Back to Back Lessons

Last Tuesday and Thursday, instead of a traditional class, all of us taught back to back 20 minute lessons based on our content. The idea was that we could teach students our content for one class and give students an exit card to assess their progress. Based on the exit cards, we would modify our lesson for the second day of lessons. This exercise was used to help us get used to teaching and planning lessons. I have linked the evidence of my lessons below, including my original plan, some of the exit cards, and my classmate and teacher feedback.

Lesson Evidence

The Performance Criterion that I believe this experience most closely matches is, Performance Criterion 7.2: Candidates plan instruction by drawing upon knowledge of learners to meet rigorous learning goals. By having my students complete exit tasks I was able to modify my next class to meet their needs. In my second lesson I had discussion questions for the student's to complete. I gave them the option of filling it out individually and writing down their answers, or reviewing it as a discussion. The students felt more comfortable reviewing it in a group. I could tell from our first class that the topic was something they were passionate about, and the students enjoyed having an open dialogue. Because I knew this, I was able to modify my lesson to fit their needs and the knowledge they had coming into the classroom.
  
    Overall this lesson was a very rewarding experience. It was the first time that I was able to teach 2 lessons back to back in my content area on a subject that I wanted to teach. It was also very helpful to get feedback from my colleagues and my teachers so I could see what areas I excelled in and what areas I still needed to work on. My final assessment for my students was an open discussion based on the topics we discussed. I really wanted my students to understand how bad traits in a leader (i.e. greed and selfishness) affect the government and decisions. I am proud to say that my students were able to understand the content and passed their assessment with flying colors.
  
   One thing I need to work on, is more clearly planning out the objectives for my class and communicating them to my students. I have the plan in my head of what I want my students to achieve but I am a very impulsive person and so easily get caught up in a good meaty discussion that I totally forget to mention the significance of the lesson, or why we are learning what we at learning. I also need to work on how often I say "guys." It is a really bad habit that I need to be more conscious of.
   
    Building a lesson plan in curriculum and learning how to have content, activities, and assessments that match the standards, helped me create a cohesive lesson that reflected the standard I wanted my students to meet. Literacy taught me how to modify my classroom and learning plan so the class as a whole could understand the content depending on their literacy ability. Which is one of the reasons why I opted for a multimedia presentation of the content instead of having a read aloud which I was originally planning on doing.
   
     This experience was really beneficial for me to gain more teaching experience and to find my style as a teacher. I am excited to see how I continue to grow as a teacher in future lessons.

Same Sun Here

A few weeks ago, the author of the book Same Sun Here visited our campus. Neela Vaswani, co-author of the book, came to talk about the book and her process of writing it. What was fascinating about Neela is that much like her character in the book, she is of Indian descent.
        
           In making the book, she talked about how organically it was made with her co-author Silas House. They each took their own characters that they came up with, and sent each other real letters in the mail as if they were real pen pals. This created the basis for the book, give or take some editing. Neela told us that when her publisher first read it she was surprised that there was no conflict between the two main characters Meena and River. They tried to stir things up a little, but overall the two characters were perfect friends.
  
         This book was overall a great book and I really enjoyed it. One thing I really enjoyed about meeting the author was being able to hear her perspective on how the book was made and how they integrate the book into schools, by doing various lessons and school wide activities centered around themes of the book. Overall this was a really great experience.

Vocabulary Lesson

Vocabulary Lesson Plan


Vocabulary Lesson Video

A week and a half ago in our classroom we were asked to create a mini lesson about one vocabulary term or concept related to our content and teach it to a small group. This assignment was especially difficult for me. I felt as though I didn't have a clear focus or direction as to what to teach about. Consequently I spent so much time thinking about what topic to choose, I was not able to put enough time into my lesson. Overall, this is not my favorite lesson I have ever done and I was not particularly happy with my final product. The lesson plan goes over my idea of how I wanted to present the material to the class, while the video is actual footage of me teaching the lesson. As I stated before, it is not my best lesson and upon watching the video, I have found quite a few things that I could improve on.
  
This lesson experience most closely relates to the following pillar in our mission statement:

          

       "Our graduates are reflective and contemplative practitioners. They thoughtfully implement curriculum and assessments, drawing from a solid theoretical base to guide their instruction and leadership decisions. They balance action with reflection to stay centered and purposeful in active environments, offering a role model for students. "

While it is not my best lesson, I take this experience and learn from it. Teachers, just like students and all human beings don't always do their best, and sometimes make mistakes. Being able to recognize what you did well on and what you can improve on as a teacher models a reflective behavior that all student's should have. Of course students should not be overly critical of their work, but as any human there needs to be a strong balance between looking and  assessing your own work. What did I do well on? What could I improve on next time? Yes of course the teacher's opinion is important to an extent, it is a student's self reflection that is most crucial to their learning. Not only are they learning more about themselves but they are growing as a student.

   I know I have a lot of hard work ahead of me and I am not always going to get it right, and I am not always going to get an A+ or Proficiency with Distinction. I do know however that these experiences such as a bad lesson are going to help me grow as a teacher and a person, and I can only hope that an experience such as this will shape me to be a role model for students and prove to them, we don't always have to do our best work to succeed or improve and it is possible to learn from your mistakes.

While I am not happy with the final outcome of my lesson, I have learned a lot about myself and how I can improve my teaching. I know that I am learning and I can't be expected to be a perfect teacher just yet. I need to be more confident in what I say and what I do. My voice is quiet and I am not interacting with my students as much as I would have liked. I was so nervous and anxious I ended up standing behind the podium the entire time. While my discussion questions looked good on paper, they did not receive a good response from my students. The questions were too easy and only elicited one word or no answers, proving that my questions were just a tad elementary for my audience. While I am very disappointed in how my lesson unfolded, I did have one small victory, I did not say "um" (yay!). This is definitely a lesson that I can learn from (no pun intended) and I am hoping that my teaching and confidence will improve by the end of the semester.

   In class we practiced writing fair use contracts and letters home for a hypothetical 1:1 technology initiative in our school. Below are links to both our fair use contract, and our letter home.

Letter Home

Fair Use contract


Each of these were difficult to write, because there were so many aspects to each. I personally was afraid that something might be left out or come across the wrong way. We did however successfully cover all topics related to the use of the technology including disciplinary actions and how we as educators expect student to effectively use the technology.
    
    Our future students will be digital natives and surrounded by a world that will one day be completely digitalized. Our students ability to be digitally literate begins with how they are taught to use technology in schools. It is our job to teach students how to effectively use the technology given to them, ensuring it opens doors for them. This relates to :
Performance Criterion 10.1: Candidates are prepared to collaborate with learners, families, colleagues, other school professionals, and community members to ensure student learning.
As a future educator, it will be my job to ensure that students are aware of how technology will aid in their learning. It will also be important for teachers, parents, and the school district to all be on the same page and collectively agree on how technology will affect the students learning, and what is expected of students to ensure that they are effectively using technology to increase their learning capacity.

    Technology will soon be incorporated in every single aspect of education. With the new 1:1 initiatives, smart boards, apps, eBooks, etc., there will soon be a day where our students might not even use a pen and paper to write anymore. While the idea of technology excites me, it scares me as well. Of course technology will open many doors for students and they will be able to explore different modes of media and learn things that a encyclopedia might never have been able to tell them . Students are now able to skype with other classrooms from around the world or watch movies or Facebook live videos that pertain to real world news or what they are studying in their classes. At  the same token there are a lot of not so good things that come with technology . Excessive screen time is detrimental to health, there are also a lot of important things that cannot be necessarily done on the internet, like writing a letter or communicating with a person in human. Yes, I am excited for technology but I fear that the humanness will become lost because of it. I am hoping my class room will use technology effectively to learn, but my students will also be able to go back to pencil and paper and having face to face discussions with one another. I also feel that the more complex  the technology gets that my students will have to start teaching me the ins and outs of the hottest new  apps. It will be difficult to keep up with all the new digital discoveries, I look forward to having a group of young digital natives to keep me in the loop.

     Over the past two weeks I was given two multimedia assignments for my education classes at St. Mike's, (ED 343 Literacy in Middle/High, and ED 361 Curriculum in Middle/High). In ED 343 we had to make use the APP Adobe SparkPage in order to creatively explain to our classmates our personal views on learning. In ED 361 we used the APP Explain Everything to make a video presentation about a specific learning theory we identify with and how we plan on using these learning theories in our future classrooms. I have linked both presentations below:

https://spark.adobe.com/page/DOCmoQJNlOHvS/

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8iwyFcF5jJbejRaejBRRmRkMms

(an updated version of my explain everything will be up soon!)

The PC that I believe these assignments most closely relate to is:

Performance Criterion 5.2: Candidates integrate cross-disciplinary skills (such as critical thinking, creativity, and collaborative problem solving) to help learners demonstrate their learning in unique ways.

     One thing that I found very difficult for this assignment was taking the time to learn a new piece of technology. The App Explain Everything was extremely difficult to use and I felt as though I did not compose a good presentation due to the amount of time that I had to put into app before the content. This program was very difficult for me to navigate. On the other hand I REALLY enjoyed using Adobe Sparkpage. The page was easy to use and intuitive and I was able to visually and creatively share without taking away from my content. After finishing both projects I began to reflect on how I might use these Apps or integrate digital media and creativity into my classroom. Explain everything would be a great tool for students to present and practice using digital media. This App is very intuitive and in depth and there is A LOT you can do with it. With that being said, I would not expect a student to create a project within a week using this app. This app takes a lot of time to master and in order for a student to effectively integrate both the app and their content more than a week would be required to master this app. Explain Everything however allows students to be very creative. Students can make various slides and turn their show into a video with voice-overs and moving clip-art.
    Adobe Sparkpage is similar to Microsoft PowerPoint, it is made up of various slides and one can add pictures, text, and video into a "slide-show" that views more like a webpage. There is potential for creativity here too, but not as much as Explain Everything. It has the same concept as PowerPoint making it less of a creative challenge for students.
    By using both of these technologies in Curriculum and Literacy I was able to integrate our content with digital literacy. Being challenged with my digital understanding along with exploring new content helped me learn in a unique way. It would have been simpler but boring just to write a paper on the content, but instead I was able to focus my energy on creatively displaying my content.

Is Your Identity Given or Created?

Recently, I watched a TED Talk by Marcus Lyon entitled, "Is Your Identity Given or Created?" The initial think that Marcus notes is that 1.8 Billion images are posted on social media every day. He is a photographer and he talks about a project he is doing on the identity of Brazilians, and what it means to be a Brazilian. Lyon notes that photographs have the ability to "hold time" and help give a an identity and a voice to the unknown. Pictures are important, because behind pictures lie a story.
    He talks about in his project he gathered stories, pictures and DNA of all different Brazilians in order to identify who they were. While DNA biologically identified them, it did not tell me who really were. Identity is so much more than picture too. Lyon notes that "as an audience we make our own judgements about photos. We will look at a photo and identify a person based on what we see. And then there is the physical story of this person that tells us their identity. In a story, a person's identity is not found in their DNA or their physical appearance, but what they have done in their life, and the relationships they have and their personality is truly what makes a person's identity, as Lyon argues. It is what we do for others that truly identifies who we are as a person.
     One of the most significant stories for me that Lyon told was the story about Ana. Lyon brought up Ana's picture and began to tell her story. When Ana was a child her grandmother whom she was very close to, got very sick and she had to have a double leg amputation. Ana was so upset by this she cut off the legs of all of her dolls and turned her room into a hospital. Ana vowed to make sure no one ever suffered like her grandmother did. Ana is now a doctor, who is renowned across Brazil, as an amazing palliative care doctor, meaning she works with individuals who have serious illnesses by helping relieve symptoms and stress that they face.
      When we look at the picture of Ana we would not know how much her job means to her, or why she chose to become a doctor. For all we know she could just play a doctor on TV.

Photo of Ana taken by Marcus Lyon (Somos Brasil)

Lyon ends his talk by asking the following question, "When we ponder the 'Who am I question' consider that we truly grow our identities when we are guiding lights not only to ourselves but to others." In other words our identity is ever growing and the only way we can grow ourselves as a person is to be a beacon and advocate for those who are struggling.

            Here is a link to the TED talk, Is your Identity given or created? by Marcus Lyon

  

                              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tJKGZ_xSZ0

ASL Classroom Management

     I have always been fascinated by American Sign Language. It is something I have always wanted to learn, and something that has always clicked with me. In the fall of 2009, at the age of 37, my mom lost her hearing, and was completely deaf in both ears. I watched her struggle through having hearing aids, and through an eventual surgery, that has allowed her to get her hearing back. She always had a hard time, with reading peoples lips, because no one ever made eye contact or talked loud enough for her to get a general idea of what the person was saying to her. While my mother never learned ASL she was able to depend on lip reading and context clues, in order to communicate effectively with others, until she was able to hear again.
       My cousin Emily who is 2 years old, was born with hearing loss, for the first year of her life, Emily couldn't hear and the doctors believed she would never be able to hear again. Emily went into an intensive speech therapy program, because she wasn't making noises or developing her speech because she couldn't hear. The program that Emily was in actually was paid for a ASL teacher to come to their house once a week to teach sign language, as they believed it would be the only way to communicate with Emily. My aunt and uncle invited most of the family, and every week for about 3 months, they spent 2 hours a week learning ASL. While I was not able to attend because I was at school, my mom attended every class. She learned so much, and I remember seeing her on brakes and she would sign things for me and show me what she learned. She was so excited.
     Within the last 6 months, Emily had a turnaround. They put tubes in her ears, and she was able to hear again, but she still has some significant hearing loss. Her cleft palate will also make speech difficult for her, so she still sees a speech pathologist weekly.
   For my family learning ASL was important to us because it directly affected us. Over spring break I was thinking about ASL and being deaf and how it affected my family, and how one day it might affect me personally as well. As my mother's hearing loss was genetic, I have a good chance of developing it at a young age too. I thought about how I could incorporate this in my classroom. Was there a way that I could incorporate sign language into my every day lesson plan? Could I have a little power point with important vocab words of the day, and how to sign them? I decided to do a simple google search, to see what popped up. Within seconds, I was bombarded with links on how to use ASL as a effective classroom management technique.
    The articles talked about using, sign language, to sign things like bathroom, water fountain, or even things like I have a question, or I have a comment, in order to minimize disruptions in the classroom. It would be so easy to have my students just raise their hand with the sign for restroom, and I could easily, direct them, by signing yes or no, without stopping the class or disrupting an activity or lectures. Most of the teachers who wrote about ASL classroom management were elementary or middle school teachers. This is could also be an effective tool in high school, but I am apprehensive because it might not work as well for older students, who might find it petty. Is it too childish? Is it appropriate to use?
     ASL classroom management is an idea I would like to explore further, it seems like if used correctly it could be extremely effective. Not only does it help minimize distractions in my classroom, but it is also teaching my students a new language, that one day they could find useful or helpful in their life.

    Check out this link:
 Sign Language Classroom Management Posters

My beautiful cousin Emily