Free Choice Journal Topic - Teaching Reflection on Challenges, Breakthroughs, and Harsh Realities in the Teaching Profession

 ***The following is a reflection on the teaching practice that I wrote right before beginning The Great Gatsby. I find it interesting and even intriguing to be able to look back on an earlier reflection like this one and see if my thoughts and attitudes have changed or developed in some way considering that I am now entering in to my final week of student teaching. -->

                Maintaining a positive demeanor is so incredibly critical in the field of education. After a full week of bickering between teachers and administrators, complaints regarding standardized testing procedures and teacher grading policies, and various other fiscal, personal, and student-related issues that seem to plague the teacher’s lounge day in and day out, it isn’t hard to find one’s self caught up in this drama while losing sight of the one thing that matters most: the kids. Almost all educators (there are, of course, some unfortunate exceptions) enter in to the field of education as optimists who really do wish to make a change in the lives of their students. However, life in the “real world” has a nasty tendency to strip away this warm and comforting sheet of educational idealism and pedagogy and replace it with a heavy suit of armor, locking in various frustrations and stagnant ideas and shutting out new concepts and many of the joys that often go unnoticed or undervalued in education. This past week, while obviously full of its own frustration and doubt, has also come with a few pleasant joys, which have reminded me of why I love the field of education so much.

            In the beginning of this week, my students were given a final assessment on the play Macbeth, a work they have been reading and discussing for nearly two months. Many of my students struggled greatly with this text while many others were predominantly uninterested in the text as whole. While we as educators are not necessarily keen on the idea of giving final, formal assessments to students, the current state of education has not yet reached the point of granting a teacher autonomy in the classroom and thus, we are still forced to have a minimum number of formal, summative assessments in our quarterly grade books. This became a primary issue for me as an educator because, for many of my students, a poor final test grade could spell disaster for their final third quarter grades. I administered an assessment that I spent a great deal of time creating and ensuring would be both fair yet challenging for my students. The results, which I were originally expecting to be sub-par given the student engagement and investment I have seen over the past three and a half weeks, were far better overall than I had expected. Initially, I was skeptical and checked my math and answer keys multiple times over. The writing of the students however, simply doesn’t lie. Many of my students responded far more articulately and thoughtfully than I could have hoped for while many others provided meaningful quotation examples and superior close reading analyses that left me astounded. Granted, just like with every assessment, there were failures peppered in with the pile of exemplary work, but I must say that as a whole, my students’ performance was a pleasant surprise that left me feeling accomplished. Many of my students may not have seemed engaged, but their knowledge of the content and their critical and analytical performance on my assessment was proof that I must have done something right.

            In addition to this small and unexpected victory, I also experienced a valuable yet subtle breakthrough with a particular student in my period seven inclusion class. This particular student has often struggled in various classes before in the past. However, based upon multiple conversations I have had with this student, I have come to understand that he is far from unintelligent. In fact, this student is quite bright. Motivation and student-teacher rapport has often been this student’s greatest issue, yet he has opened up to me and shared a great deal of his own personal beliefs and goals. I have also learned that this particular student is extremely interested in literature. During a conversation with him, he told me, “Yeah, Macbeth was awesome. It’s so messed up! I’m really excited for The Great Gatsby though too. I heard it’s really good.” While this seems like minor or unimportant commentary, it is music to the ears of a literature lover like myself who has struggled the past few weeks with encouraging student motivation and participation. A student, who initially was extremely apprehensive to even speak in class, was now telling me about how much he loves reading and how interested he is in moving on to the next text. These minor connections and victories are what keep me, along with all other good teachers, going. Each day must be taken one at a time and even small breakthroughs like these help remind me of why I have chosen to enter into education in the first place.

My Pintrest Specifically Geared Towards Teaching and Education!

Interactive SMART Board Presentation

The above are some sample slides from a SMART Notebook presentation that I prepared for my seventh grade students during my last placement. Student could come up to the board, manipulate objects, annotate text, and drag and drop objects to reveal answers. Younger kids with plenty of energy especially love this!

The Great Gatsby Comic Strip

The above is a comic strip depicting one of the most famous scenes in the novel The Great Gatsby. This scene takes place in Chapter Seven, at the point when Gatsby finally confronts Tom Buchanan regarding his and Daisy's mutual love for each other.

Introduction to The Great Gatsby: 1920's America Glog

This is a short introduction I am planning to present to my students when we begin the next unit on The Great Gatsby. I love the concept of the "glog" because instead of using a sequential PowerPoint presentation, I can jump all over the place with the glog format. Plus, I think it is a lot more aesthetically pleasing.

Journal Entry #4: How can I develop more effective questioning strategies?

Questioning is, first and foremost, one of the most important tools a teacher has when conducting a lesson. Questions however, like all good lessons, must be carefully structured and planned so as to be highly effective. I have come to understand, through actual teaching experience, just how valuable a properly structured question can be and, conversely, how wasteful and even counterproductive a poorly structured question is. Throughout my journey as an evolving teacher, I have been working tirelessly at creating more valuable, effective, and meaningful questions that I know will elicit thoughtful and appropriate responses form my students. While I can safely say that my questions have improved since I first began my student teaching experience a couple of months ago, there is still plenty of more room for improvement. For example, according to Bloom’s Taxonomy, there are multiple levels of questions. The lowest forms of questions lie within the “Comprehension” or “Remember” category, in which the teacher may ask questions that require students to simply regurgitate memorized material. The higher categories of the taxonomy however, require a great deal more critical and analytical thinking. Questioning categories like “Evaluate” or “Create” on Bloom’s Taxonomy require students to do far more in order to effectively answer any given question and these are the categories I strive for in every lesson. Obviously, not every question that I ask my students can possibly fall in to these higher categories, nor should they. The most important thing to remember regarding Bloom’s Taxonomy is that the teacher should utilize every category, from “Remember” to “Create” and everything in between. What I try to avoid, and what any good teacher should try to avoid, is spending too much of my questioning time in the lower categories of the taxonomy without ever really breeching the higher levels of questioning and thinking.

            In order to improve my own questioning strategies, I always make sure to plan at least a great deal of my questions for the lesson while lesson planning. I have found that my questions are often far more effective when I have spent time before the lesson constructing them carefully rather than always coming up with them on the spot. I also make sure to use certain words in my questions that I know will help elicit more meaningful responses from students. Every category on Bloom’s Taxonomy has certain key words that often appear in the questions that fit in to that particular questioning level. For example, questions that fall in to the “Analyze” category often have words like “analyze,” “compare,” “contrast,” and “infer” within the questions themselves. I am always sure to consult my list of key words and questioning levels when constructing questions, so as to ensure that the actual wording of my questions is helping accomplish what I am setting out to accomplish. Another incredibly important procedure that I am constantly trying to improve is wait time. Essentially, wait time is the amount of time a teacher chooses to wait for a student response after asking a question. While a teacher’s first impulse is often to quickly move on after asking a student a question, adequate wait time ensures that the teacher is giving the student enough time to first construct a meaningful response before answering the question. As I continue on my journey as a teacher, I hope that I may continue to improve my questioning strategies with the help of a few of the aforementioned techniques discussed above.

Journal Entry # 3: Why are critical thinking skills so important to impart to my students in a democratic, diverse society? How can I help students to acquire critical thinking skills, content specific literacies, and problem solving techniques required for college and career readiness in multiple disciplines?

As is blatantly clear, we live in a world that is far from black and white. All of the simple questions that we remember from our respective childhoods like "do I want chocolate or vanilla ice cream?" or "do I want to go play with my friends after school or watch a movie with my family?" have been replaced with questions like "what can I do to find a career in an unstable economy?" and "what rights do I truly have as a citizen in a democracy that is currently in a state of unrest and fluctuation?" These kinds of questions haunt adults, both young and old, every single day. However, another perhaps even more important question we teachers should be asking ourselves is "how do I begin to prepare my students for a life in a world full of grey uncertainty?" One of the best answers to such an intimidating question as this is simply, to promote high levels of critical thinking in the classroom. "Critical thinking" however, is a term often thrown around a lot these days, but, in its simplest form, critical thinking is really just the ability to apply acute reasoning to any situation or assertion and then evaluate that situation or assertion by figuring out how true or false, favorable or unpleasant said situation or assertion really is. While most of us do this everyday without even thinking about it, our ability to carry out this critical process of reasoning did not necessarily come naturally. Rather, this critical thinking process is something we acquired over the course of our lives and it is a process that is incredibly important, particularly in adulthood. The questions we often face are no longer the "yes" and "no" questions that marked most of our childhoods. We are constantly forced to evaluate situations or assertions (How much money could I put down on a new car? Who is the better candidate in the election and why? Is he really looking our for my best interest or is he simply using me for his own personal gain?) and the ability to do this effectively could make or break our future as critical and informed members of society. The question however, still remains: How do we teach our students this skill?

A few of what seem to be the best answers to this question all lie with processes many teachers are familiar with. One, for example, is simply modeling critical thinking skills in class. We have learned and continue to learn much of what we know through first watching someone else do it and then imitating the same action ourselves. If we as teachers incorporate critical thinking skills in to the classroom everyday, we are, in effect, modeling those skills for students. Allowing students to watch a questioning strategy the teacher uses while approaching a question or text for the first time for example, is a great way to model critical thinking skills. After all, questioning is one of the keys to truly mastering critical thinking. Another example of how to teach critical thinking skills and, more generally, problem solving as a whole, can be found in introducing real-world scenarios, current events, and relevant information to students in to the classroom.  While students can undoubtedly learn from an algebra problem or a novel, it may be much easier to model an effective critical reasoning strategy when applying it to real-world or real-life events. This idea can be expanded in to a third category. The Common Core National Standards have begun to push teachers to introduce more content-specific texts in the classroom so as to increase literacy all across the board. Conveniently enough, "literacy" is really just a critical process of thinking. Individuals who are truly "literate" in a content area can approach any situation that arises within the content area with a critical response. Therefore, introducing more content-specific texts to boost literacy and critical thinking skills is crucial. These content-specific texts may be non-fiction articles about the state of the subject area itself or perhaps pieces of literary criticism. Any kind of text that not only deals with the subject area, but is also able to take the subject area to new and exciting contexts that students have never interacted with or thought about before is key to boosting both literacy and critical thinking skills.