taking away teacher and student autonomy; some have bristled at being told specific things to teach. Both in the teachers' lounge and in my graduate school education classes I've heard so many dismissive things about the standards that I began to believe them. Now I see how wrong I was. Embracing the standards fits in with my new goal of sharing explicit goals with my students. The standards do not tell me what or how to teach but rather give me goals to work towards; how my students and I reach those goals/standards is up to us. Posting the standards in my classroom and discussing them with my students will, I hope, give our classroom more definition, structure and a clear direction to head in. Area Two: Humor, Goofiness, Hands-on and All That Jazz One of my goals back in September was to add more humor and fun to my lessons. I began a daily "corny joke time," made Fridays "funky sock Fridays," and generally began to have more fun with my lessons. I used funny voices for different historical characters, plenty of role-plays and act-it-outs, lots more hands-on and creative activities that made history come alive for my students. Well, most of them. This method was working well for my fifth, sixth and seventh grade students. Eighth grade was a different story. The curriculum is Civics and American Government, not exactly a spine-tingling topic. Much of the curriculum involves dry information about the structure of our government, with lots of vocabulary and memorization (do any of us remember the list of who assumes the presidency, after the vice-president, in the event of a president's death?) I was also struggling with the natural boisterousness of eighth graders perched on the brink of graduating. Inside them, there's a constant conflict between their desire to leave middle school and their fear of what high school might hold for them. Eighth graders also have that sense of ownership of the school, which manifests in bolder and sometimes cocky behavior. I was also putting pressure on myself to get them ready for high school, telling myself that I had to treat them like high school students in order to prepare them. All of these conditions combined to make me a very boring Civics teacher. The humor and fun present in my other classes was nowhere to be found in my eighth grade lessons. My eighth grade students were often disruptive and bored with my lessons (and frankly, so was I). I spent many nights trying to figure out why I did not feel the sense of freedom and fun with them I felt with the fifth, sixth and seventh graders. After fruitless nights of asking why, I finally decided just to do it -- to go in the next day and be funny, goofy and hands-on with the eighth grade. The lesson was the development of political parties (you all remember: the Federalists and Anti-Federalists and the complicated process of how they turned into the Democrats and Republicans of today), not exactly a topic likely to have them rolling in the aisles. Resolved to make it interesting, I used the technique of characterization I'd been employing with the lower grades all year. I asked students to come up with poses to represent a strong national government and a weak state government (the Federalist position). At first they were perplexed. Some said, "Ms. B, we are not babies, what are you doing?" I persevered and asked them to draw a strong, body builder like figure with the white house for a head and a weakling figure with the state of New Jersey for a head to represent the Federalist position. As I continued with the lesson the grumbling gradually stopped. When I called some students up front to play tug-of-war as Federalists and Anti-Federalists (each time a side tugged they had to state a position of their side), I looked out and realized I had the entire class's attention! Gone were the bored, half-asleep looks I was used to in this class. I felt joy as a teacher when I noticed a student who struggles academically and often tunes out watching with excitement and eagerness. The following day when I gave a written assessment of that lesson there was almost 100% recall. When I asked for feedback about why it was easier to process and remember this lesson one student said, "When I was trying to remember the definition of Federalist I remembered the drawings we made and it helped me." Aha! I resolve to continue to use humor and fun with my eighth grade, despite the seemingly boring content of the curriculum. I feel a sense of accomplishment at having reached a difficult group of students.
