Clarify Me » teaching

Reflecting on 08/09

Claire Thompson — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:21:54 +0000

Before I really get into my plans/goals for the 09/10 school year, I thought it would be a good idea to reflect on the past year.

Goals and Results
Prior to the school year starting, and as it went along I had a number of goals. I’ll discuss them below with a review of how they worked out.

‘Malinconia. L’ultima partitella (the last match of+the+summer)‘

Get more face-to-face time with my students (I work at a distributed learning school–students work at home on the curriculum that we provide): In the 07/08 school year my colleague, Jodie, ran a humanities class for her grade 8-10 students and I could see the benefits of this weekly face-to-face time; it allowed for discussions, one-on-one tutoring, and an opportunity to speak to students about their progress. So for this past school year Jodie and I offered a general high school class for 2 hours on Thursday mornings. Students were encouraged to attend, but for many students it was optional. For other students at risk for failure the class was mandatory. The benefit to this structure was that we had weekly face-to-face time with the students who needed it most. The drawback was that with the large number of students present, all at different levels and at different points in their programs, it became difficult to conduct effective lessons. I think that the benefits outweighed the drawbacks though. In my experience one of the key factors for a student to succeed in a distributed learning program at the high school level is good communication with the teacher. These face-to-face classes facilitated this.
Improve communication with students: I’ve written about the communication aspect before in this post. This year many of the courses I was responsible for were paper based which meant that my kids were not in a Learning Management System (LMS) with built in e-mail. I wouldn’t have thought this would be a problem, but a surprising number of students do not have their own e-mail accounts that they use regularly–I guess they rely more on IM and sites like Facebook to communicate. Partly to address this, Jodie and I (ok, it was mostly Jodie) set up a ‘Student Lounge’ in WebCT. Most of our students take at least one course in the WebCT LMS; enrolling all of them in the ‘Student Lounge’ meant that it was easy to send out batch e-mails and it was easy for them to e-mail us. We had other plans to showcase student work along with some general discussions. Those didn’t materialize, but I definitely had more students contacting me with questions than prior to the ‘Lounge’, so I’m pretty happy with the results.
Provide opportunities for students to conduct labs at our school with support: There are some virtual labs that my students do, but there are also a good number of traditional labs the students are expected to do. To do a lab at home on your own can be frustrating. Let’s face it, even in a typical classroom kids get frustrated because they don’t get the ‘right’ results, or they are unsure what to do. This year my goal was to have time during some of the weekly high school class (see #1 above) to help students with labs. This was not a big success. I was able to do a couple of labs with the kids, but because the students start at different times and end up in different places in the course, it was difficult to choose a lab that all students were ready for.
Improve my weekly Elluminate sessions: In the 07/08 school year I started doing weekly Elluminate sessions. One week was for science and the next was for math. We met for 30 minutes for each grade. I gave a mini-lesson reviewing old concepts and introducing new ones. Then there was time for questions from the students. I started out this way again in 08/09. As usual the problem is that very quickly the students get spread out in their courses, so preparing a mini-lesson becomes difficult. Over the course of the year the sessions shifted more to being a straight tutorial. I find Elluminate to be very useful to help students with their math. It is difficult to answer math questions over the phone or via e-mail, but using the whiteboard feature in Elluminate allows you to write out the math symbols easily and have the student help to answer the question. For next year I think I will spend more time recording mini-lessons so that I can build up an archive that students can access as needed and use the Elluminate times as straight tutorials. I have to work on attendance too. The sessions are not mandatory and attendance is not always great. I’ll have to look at ways to improve this.

Future Plans
Those are the main goals I pursued this year. If you have any thoughts on how I can improve on these areas, I would love to hear it. I plan on posting again soon with my goals for next year. I hope to make this an annual event: posting goals prior to the new school year and reviewing them once the year is over. If you already do this, do you find it useful? If you don’t, would you consider it to be helpful. As always, thanks for reading this!

The Power of Observation

Claire Thompson — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 04:20:50 +0000

One of the best things about my teaching practicum, oh those many years ago, was the chance to sit in and observe other teachers in their classrooms. Everyone has a different teaching style and there is always something to take away and make your own. Since my practicum days I have taken the opportunity a few times to sit in on colleagues’ classes, but never as often as I would have liked.

student teacher by peiqianlong
Attribution License

Blogs, Twitter, and social networks are making it easier to network with and learn from other educators, but for the most part they don’t allow for actual observation. Lately, however, I’ve been able to get in some virtual classroom observations and it’s been great! This past year I’ve taken a number of week long on-line professional development classes through KnowSchools. In addition, I’ve been training to be an assistant facilitator for KnowSchools which has allowed me an inside peek as to how the different facilitators organize and run their week long classes. The classes are done using Moodle and it has been fascinating to see how the different facilitators make use of the different features in Moodle. So I’m learning about some great ways to improve my teaching practice and I’m getting to observe talented educators and how they teach.

I’ve also participated in some virtual PD offered in Elluminate Live from a variety of sources; today I popped in (briefly) to Classroom 2.0’s weekly show. I use Elluminate Live with my distributed learning students so whenever I’m in a session that someone else is moderating I’m looking for good ideas that I can steal! It’s also good to experience an Elluminate Live session as a participant. It reminds me that it is boring just to sit and listen to the moderator; I need to give my students an active way to participate and discuss ideas and I need to engage them with good visuals.

Do you take the opportunity to observe your colleagues as they teach? If so, how do you make time to do this? Do you prefer live and in person, or virtual observations? I’d love to hear from you

We’ve Got The Power

Claire Thompson — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:03:02 +0000

Sometimes I think we forget that for many of our students we are a significant adult in their life. For some students we are one of the very few significant adults in their lives. As such, how we respond to our students can have a very big impact on them and their perception of themselves.

For Example:

A number of years ago I had the following experience which really brought this idea home to me. I was teaching Biology 11 and there was a girl in the class that I had known for a few years. She was a sweet girl, but very unsure of herself. I had noticed that she had seemed down for awhile and after class one day I asked her if everything was ok. She smiled and said that things were fine. The next day I got a call from her mom; her daughter had told her about the brief conversation we had. The daughter felt that none of her other teachers even noticed her, and so when I noticed and was concerned about her it really affected her in a positive way. Her mom shared some of the troubles her daughter was having and thanked me again for taking an interest. She said it meant a lot to them both. All this from a brief conversation; just letting another human being know that they matter.

Recently there was a situation with a high school student at my school which also illustrates my point. As a staff we had noticed that this student had changed quite a bit since September; in both his appearance and behaviour. He was also making some poor choices which were affecting more than just his schooling. Then a situation arose that was clearly a cry for help. My principal met with the mother and then with the boy. He did a great job of letting the boy know that: 1) the staff and students had noticed the changes in him; 2) we were all concerned about him; and 3) we all really liked the “old him” better than this new persona. There was more to it than that of course, this is just the Coles notes version. A week after that meeting, the student was back in class and he was so positive. He was working well and interacting with the other students, not shutting them out like before. He was back to his old self and more. His positive energy was contagious and the other students were feeding off it; very cool. I’m just guessing, but I think it probably felt pretty good to know that the staff and students at the school cared about him and liked him. He mattered.

The Take Home Message

Now I’m not saying that we need to go around acting as counselors for all of our students; in fact when students come to me with personal troubles I let them know that I will offer them support, and part of that support is finding a person with the right skills to help them (I’m not trained in that kind of stuff and I definitely do not want to botch things up.) And I know for a good percentage of our students they are doing just fine, thank you very much. But we do need to be aware that for some of our students, just the fact that we notice them and are concerned about them really is a big deal.

What About You?

How do you try to connect with your students? Do you think I’m overplaying this role of teachers as significant adults? I’d love to hear from you!