Reflection on Learning

I'm happy that I took the TED 633 class when I did - at the very beginning of the school year. It forced me to look deeper into the content I was teaching and to analyze every component for maximum learning. I took a lot of time going over the Extreme Sports Unit, creating new handouts, transfering lessons onto Google Classroom, and making sure all of the lessons were understandable to the students.

I've spent time this month very carefully planning out what I was teaching and how I could get my students ready for the Argumentative Essay benchmark at the beginning of October. Also, I made goals for myself for this year- what I would do different/better than I did last year. Here's my plan:

1. Do a full year of Google Classroom. Teach all students how to use Google Drive. Incorporate the student's tablets into as many lessons as possible.

2. Add onto the behavior plan, structured classroom rules I enforced last year, and tighten classroom management even more- use the new Vice Principal (who is very knowledgeable about discipline/classroom structure) as a resource. Because as I've learned - when you teach regular 9th grade classes, if you don't have discipline down pat, there will be no teaching.

TED 633 has helped me in my work in that I have had all this organized in my head, more so than last year, and when the VP asked if he could meet with me so we could (already!) plan for my formal observation/evaluation, I was totally ready! I wasn't sweating this at all. He said- okay, I need you to think out some goals for yourself for this year. Easy, I'd already done that, and I'd already started working on them and finding the resources on campus for how to implement these changes. And, when he comes in for the observation, I will feel better about being able to verbalize before and after what the my lesson entailed.

This class has helped me to feel more confident in my knowledge of teaching practices in my content area, and it has also helped me at work to "go deeper" while lesson planning. Hurray for TED 633! :)

Field Experience- Assignment 3B

I am writing about the lesson from Day 3 of the Extreme Sports Unit, mainly because I finished teaching it to all four classes on Friday and it is fresh on my mind!

In this lesson I had the students review vocabulary words from the two previous lessons, listen to a read aloud of two non fiction articles on extreme sports, and then they worked in pairs to answer comprehension questions about the articles.

For the pre assessment or warm up, the students were told to take out a piece of paper and pen or pencil and to take out their cell phones. The assignment was posted on Google Classroom. On September 8^th all of the students will be given their own tablet to take to school/home, after tablet roll out assignments will be on Google classroom on the screens of their tablet, as well as on my smartboard, and they won’t use paper, instead they will type the answers into their tablet and send it to me on Google Drive. Meanwhile, paper…

I assigned words that had been used during the previous lessons and needed to be reviewed. I really want to focus more on vocabulary this year. They were told to use their cell phones to look up the 10 words listed on Dictionary.com or Google it and write down the definition that most fit what they knew of the word already. If they didn’t have a cell, or a partner with a cell (this was pair work), they were to write down the definitions in their own words (and I’ll be nice when grading because it’s not fair that they didn’t have the internet as a resource). This assignment took a little longer than I thought it would. But it was effective. I circulated to make sure everyone was on task. These classes are still new to me and I needed to see who was working and who was not and why. By and large everyone in all four classes seemed to actually like the assignment, I think because of the technology aspect and they were able to work in pairs.

Then I moved on and handed out a packet of two different articles on extreme sports. One article holds the point of view that extreme sports is good, the other says it is dangerous and you should be cautious. This will help us to move towards finding the author’s claim, author bias, ethos, pathos, and logos and using evidence to support your claim using in text citation. But for this lesson I started out slow. I let them know that I would be doing a read aloud of both articles and their job was to remain quiet and follow along. Today would be the first reading, I told them we’d go over the articles more in depth with each day.

I was planning on having them go more in depth with annotation, having them take out high lighters and figuring out claims and evidence, but during the first class I asked the students if they’d heard of annotation before (I wrote the word on the board). They all gave me blank looks. “Whut?”was the general consensus. In one of the classes many of them raised their hand and said they’d heard of annotation and had used the technique before in a previous class, but all of the other classes were clueless- never heard of it before. So I realized I needed to dial it down and start small and add more annotation to the lesson on Day 4. I taught them how to write a note to themselves next to the title of each article about the point of view of the author. Their first annotation!

After the read alouds I assigned post assessment comprehension questions they could work on in pairs. These were higher level questions that had to be answered in complete sentences. I showed them how they could answer questions one and three using the annotation they placed at the top of each article, turning their note into a complete sentence. This linked the value of annotation to their work. They had to compare and contrast the two articles and also I turned the titles of the two articles into questions to be answered. I circulated and could tell that the questions were challenging for them so I spent time coaching them individually. Just the right amount of challenging though - good learning!

At the end of each 90 min block there was always about ten minutes left and I used that time for turning in work and having the closure of showing a 5 min. video I found from CBS Sunday Morning about a couple who met and married because of their mutual love for extreme sports. It was darling, the students always clapped at the end. J

Pre-Assessment, Day 1 - Brainstorming Extreme Sports

I have taught three lessons out of the five that I turned in for my Content Area Unit- Assignment 2B. For this blog entry, I’m deciding to zero in on the very first pre assessment I administered to the classes, the one that kicked off this whole Unit on Extreme Sports.

This assessment was given to four different 9^th Grade classes, some in the morning, some in the afternoon, mixed skill levels, and socio-economic levels. I had to know right away what their back ground knowledge was on the subject of extreme sports before we started. Did they need vocabulary?

 I started class by telling the students that we were doing a Unit on extreme sports and the first thing they needed to do was to brainstorm and write down 10 words on their paper that came to their mind when they thought of the words extreme sports. No right or wrong. After I said this to the first class I noted a lot of puzzled looks on student faces and pencils that were still. So I added – these could be sports that you think are extreme, or words that describe an extreme sport, or words that describe feelings people have while participating in extreme sports. This helped all classes to overcome their inhibitions and start to brainstorm.

    
I circulated in each class while they brainstormed in order to get to know the student’s skill levels better and to keep them on task and find out if anyone needed clarification - and found that only about 9-10 students per class were able to independently find the full 10 words that defined extreme sports. On average they ran out of ideas at about the fifth word.

Each class was a bit different. The first class was the most talkative, it was easy to get a class list of words from them during share out. Second block (first class of the day) was practically mute during the discussion, getting a class list of words from them during share out was like pulling teeth. Oh, and I made a fatal error- 6^th block was the last class I taught this lesson to, and I forgot to erase the brainstorming list generated from 2^nd block before 6^th block arrived! I explained the activity and got them started, turned around and gasped when I realized all the words from before were still on the board. I went on and on to the class about how terrible it was that I left that, I couldn’t believe I’d done that, how I was going to tell this story to the other teachers at lunch so they could laugh at me. Some of the students laughed. But I noticed it did effect the lesson, later during the share out of words I had to reject a few words because they’d obviously been culled from the prior list.

One good thing about doing the same lesson to four classes is that with each class I taught the lesson better. I always call the first class the guinea pig class, and after the first one I know what to tweak for the others. In the first class I noted that someone asked if football was an extreme sport. I explained it wasn’t and why and then I told that to the next three classes. Someone else asked if Rugby was an extreme sport, someone else asked if Dodgeball was extreme. I included these questions and the answers to the next classes in order to make the pre assessment more effective and clearer for the students.

The rubric for this assignment was a simple 10 points according to filling out each of 10 words. If they wrote a list of 10 words they got 10 points, 7 words, 7 points, etc. I didn’t really need to adjust the rubric. But, it was a good thing that I circulated and checked for understanding, therefore knowing how many per class were able to write out the full ten words independently and how many needed to add from the classroom chart. The way that I did it, the final assessment showed me only if they’d did as asked and filled in their list if they didn’t have 10 words with words from the class list. It didn’t let me know how many words they knew prior to the share out. Despite this, I felt the assignment was effective. The very next activity was a quick write about extreme sports, which they all had the vocabulary to complete.

   
*I completely forgot to have students take pictures of me while teaching! I’m so sad.

Teaching Style

In taking the inventories on teaching styles I learned that I am an Intuitive learner. This is probably why I've always hated math! Also, I scored high on Formal Authority, Personal Model and Delegator. I can't help it, I teach 9th graders, you have to be a formal authority or you will be eaten alive by your students and no one will learn anything. I think the strong idea of the personal model comes from all my years in Elementary and SPED, I was always very interested in Child Development/teaching Social Skills. I definitely am more of a delegator than a facilitator. I can see that this is not necessarily the type of teacher to be in this new common core classroom. This is something I need to work on, an area of growth.:)

Introduction

Hi! My name is Michele Powers and I teach 9th grade English at Central West High School in Fresno, CA. I've been teaching for 15 years, most of which were in Elementary. I taught General Ed Kindergarten for two years, and 4th grade for one year, then switched to Special Ed, which I then taught for the next 10 years. But, eventually I needed a change. I had started on my goal- becoming a published author, and I was burnt out teaching Special Ed. So, in order to make my day job align with my night job, I asked to be transferred to the High School and I was given a position teaching English. And I am so happy! Especially since, I'm pleased to report, just two weeks ago I signed a contract with my dream publisher for my first book which will release Spring/Summer of 2016! Whoo! Hoo!

Me, tired and worn out from working two jobs, husband, toddler and a teenage son:

Unfortunately, my High School/District can't claim me because I'm a dedicated romance writer (I belong to RWA- Romance Writers of America) and I write steamy romance. Not YA, not mainstream women's fiction, or even sweet romance - hot romance. In fact, I intend to write books similiar to this:

Hahaha. So, I write under a seekrit pen name. And to be truthful, this teaching gig is just my day job until one day I can quit and write full time (every writer's dream).

Personality Test


I took the Myers-Brigg test and discovered that I'm a INFJ and my second closest type is ENFJ. To be truthful, I was pleased with this. This sounds like me. Or well, an idealized version of me. I'm not as altruistic as my type suggests I should be! But it's true, staying true to my own personal morals and values is very important to me. INFJ is why I write, and why I teach too:

If your closest personality type is INFJ then you have a strong, private sense of knowledge and vision, often for hidden things that other people would think can't be known. You see imaginative possibilities and insights, especially in relation to people, anticipating a future for them that they can't even see themselves. Although you probably have some strong relationships, your insights may be so unusual that others find them difficult to accept, and you may therefore find it difficult to articulate them.

I think this part of the ENFJ type is probably the core reason why I'm am a teacher: 

you are someone who seeks to develop and promote personal growth in your friends, family or colleagues. You sometimes have a sense of their potential which may extend beyond how they see themselves.