Thanksgiving… break?

Well, I’m sitting in the Oakland airport right now waiting for my flight back up to WA surrounded mostly by what look like other college students.  We even have someone playing guitar (and even pretty good at it!).  I’m working on preparing myself for these last two weeks of the quarter.  On the one hand, it’s only two more weeks until the quarter ends, but on the other hand, these will probably be the most challenging in terms of the work we have due.

Prior to Thanksgiving break everyone in my cohort was pretty excited to have a week off school.  A lot of folks had images of a week without any work, spent vegging in front of a TV or out doing things we don’t really even get to think about doing.  Those dreams were dimmed a little when our faculty spelled out the work we have due in the next two weeks, but still, everyone was excited about a week without class.

Only, I actually spent just as much time in a classroom over my break as I do any other week.

I spent that time in my dad’s third grade classroom.  I’d been there volunteering at the start of the school year, so I already knew the kids and they were excited to see me back.  It was fun, and I had a different perspective on things than I’d had when the school year started, after eight weeks in the MiT program.

For one, it dawned on me how incredibly idealistic my colleagues and I are.  I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, not at all.  The world needs idealists, and idealists with passion are often the catalysts for change.  But it will be interesting as we all start our practicums next quarter and begin spending more time in classrooms and putting our ideas to work.  There’s a huge difference between discussing what’s best for a student in a seminar on Evergreen’s campus and keeping that in mind while trying to lead a class of twenty to thirty students through a lesson with a lot of other factors in play.  Will we be able to stick to our ideals when they collide with reality?  I hope so.

I also had the chance to apply some of the ideas I’ve been developing on feedback.  We’ve talked in our program about types of feedback and the effects they have on students.  The terms that we’ve mainly used is feedback that is either process-oriented or product-oriented.  While product oriented feedback can have it’s place, it really puts the student’s focus on the final product, on what they produce rather than the process they went through.  Product oriented feedback also tends to have more judgment associated with it (whether the finished product is “good” or “bad”), which is often related in a student’s mind with a judgment of themselves.  Process oriented feedback tends to focus more on the effort a student put into learning and exploring, and the focus is on what was learned and what process (problem solving, critical thinking) the student used.

I took the opportunity while working with students in my dad’s class to practice being conscious of the types of feedback I gave and what it might mean to the student.  After working for a long time through a series of tough math problems, I focused on praising the student for sticking with it until we found a solution.  I commented on the use of resources (other students, counters, vocab posters on the wall).  And I focused on telling students how impressed I was by the effort they were putting into their work.

It seems to me that students who feel their work and efforts are appreciated (as opposed to just their “right” finished product) will be more likely to continue putting effort into their work even if it’s challenging.  What we’ve been reading in my program also supports this.  It was interesting to try it out, and from what I could tell it seemed to have a positive effect.  Though I know I only saw immediate effects, and three days isn’t long enough to see anything lasting.  But even in that short time it seemed like some of the students were more willing to keep working on challenging problems when I made a point of praising the work they were putting into it.

Definitely something to keep in mind for the future.  And possibly something I’ll need to keep in mind for that little voice-in-my-head self critic over the next two weeks.

Practicum

For Fall quarter we’ve been doing observations in groups every Thursday in a variety of schools.  In Winter and Spring quarter we start our practicums.  This means that we will each individually be in one classroom every Thursday for the rest of the year.  We wont be changing classes or schools, we’ll be with one teacher through all of their classes for the day.  We will have some set things to observe and work on assigned by our faculty, and in Spring quarter we’ll start doing more hands on work and put together some lessons to teach.

I’m very excited because I just got an email letting me know that I’ve been tentatively matched with a Social Studies teacher at the high school in Shelton.  The teacher is actually an alumni of Evergreen’s MiT program, too!  I have to contact him and set up a meeting, a chance for us both to see if we feel like we’d be able to work together well.  If that goes well then my practicum placement will be confirmed there.

I’ve heard good things about the teacher, and I’m definitely looking forward to being in a social studies classroom (I’ve had more experience with English).  Super excited about this!

Manic Me

“As a student and a writer there’s a point where you just become manic: friends, family, laundry, personal care, they don’t matter.  You’re just completely focused on the paper.  So go manic.  Just try not to drink too much coffee…” – Michael Vavrus, MiT faculty.

One of the big assignments we have this quarter is a synthesis essay in which we are supposed to integrate everything we’re studying to address schooling, learning, and teaching.  That means things from our texts and other articles we’ve read, films we’ve watched, lectures, workshops, seminars, and observations from over the course of nine weeks.  It’s a lot to put together into one paper.

To get us started on this mammoth task our faculty had us turn in a complete draft of our paper at the end of week 7, a little over a week ago.  Obviously we wouldn’t have the information from weeks 8 and 9 to use in our synthesis, but they felt we’d have plenty to work with to get a good start on it, and then we could integrate the rest later.  And they were right; it was plenty!

I spent a lot of time preparing for this paper, since the idea of synthesizing all this information seemed daunting, even intimidating.  I used my new pad of newsprint paper and my fancy markers and worked hard at getting my ideas out so I could organize them.  It worked pretty well.  I ended up making different posters for schooling, learning, and teaching that drew on the material from the class.  It was especially helpful when I actually got down to writing, since I hung the posters on my wall in front of where I was working.

The whole process, especially toward the end of week 7 when the drafts were due, made me really glad I was living alone!  I cleared my kitchen table and piled it with books, articles, handouts, observation and class notebooks, previous work, and anything else that might be helpful, as well as the constant cup of chai.  I put posters on the wall.  I spread out papers all over my living room floor.  I even broke out my set of shower crayons and hurriedly scribbled notes to myself as they occurred to me on the shower wall or the mirror over the sink.  Each day that brought us closer to the due date found me more focused on and more absorbed in this paper.  The quote from my faculty at the start of this post began to really resemble my life, and those of my colleagues!

Wednesday night I managed about five and a half hours of sleep after working on my paper, then I had to get up early and head to the middle school for our last round of observations there.  After observations we had the rest of the day to ourselves, which meant one thing for all of us: writing our papers.

Most of Thursday is a blur in retrospect: maniacally working on my paper surrounded by my posters and books, taking short breaks to commiserate or conspire about references with colleagues on facebook, caffeine, and more frantic and excited writing.  I was able to avoid a complete all-nighter, and got about 3 hours of sleep before having to get up and head to campus for our day of reckoning.  I have to say I think I made it through the rest of that day (writing workshop and a workshop on operationalizing knowledge) fairly well for only three hours of sleep before emerging from my manic cocoon into more material and learning.

But what strikes me most is the fact that even at it’s most challenging, it’s most grueling and taxing point, I was still excited about what I was doing, about the information I was exploring, about the product I was creating.  Even synthesis-paper-induced-insanity can’t dampen my enthusiasm for this program!!

Though it did take me a while to recover…

And just to share; some pictures of my paper preparation and state of mania :)

Haiku

Textbooks can be dry.

Need strategies to focus…

Caffeine and play-doh!

Whew!

Taking a break between homework assignments right now, and I have this mental image of coming up for air… and gasping it in before I have to dive back under!

We’re coming to the end of week 6 in our 10 week quarter, and I’m definitely feeling it.  Today we had a paper due, an autoethnography.  Mine ended up being a full 8 pages.  It was an interesting assignment that required us to reflect on our own educational experiences K-16, particularly in regards to race.  Some of the prompts we had to touch on included when we first remember being aware of race, how our schooling experiences affected our racial constructions and identifications, what omissions we can see looking back, and how privilege has played a part in it.  I spent a lot of time reflecting and writing notes before pulling it together into a paper, and I’m curious about how my experiences in a bilingual elementary school may have affected me differently than my colleagues who were in English-only schools.

And hopefully I’ll have the chance to chat with some of them about it in class, but right now I have to focus on more homework.  Each week we have an integration paper due on Friday, in which we take all of the concepts, readings, workshops, lectures, films, observations, and anything else from the week and integrate it all into one smooth paper.  It’s not meant to be a linear piece by piece description of the week, but rather a compilation that reveals the connections between everything.  Which requires us to find the connections.

This weekly paper has definitely required me to go beyond my normal methods of scratching out a basic outline and winging it as I write.  This takes thought, reflection, experimentation… it takes crazy scrawling on paper and massive amounts of connecting lines drawn in multiple colors to identify themes.  Over the last few weeks my methods have evolved, and I’m actually quite proud of how I prepare.  I noticed that I was having trouble making connections if I used a linear outline format, so I’ve shifted towards more of a web map, where I get all of the ideas on paper, then spend time physically drawing the connections.  I feel like this also helps me reinforce my understanding.

In fact, I’ve gotten so into this visual map as a preparation tool that I’m taking it a step further.  Our final paper for the quarter is an 8-10 page integration paper in which we take everything from the whole quarter and integrate it.  I was feeling a little overwhelmed by this (and by the fact that our rough draft is due in a week!), so I went out and bought myself an 18″X24″ pad of newsprint paper and a new set of marker pens, and now I’m going to spend my weekend making some really really big maps.

I always used to consider myself more of a written word kind of person than a visual person, so I’m really appreciating that this has forced me to adapt and to find new strategies that work for me.  And work well!

The Jr. High

Every Thursday my cohort breaks into three groups and visits three different schools to conduct observations.  Within these big groups we break into triads, and each triad has a different classroom they visit for three weeks in a row at that school.  After three weeks of structured observation in one classroom at one school, we switch schools and get a new classroom.  The schools we visit are an urban high school, a rural jr. high, and a suburban elementary school.

The first three weeks my group went to the urban high school, which meant commuting to Tacoma at 6am each Thursday.  My triad was in a business class, which mostly involved a lot of typing.  It was interesting enough, and gave us a chance to understand the structure of the observations without getting too lost in what was going on in the class (because not much was…).

This week we started at a new school.  This time my group was headed for Shelton to observe at the rural Jr. High.  Now, until yesterday I had not really set foot in a Jr. High since I’d attended one myself.  My own experience there pretty much made me never ever want to set foot in one ever again.  But I was actually hopefully anticipating our visit, telling myself that twelve years was more than enough time to get over my own bad experiences with Jr. High.  Also, my endorsements actually cover grades 5-12, and our field experience liaison told me that it’s more likely I’d find a job at a middle school or Jr. High than at a high school, so I figured it was about time I got used to the idea of working at that level.  Plus, I’m facing a potential 20 week practicum at a middle school or Jr. High this Winter/Spring quarter, and a definite 10 week student teaching stint at one next year.  Also, I figured I might actually even be taller than the students there, and less likely to be mistaken for one of them.

Well, I was right that I wouldn’t be mistaken for a student there, they all do look significantly younger than me.  However, many of them were still taller than me.  I have a feeling that’s going to be the case until my group gets to the elementary school (hopefully!!).

My carpool arrived there a little bit early and we waited in teh office for the rest of our group to arrive.  I’d been there before so I had a slight advantage in getting there.  The interesting thing about Shelton is that the district has several elementary schools that go to 5th grade, a middle school that’s 6th and 7th grade, the Jr. High that’s 8th and 9th grade, and a high school that’s 10th-12th grade.  It’s the only district I’ve known that breaks the grades up like that, and I’m curious about how it is in terms of dynamics between grade levels at the middle, Jr., and high schools.

But it did make the morning confusing for the majority of my group, who found themselves at the middle school instead.  Once they finally found the right school we met with the principal and were taken to our classrooms.  After having been in typing for three weeks, my triad was eager for some humanities, so we snatched up an 8th grade English class.

It was an interesting day of watching the class, and I actually have a really good feeling about working with middle or Jr. High school students now.  I’m eager to do our next two weeks of observations there and see more of how the students work and learn at this level.  I’m also excited because the teacher we’re observing is very interactive with the students, and it looks like we will have plenty to take in!

So, after 12 years of bad memories of Jr. High, I’m very glad to be making some new hopeful and exciting ones.

The Teaching Personals

We’re submitting our Winter and Spring quarter Practicum Requests this week.

Let me unravel that sentence a little…. First year students do weekly observations in schools during Fall quarter, and then do weekly practicums in a classroom for Winter and Spring quarter.  Our practicums take place in one classroom with one teacher, whom we stay with for the entire length of those two quarters.  We go every Thursday and stay the entire day, partly working on assignments the MIT faculty will give us, and partly working with the teacher on what is happening in the classroom.  In Spring quarter we will even start doing a few lessons of our own in the classroom.

We get to request the subject area and grade level, even school district and teacher, that we would like to have for our practicum.  We aren’t necessarily guaranteed to get it, but we can request.  We give our request forms to the field experience liaison with the MIT program, and he faxes them out to local schools to see if the administration and teachers are willing to take us on.

I don’t have a specific teacher or district I would like to work in, so I’m going to ask our liaison if he knows of any great teachers he thinks I could learn a lot from and go from there.  I also don’t know what grade level I’d like to work with (not more specific than high school anyway).  After long deliberation, I’ve decided that I would like to be in a social studies class over an English class, so I at least have a preference there.

Part of the request form is that we have to write a paragraph about ourselves that gets faxed out to the schools for the teachers to read.  I felt a little bit like I was writing a personals ad, only instead of looking for a hot date for Saturday night I’m looking for someone to take me on as a mentee and to let me use their classroom as a place to experiment and grow in my teaching practices.

My ad:

“My name is Chelsea Whitaker, and I’m currently working towards my Masters in Teaching with endorsements in secondary social studies and English Language Arts.  I am excited about teaching at the secondary level because I feel it’s an important age for encouraging emerging young adults to become independent, critical thinkers and lifelong learners.  I’m passionate about these subject areas, and as a teacher I hope to be able to engage students in them and to help them see how an understanding and appreciation of them can be empowering.  When I’m not absorbed in learning and working towards becoming a teacher I like to cook, kayak, and dance.  I’m looking forward to the challenges and opportunities that my journey in teaching will offer me!”

Hopefully not to corny.  I’ve given up on not sounding too idealistic because, well, I am idealistic, and I think that it’s a good thing.  Very excited to get this sent out and to hear back from someone!

Legislative Discussion Circle

Today was the day!

I was thankful to learn that they had invited MIT alumni to come for the discussion, and about ten of them did show up.  They represented a fairly diverse range, elementary, middle, and high schools; English, social studies, math, sciences, art, ESL.

We had two Representatives show up and one aide.  The Representatives were Sam Hunt, member of the House Education committee, Skip Priest, ranking minority member of the House Education committee and ranking minority member of the House Education Appropriations committee, and the legislative aide for Marcie Maxwell, also a member of the House Education committee.

In addition, they invited principals from local schools who spoke highly of the quality of the alumni they’ve hired.

I didn’t do a lot of talking.  For one, I was way more interested in what everyone else had to say.  I also don’t feel like I have experience to speak to.  I did speak a little about why I chose Evergreen’s program, and how I anticipate that what I’m learning will give me a strong foundation to adapt and to be a good teacher, but mostly I listened.

The legislators had a few key topics they wanted to discuss; class sizes, what it is that’s gained from a two year program versus a one year certification, prioritizing funding, and where it’s worth it to fund a higher pay bracket for teachers with a masters degree.

The alumni jumped right in with class sizes, starting with high school teacher who has an average of 34 students per class.  They talked about their personal experiences and what having a large class actually means practically for a teacher.  They also spent a lot of time talking about the value of a Masters in Teaching or Education and the importance of offering a salary incentive for it.  Everyone knows that teachers don’t do it for the money, but that doesn’t mean teacher salaries should be cut just because they have a larger motivation for being there.

Apparently the legislature is currently debating the value of offering a higher pay bracket to teachers with a Masters because their research group told them about a study which indicated that a Masters had no effect on student achievement.  Which got us into a discussion about whether the study differentiated what type of Masters degree, as a Masters in a content area would not provide the same foundations as a Masters in Teaching would for a future teacher.  They also picked apart other aspects of the study and provided some of their own.  MIT alums know their research.

It was a great conversation to be part of.  It was highly validating to hear the alumni talk about how prepared they were when they graduated, how they’ve been able to take on leadership roles in their schools and districts in integrating new practices they were exposed to in MIT, how they feel that MIT gave them the tools they need to be highly adaptable and effective teachers.  Several of them are getting their National Board Certification, and said that they weren’t nervous or stressed out by the process at all, that it seemed a lot like what they had already done in MIT, though their colleagues who hadn’t done MIT tended to find it extremely challenging.

It was also great to see legislators taking a interest and really engaging in dialog with experienced teachers about what is really happening in classrooms and what that means.  They took the time to explain what is happening around education in the legislature, listened to what the alumni had to say, and asked a lot of questions.

It was a great experience, and I’m glad that I was able to participate and observe.

Plus, the MIT staff gave us all apple cobbler.  Can’t go wrong there!

“Mistakes Were Made

(but not by me).”

That’s the title of a book we had to read written by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.  I highly suggest you read it.  Yes, you.  While I can tie it to teaching, it fits with any walk of life because it has to do with a universally shared experience; cognitive dissonance.

Tavris and Aronson say that “cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as ‘Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me’ and ‘I smoke two packs a day’.  Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don’t rest easy until they find a way to reduce it.”

Think about it, have you ever done something, said something, made a choice that didn’t quite sit right?  That nagging feeling would be the dissonance.  What the authors go on to talk about extensively is how we manage that dissonance, and the sometimes elaborate extremes people will go to in order to reduce it.  This usually takes the form of self-justification.

They say that a common reaction when faced with a feeling of dissonance, a feeling that you may have acted in a way contrary to your values/beliefs/self-conception, is to rationalize to yourself why the choice you made was actually a good one.  And once people start on this path of rationalization, it becomes harder and harder to take a step back and analyze our actions, and maybe even admit that we were wrong.

This has strong implications in daily life.  Other people respond well to someone who is able to take responsibility for their actions, right or wrong (how many times have you had to deal with someone who stubbornly clung to their righteousness when the people around them shared a very different perspective?).  And we all know that it’s important to learn from our mistakes, but how many people actually take the time to sit with their dissonance, to analyze it, to really reflect and learn on it?

This also has important implications as a teacher.  For one, the idea of being expected to know everything about my subject matter is mildly terrifying, and I’ve observed teachers who believe that they are supposed to know everything.  When they make a mistake, this belief gets in the way of their being able to step back and recognize it, and instead they insist that they’re right.  I don’t want that, and I really don’t want my students to have the expectation that I know everything.  I want to be able to make mistakes in a classroom, and I want to be able to model for my students how to appropriately handle making mistakes.

Mistakes and learning also tie into intelligence theories.  Tavris and Aronson cite observations done in both Japanese and American classrooms around students making mistakes.  In the American classrooms, children bought into the belief that mistakes are bad, and that they indicate ineptitude on their behalf.  When confronted with their own mistakes, children would give up.  Conversely, in the Japanese classroom they cite a specific example of a student working for 45 minutes straight on one problem, making mistake after mistake, and yet never giving up until he finally found the right answer.  If we believe that mistakes reflect our ineptitude, that they are a signal that we are not intelligent enough to find a solution, what implications does that have on our willingness to take learning risks, to get engaged in learning?

I can remember specific instances in my own educational history where I’ve equated my mistakes with an inadequacy on the part of my intelligence, particularly in the field of mathematics.  What was the result?  I figured I was bad at math, and I didn’t want to try.

Most people recognize that “everyone makes mistakes” and yet in our society, and in our schools, we hold a fear of mistakes.  If we can move beyond that fear, if we can embrace what we can learn from experiencing dissonance, from making mistakes, then we can really create an environment that fosters learning over being right, the process over the product, and development over the idea of innate abilities.  Linking back to intelligence theories again, it would create an environment that supports an incremental perspective on intelligence, that we can all learn and increase our level of intelligence, rather than the perspective that we are born with a set amount of intelligence and that’s it.

Also, wouldn’t it be a relief to know that everyone saw your mistakes as a learning opportunity rather than a negative reflection of you?  I know it would be to me!

Sniffle sniffle cough cough

I suppose it was inevitable, now that I’m back on a campus of 4,700 and in a class of 45 three days a week, plus visiting public schools once a week.  Inevitable that I would be exposed to the germs, the bugs, to everyone’s favorite: the common cold.

So maybe going contra dancing Saturday night outside in 40 degree weather wasn’t the best idea… but it was fun!

And being sick has given me a bit of perspective on a few things.  For one, if I don’t feel well enough to procrastinate by going out with friends, I actually get a lot of reading done.  I’ve already done all my reading for this week and have started on the reading for next week.

The other thing is that my reaction to being sick has definitely changed.  When I was an undergrad, or in high school or middle school or even elementary school, being sick meant that I got to stay home from school.  Got to.  Not had to.  I saw it as a nice excuse to take some time off from class.

I can honestly tell you that’s not the case anymore.  I spent Sunday and Monday doing all I could to get over this thing fast so I’d be well enough to make it to class today.  And I did.  More or less.

But it shows how engaged I am with this program.  I don’t want to take a day off, I don’t want to miss any lectures or workshops or seminars.  Who knows what insights and thought-provoking gems I’d miss out on!

Though as much as I appreciate the perspective, I’d really like to not have a runny nose anymore…