#teacher challenges

[tdwf-articles]

[greatprincetyrant]

Why Punishment Fails in Today’s Classroom

When a class becomes difficult, punishment feels like the quickest solution.– Raise your voice.– Send a learner out.– Give extra work.For a moment, things seem to settle.But only for a moment. The reality many teachers are facingPunishment is no longer as effective as it used to be. Not because teachers are weak.But because learners—and classrooms—have changed. What is really happening? When…

Why Punishment Fails in Today’s Classroom

[greatprincetyrant]

Why Good Teachers Still Struggle

Not all struggling teachers are weak.Some of the most committed, hardworking teachers are the ones quietly struggling.-They prepare lessons.-They show up every day.-They care about their learners.But still—something feels off.Lessons don’t flow as expected.Students don’t always respond.Progress feels slower than it should. The uncomfortable truth Being a good teacher does not guarantee an easy…

Why Good Teachers Still Struggle

[laughingblue12]

Those Were the Days

Pictures from picturehistory.com, www.edb.utexas.edu, texasescapes.com, and lbjmuseum.com My personal history as a school teacher begins in the 1981-82 school year in a little town in South Texas called Cotulla.  Without realizing it, I was following in the footsteps of former U.S. President LBJ.  Really!  It’s true!  To prove it, here is a picture from the LBJ Museum showing the big-eared,…

View On WordPress

[greenbeanrecipes-blog]

A teacher's experience in talking about what happened in Steubenville with her freshmen. The trouble is that we as teachers, as adults, tend to assume kids are not ready to know and talk about serious issues in the news, but these kids do know about it and think about it. And if we sell their thinking short, they'll continue thinking as they do without being introduced to new perspectives--like learning how not to blame the victim.

[greenbeanrecipes-blog]

Taylor Mali's poem, "What Teachers Make." I watch this whenever I have a rough day, or can't seem to make my way through a stack of essays. I hear snippets from it in my head perhaps once a day. I've also found that even with less than a year of experience in a formal classroom, I've already encountered each of those situations (or some version of them).

[greenbeanrecipes-blog]

The Power of Formative Feedback

I am no stranger to circulating and offering help to the students who ask (and ask they do), and am rarely sitting. However, Mr. M pointed out to me a couple weeks ago that a few of my students simply sit there, on the verge of getting to work, and could sit there for 5, 10 minutes at a time almost starting while I help their peers, until I come over and prompt them to begin. It is as if they want someone to set them back on track. To address this, I began being more proactive about keeping students on task, even if it means checking in with the same student every three minutes. This upgrade came at about the same time as we've been talking about the power of formative feedback in my classes, and the combination of the two has been proving to be well worth the energy it requires.

(the rest is under a cut, for this turned out to be a longer reflection than I'd predicted)

Yesterday, my juniors did an activity called "Quote Fishing" that Mr. M developed to scaffold the writing process. Students receive a topic sentence from a theoretical essay and 14 quotes that COULD work with the topic sentence. The students have to identify the 3 quotes that would be PERFECT for the topic sentence, then analyze the quotes in connection with the topic sentence.

While I circulated, I made sure to check in on one student who tends toward unproductivity, who was kind of hanging over his paper with his eyes half-closed. I asked him if he was tired (he was), we compared how many hours both of us slept (he got even fewer hours than I), and we did a knuckle pump for camaraderie. Then I pointed out to him that this would be really good practice to see how well he can analyze when his brain is oxygen-deprived from lack of sleep. I'm not sure if that provided stress relief through humor, incentive, or simply teacher interest, but he got right to work.

As I circulated, I looked over each student's quote choices without commenting on them. As time began to wind down, I stopped by a few students and asked them to show me their best analysis, and gave them suggestions how to keep pushing their analysis. This included 2-3 of the students I rarely hear from (and who thus do not do well in their participation grades). This allowed me to solicit them to add a bit more analysis and then share their answers with the class. Yesterday was probably the first time in a full year that one of my students volunteered to share his analysis.

Another student I spoke to picked my favorite quote from the list, but only really paraphrased it in his analysis ("Daisy is like a balloon"). I told him he was on track, and then asked him how it shows that Daisy is victimized. He needed time to think, so I came back to him a few minutes later. He'd locked on the exact word that would prove his point, and explained it well. All it took was probing questions.

To summarize, circulating and providing formative feedback (specifically to students who did NOT ask for it) helped me

keep students on task by showing them they would be kept accountable,

push students, both stragglers and leaders, to a higher level of analysis,

show several struggling students they actually DID know what they were talking about,

and hear from students who NEVER volunteer in class.

The drawback, of course, of such practice is that I can only give meaningful feedback to one student at a time, and some students need several minutes of back-and-forth to help them move onward. This means I have to "pick my battles": focus on only a few select students per day. That said, though that makes for a rather slow process of reaching all students, it also means that eventually I will have spoken with and given detailed, meaningful feedback to all my students about their work, which builds their confidence and gets us hearing new voices. Fascinating how the theories from my reading actually work!

[greenbeanrecipes-blog]