confessions of a Practicum student

a blog for my professional development (please note many of these posts will be out of order)

[intothelandofeducation]

Lets talk Collaboration

Hello everyone.  Once again, I’m back to talk about/reflect on something in education.  This time its collaboration.    This semester in practicum we had so many opportunities to build and use this skill.   But, I think I will stick to just a couple of times we either had to use the skills we already have or got a chance to grow as a collaborator.

The first opportunity that comes to mind is all the time I spent in the field with my mentor.  From the moment I set foot in Mrs. H’s room, I was expected to work with her to build my skills and get my toes wet as someone on the path to being an educator.  But, to also work together and collaborate with her and the occasional ed techs to help students achieve the learning goals set out by Mrs. H.  This is something that could not have happened without the ability to collaborate.  Any time you add more educators or teachers into the mix in a room if you can't get everyone on the same page students can’t succeed.  A really shining example of this was when I was gearing up for being observed by my field director Professor K. (side note I will never use a full name on this blog unless it is a pseudonym or I have their express permission) Professor K comes in to view all practicum students and whilst doing so we are expected to be the sole person delivering the lesson with only mild support from our mentor teacher.  This is nerve-wracking.  However, I managed to pass my observation with flying colors and the students loved the lesson.  The reason I did so well, I attribute to the collaboration and work that was done beforehand with Mrs. H. We both had to sit down during a prep period and look at where the students really are, what am I confident in content-wise to teach by myself, and what is appropriate for the class that I will be teaching.  Without working together in a professional manner these questions would not have been able to be answered nor would the lesson ever have been effective.

The second experience I had in practicum that I think of that really involved collaboration came from the latter half of the semester when everything went online.  During the second half, there was a project where two other practicum students and I had to read, think critically, and create a discussion about a chapter in a book called “spirit whispers.”  Now anytime you talk about group work you are essentially talking about collaboration.  In order for us to properly pull out the core ideas, reflect, and not overlap each other we had to work together.  The reason this was extra challenging, however, is the fact that this was at the very beginning of us doing classes online so we had no way to be in person. so we had to get creative.  We used our class page, and Facebook messenger to work together, process ideas and ultimately turn out what I would consider a relatively good conversation about the particular chapter in the book.

The last thing that happened that I want to touch on is the Facebook group chat that the spring 2020 practicum group had.  Not because a group chat is inherently a collaborative thing (believe me I’m in plenty that are anything but) but, that anytime one of us faced a hardship or a challenge we all kind of came together as a collective to form a solution 

To me, that's what collaboration is in its rawest and purest form.  It’s people coming together and working toward a goal as equals.  Whether that goal is as small as working together to get assignments in or as large as trying to find a solution to effective online learning.

[intothelandofeducation]

A Community connection

As part of my practicum and part of making a diverse and inclusive unit we are required to come up with a way to connect our unit to the community in one way or another.  As I have mentioned before I made a MASSIVE unit on the periodic table, matter, and chemical reactions ( which my professor helped me break down into 3 meta-units. Thanks Dr. T)  I decided to put my community connection into the reactions part of my unit and in particular to connect it to my summative assessment project.  For those that don’t know it is a scriptwriting project in which they will write a script for a kids TV show that takes what they have learned at the high school level and break it down in a way that is both easy for a child to digest and have fun learning it.  Now some may think it would be impossible to involve the community with this but I would say otherwise.  In essence, the new skill they are learning is scriptwriting and visual media.  Having come from the Portland Maine area it is easy to find people involved in this segment of media.  My idea for making the project community involved was to reach out to the local community college of Southern Maine Community College and have their department head give some tips and tricks of writing a good script (possibly involve their own students)  In an ideal world I could introduce my students to theirs and my students would benefit from learning the basics of writing a script and their students might have an opportunity to film said scripts and even add it to their final portfolio ( a requirement for all media majors at SMCC)  My hope is that by showing them people currently pursuing this field that they could not see the project I have given them as an insurmountable task and given that their role in the project it a scriptwriter/performer they could see from these students what that is really like. There may even be a possibility at the end for a showing with “professional” critique from the SMCC students or most likely their department head. 

As an alternative, my ideas for this project that could be done in any classroom is having students go look at youtube episodes of sesame street and seek out interviews online of writers for various television.  The idea being that it would give them an idea of what a typical sketch on an educational show looks like and that they could see into the mind of a writer and how they may work through their creative process.

Both have pros and cons 

For the SMCC and department head coming in and talking with the students the pros are helping my students understand that there is both an art and science to scriptwriting.  To see faces of people who are in this field and see the very diverse viewpoints that come along with media.  It’s very common to have only one viewpoint seen as the right way to present information and this could hopefully inspire them to get creative and see and embrace differences.

A con of this is that the SMCC students or department head may be too critical of my students and unintentionally break down their confidence if they are not briefed ahead of time of ways to make sure they are being constructively critical of what my students are doing

As for the alternative project, it is inherently consistent in that there will always be episodes of Sesame Street somewhere on the internet and there will always be interviews of creatives (whether a video or a written interview) out there and could even let students look into some favorite they may already have. 

The con, however, is that they lose the opportunity to ask real-time for suggestions on where to start or what pitfalls they may have while writing that I even as the creator of the assignment may not be able to answer in a meaningful way since I am not a screenwriter by trade.

Lastly,  as with most blog entries I need to connect it back to my growth as a future educator.  With this particular blog post, I’m going to connect it with the ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) teaching standards.  these standard for those of you that may not know are standards that are supposed to guide teahcers and students to not only be proficient in technology in our modern ever-changing world but to also use this technology in a meaningful way.  The standard im going to connect this too is as follows 

“ Standard #11.4 Collaborator

Educators dedicate time to collaborate with both colleagues and students to improve practice, discover and share resources and ideas, and solve problems. Educators:

4c Use collaborative tools to expand students' authentic, real-world learning experiences by engaging virtually with experts, teams and students, locally and globally.“

My logic behind connecting with this one is based on the fact that my ideas for how to give my students a meaningful connection with this project hinge not on the community being able to get physically in the classroom but on the experts in our local state.  Maine is a state with quite an active Indie film scene and we have experts in scriptwriting, directing, and all areas of visual media in our state.  the drawback is we are also a very rural state but this also means that getting connected digitally to these experts is as easy as an internet search and an email.  these experts are almost always willing to work to help the next generation and possibly grow the industry in our state and many are also always encouraging of students putting their work out there (even if it is just for a science project from their zany chemistry teacher)

[intothelandofeducation]

The following video is a reflection on my standards portfolio and the subject of diversity as it pertains to my students

[intothelandofeducation]

CMERC test run

Well some sad news is that because of COVID-19 we never did get to go to CMERC.  However,  we had a great opportunity to have a dry run with our fellow students, professors, and a few quests in the field of education. To give some context what we were doing for CMERC was presenting pedagogically appropriate ways to assess students with technology.  That meant either using technology to completely transform what was being done or using technology as a new way to perform the assessment.  For me personally I used a new writing program for movie scripts I had never used before called indie skedge ( https://app.indieskedge.com/dashboard its completly free btw )  this allowed me to come up with a creative assessment for my students without the barrier being the creative background of them having to write a script ( the project was writing a script for a children's TV show that shows what they have learned in class)  i also learned about a new app called plickers which just astounded me.  plickers is an app that can be put on ones phone.  it scans answer cards held up by students to give instant yet anonymous feedback. To me this is very important since sometimes students can be very nervous about being asked questions among a whole class even when it is the most effective was to check progress.  the last thing i presented was a google form as a pre test for my whole unit.  this was so that all my students could quickly access it and do it in their own time before we started the unit.  

Moving on to more about the dry run. In our class we were divided so i sadly did not get to see everyone's technology.  However, I did get the chance to see how creative you can get with some of the tech.  An example is how i had a class mate show me a google tour following along some of history's greatest theaters.  I never would have thought to go and do something like that.  thinking about how I could take some time and show my students the places that some famous scientists lived or even the voyage of Darwin could really bring to life for them the history and just how short of a time in the grand scheme of human history we have had the knowledge we have.  

All these new techs some of which were never really intended to be used in the Education field can help transform the way we teach and learn.  just a simple example would be the google form pretest.  i could set it up to give instant feed back to my students on what they got wrong or right and i could set it up so that they could keep taking it both strategies would help students self asses and let them know instantly where they are at.  But, on the educators side it also catalogs what students answer.  This transforms how i would teach them and allows for me as their teacher to zero in where they have no knowledge and ramp up things where they are already comfortable thus helping provide a reasonable level of content at all stages.  

overall I’m really glad i had the opportunity to have the dry run even if it ended up being the real full run.  

[intothelandofeducation]

Three wise teachers Reflection

Well, we have reached the end of three wise teachers.  Part of the assignment was to do 4-6 hours of professional development.  Boy howdy was that hard to fit in my busy schedule but,  I managed to do it. I was given many good resources from my previous teachers.  one person, in particular, kept coming up from them named Parker Palmer (i would link to the videos I watched but considering I just typed him into YouTube and let him play for about an hour that might be hard)  what hit most home was a moment when he was talking about fear in the classroom.  How it can undermine even the most successful teacher and student.  In our educational system, we use fear to manipulate people to be better is baloney to him.  I have to agree with him.  fear can lead to paralysis.  I myself experienced this during my practicum time in the field.  However, it is overcoming that fear and always acknowledging that its there is what helps us move forward.

Something else that was recommended to me by an old teacher was to re-watch a movie called “Waiting for Superman.”  This movie directed by Davis Gugenheim would be a great thing to rewatch as I’m getting closer to being a teacher in a classroom and now that I have been in a classroom I would now have a new perspective about charter schools. To be honest I thought they were just trying to give me busy work but I gave it a shot.  I was surprised by how my views on charter schools have changed since I was in my first education classes years ago.  I used to be very confused about whether I was for or against a charter school.  (personally I feel a very negative vibe at my college towards charter schools) however, after watching it again I became less ambivalent.  I realized that as much as we want to explore different ways of learning and teaching it can be very hard when we have highly established school systems already in place and that the politics of education can be a massive minefield.  I could be doing something extremely revolutionary and cutting edge in the world of education with my students and all it could take is an angry PTA or an unsupportive administration to take me down.  Charter schools while not without some of their own problems (how they pull funding from the pool of funding for local schools or that they can reach capacity and cause issues with who gets in and doesn’t) I feel as an educator I am more comfortable with a charter schools ability to adapt quickly.  

The last resource I was given was more advice than anything. It was to familiarize myself with a website called  https://betterlesson.com/  it was a mind-blowing website.  This website has lesson upon lesson for teachers who may be struggling to come up with something for their kiddos.  What I thought was going to be a little 30 min looksie turned into 3 hours later having gone from science lessons all the way over to English.  

Overall all this professional development was rather easy and that’s in my wheelhouse.  When I am able to watch a video or just do something at my own pace I’m able to digest it so much more easily.  I also never thought that there was such a huge network of teachers who wanna help fellow teachers.  

[intothelandofeducation]

three wise teachers

as a practicum student i have many projects one of which is a three wise teacher project.  in this project i work on some professional development, reach out to teachers i used to have that made a difference in my life.  The three teachers I chose were Mary-Jo O’Connor,  Ann Boyce, and Kim Bush.  The first two were two college teachers I had at SMCC and the last was a 5th grade teacher I had that made a world of difference. Mary-Jo was a professor and head of the education department at SMCC and was my first ever professor at SMCC.  she made me feel like i was competent and able to tackle and problem that would come my way.  Ann was an English professor who taught ethical dilemmas  at SMCC a class that i had to take two times.  she made me not feel bad about having to do this class a second time and made sure i had the supports to pass the second time around.  Finally Kim, she was a teacher i met at a massive transition in my life where she helped me get to a better place and feel like i really mattered as a person. 

The way I reached out was by email.  which admittedly was a little hard.  i was able to hear back from Ann and Mary-Jo but unfortunately i never heard back from Kim.  Kim might be because it has been over 17 years since i was in her class and she may have just retired.  

Mary-jo did respond back with only one in particular she said to look up a guy named Parker Palmer.  some podcasts and books were what came to mind.

the funny thing is that Ann also suggested parker palmer as well but in particular his book the courage to teach.  

I have to say i never would have contacted them if it weren't for this project that i have in practicum and was a heart warming chance to reconnect. im excited to look at the resources they gave me and im pulling more from my mentor teacher in a few days.