Assigned: Reflection on Summer Lessons

In my evaluations of my first-years' lessons, I would often (less so now, as they've really improved on it) focus on the wording and scope of their objectives. I didn't like harping on such an Ed. School-y thing; I hate the empty jargon and (excessive) obsession with standards that permeates education as much, if not more, than I did last year. But, the past year has taught me that in this position--being a teacher and being in Teacher Corps-- a certain amount of compromise is necessary. I felt like I needed to at least tell my first years how to play the game, whether or not they believed in all of it.

All of that said, when I consider the differences between my most and least successful lessons this summer, one of the clearest distinctions is in the scope (not the wording, which I think I've mostly figured out at this point) of my objectives. On the most-successful side, my lesson on multiple-meaning words was very focused--the students had to show, by the end of the period, that they could use different meanings of the same words. This was probably not a particularly hard objective for my students to master, but I did give them a list of 8th-grade-level vocabulary that they had to use and almost every student made a passing grade. Aside from the objectives, this lesson also offered the students more opportunities for participation. I began the lesson, after my set, by giving students cards with definitions for a multiple-meaning word. The students had to walk around the room and find the other student who had a different definition for the same word. Although this was a pretty hard exercise for most of them, I think they really enjoyed moving around and that it actually helped them conceptualize multiple-meanings.

I would consider my lesson on organizational patterns in texts to be my worst because its objectives were far too broad to cram into two 50 minute periods. I had hoped that students would be able to define each of the five major textual organization patterns (sequential order, order of important, cause & effect, compare & contrast, main idea & details), recognize them in texts and apply that knowledge to reading comprehension. Needless to say, I was far too ambitious. Because I wanted to force so much material into the students' heads, I rushed through my set and explanation of each pattern and set them loose on a group activity that they weren't really prepared for.

Our instructional procedures have worked fairly well. I like making my "Do Now" an engaging, un-intimidating assignment that I can steer towards the day's objective during my set. Sharing answers to the Do Now gets students participating early and sets a good precedent for the rest of the period. In evaluations, I've paid a fair amount of attention to questioning strategies, as much for myself as for my first-years. Frequent questioning, whether as quick informal assessment or to prompt deeper critical thinking, is something I still need to work on, but when I've put in the effort there, it's paid off in engaging the students more.

My shortcut to differentiate instruction--and, admittedly, still perhaps my primary method--is to speak to students individually during assignments and ask them questions or give them more pointed directions: "Look for (blank) in this paragraph and raise your hand when you've found it," or (after asking a student to explain his/her idea aloud) "Write what you just told me." This is a cop-out, of course. I do target the students who I know will have more trouble with an assignment, but it's not really planned out and it's completely unfeasible with larger classes. In terms of more formal differentiation, I've allowed students to choose different roles (leader, reporter, recorder, reader, etc.) during group activities, tried to include more tactile elements in my lessons, and pulled examples or analogies from a wide variety of sources (an illustration of point of view using video games, for example).

Differentiation and informal assessment are my chief concerns right now for improving student performance. My lessons are still auditory-visual-heavy, and I've seen how much of a difference a small tactile or kinetic component can make in an assignment. Informal assessment is still a weak point for me; I think I frequently mistake students' energy for understanding and I can think of several students from our summer school class for whom the two clearly do not correlate.

Failure Story

It’s hard to pick out a particular “failure story” from the varied and expansive landscape of failure that was my first year of teaching. It’s hard not just because I look back at my teaching this past year critically and see a lot of failure; it’s also hard because I see how interconnected any discrete shortcoming on my part was with my students’ mistakes, with others of my own, with the myriad injustices of my situation or theirs, and even with my conscious decisions to prioritize some aspects of my job over others. Perhaps it’s my ability to rationalize nearly anything to myself, but I can’t pick out one student, or one specific responsibility I had, and say, “I failed her” or “I failed to do this,” without also seeing where “she failed me,” or “the system failed us both,” or how “I failed to do this because I was also failing somewhere else,” or even “I failed to do this because I was too busy succeeding in this other way.” And all that qualification clearly wouldn’t make for a good story.

Objectively speaking, I think it would be inaccurate to name a particular student my “failure story”; it’s like the converse of the messianic teacher impulse (“I can save a kid myself”) that I try to check in myself. There’s a hidden pride there that I’m wary of. At the same time, I do think of some students as “my failures”—if nothing else, blaming myself alone lets me preserve the hope that my positive impact on students could be that substantial—and so a failure story does fit that subjective look at this past year.

“Ricky” was one of the most intelligent 7th graders I taught, which is to say that he was one of my most intelligent students across the board, as my 7th graders were almost all better readers and writers than my 8th graders. He read books at, and frequently above, his grade level, when many of his peers were reading at a third or fourth grade level. What’s more, he was unfailingly polite and willing to help, if a little shy.

I was delighted to have him in my class, but at the beginning of the year I was far too busy putting out classroom management fires to give him much attention. Thankfully, he seemed mature and self-motivated enough to not require much on my part other than giving him the opportunity to learn. I still felt a little guilty knowing that he wasn’t getting the individual attention or even the well-run classroom that he deserved, because I was trying to handle his classmates, who were busy eating paper, trying to blow pencil shavings at each other, or making sound effects for everything they did. My guilt was only exacerbated by the fact that this was a class of seven students. How could I be this harried with such a small class?

Things didn’t improve with Ricky’s classmates for a while, but for the first semester he endured the chaos of sixth period without complaint. Around the beginning of the second semester, which is embarassingly late (but better than never, I suppose), I finally started making headway with the three discipline cases in the class. That progress came with a cost, though. I’d tried many management strategies with Ricky’s class, and the first thing that showed any signs of working was to take a much more authoritarian (not authoritative) tone with the students—to edge closer to the verbal violence that so many of my students expected from authority figures. In picking the first thing that seemed to work, rather than the one that was best, I ended up straining my relationships with all of the students in Ricky’s class, Ricky included. Class took on a negative tone, and while students would usually do their work, they did it with a scowl on their face and with no motivation to work beyond the minimum requirements. Where before class disruptions would seem to spill over from my students’ excess energy, which I could tap for positive use in my lessons, now they were almost always negative—name-calling, verbal confrontations, and complaining.

From my one year’s experience, 8th graders seem to improve in attitude over the course of the year, while 7th graders seem to get worse, so I wasn’t completely surprised when Ricky started getting caught up in the same negativity as his peers. I was disappointed, though, having seen how mature and self-possessed he’d been earlier in the year. When he started complaining and insulting other students too, I came down hard on him, just like I did with the others, but it only served to antagonize him more. The last straw was, in effect, our final unit in his class, in which we read Monster, a book he’d read a year ago. He complained from the beginning about having to do the same thing over again, and I—burnt out from the year and generally disinclined to let a student from his class do anything other than exactly what I had planned for them—told him that he would have to do the same work as everyone else and that he might find some value in re-reading. When I got around to it (which is to say, rarely), I would plan some alternative, higher-level thinking questions for him to answer about our daily reading, but for the most part, I just let him sit in the back of the classroom, bored and barely pretending to follow along. With hardly any interest in the day’s lesson, he became as big a management problem as anyone else. The rest of the class, even the inveterate discipline problems, were relatively focused on the book, and in my relief at finding something that got them to shut up and participate constructively, I let Ricky slip into a role that should not have been his.

Ricky’s story isn’t a failure story in the sense that he came anywhere near failing my class—he passed with the highest grade. It’s a failure because, by the end of the year, he’d learned to associate English class with being bored, angry, and—to some extent—ignored.

I feel like I failed “Ricky,” but I also know that my failure wasn’t as simple as just not giving him enough attention, encouragement, or individualized instruction. The failure of my classroom management certainly helped turn his class’ environment so negative, but that environment was also shaped by things beyond my control, chiefly perhaps the hormonal tumult of the second semester of 7th grade. But while I’ll concede that Ricky’s transformation from self-motivated and mature to disaffected and apathetic wasn’t entirely my fault, I realize that claiming as my failure can be useful, if I let it remind me of my responsibilities to all of my students, even those who seem like they need me the least.

Assigned: Learning Goals and Instructional Decisions

Unlike many other second-years, Deb and I have both taught our summer school subject before this session, Deb during last year's summer school and I during the past school year. In preparing an outline of the course, we were able to look over the state frameworks for 8th grade English and pick out the objectives that we knew our students had struggled with. While we couldn't be sure that our students in Holly Springs would have the same problems that mine did this past year and Deb's did last summer, it helped to have some means of narrowing down the maddeningly broad and vague frameworks. (The state frameworks for English are nearly identical from 6th-8th grade). Thus, we'll be spending a lot of time this summer on subject-verb agreement, on following the writing process all the way through, on inferring word meaning from context clues and word structure, on drawing inferences and making predictions based on readings, and on literacy in non-traditional texts (charts and diagrams, forms, reference sources, etc.). For the first week, we chose the objectives that we felt were most fundamental--mostly context clues and word structure, subject-verb agreement, and identifying main idea and details. The first and third are essential for their reading, while the second was one of the most glaring and universal writing issues for my students last year and looks to be equally necessary for these students, given the writing samples we have from the first few lessons.

With the time constraints of a 3-week term and the confusion of having four teachers, we'll need to put as much continuity as possible in our sequencing of the objectives; there's a tendency, I think, to hopscotch around without much sense when trying to fit so much material into so little time. So, for example, I've planned to hit author's purpose and the fact-opinion distinction before we get to persuasive techniques and persuasive writing, and compare-and-contrast writing before figurative language (so that we can teach metaphors, similes, and co. as forms of comparison).

Along with the state frameworks, we have another master to serve, in the form of this EBS assessment business, which is apparently a district or county requirement. In short, the requirement is that--if the majority of our class that is listed as EBS is to pass--we must assess and document their mastery of 80% of the objectives on a list that more or less corresponds to the MS frameworks. But here's the rub: our EBS students all have different objectives that they need to master. So we've also had to focus our objectives on the skills that most of our students need to master to be promoted. Of course, there are objectives that only a few students didn't master during the school year; those we'll cover in remediation outside of regular class periods.

The inductive strategy that I've used is concept attainment. As a Do Now for our first lesson on word structure, I gave every student a set of six index cards; each set was made up of words that had prefixes and others that did not ("possible" and "inaccurate," for example). The students had to come up with some criteria for dividing the words into two groups. Without telling the students to look for prefixes, most divided the words by whether or not they had a prefix. They were able to recognize prefixes without being specifically told to do so and developed a concept of prefixes that we were able to build off of with a more formal definition. Later, when creating a list of common prefixes and their meanings, I had the students find the meanings of the prefixes inductively, by giving them a list of familiar words that used a particular prefix. The students had to induce a meaning of the prefix from the meanings of those known words.