Reflection on School Year Goals #4
At the beginning of the year, I set a number of goals for myself, one of which was to reflect on said goals every two months. My fourth and penultimate set of reflections are in italics below.
Teaching
I will improve the way I give feedback to students. Formally, I hope to develop a system to give students feedback about writing that meaningfully a) tells students where they are, b) what they need to do to improve and c) is efficient enough that I can provide frequent and timely feedback to all students. I also need to make sure I am giving informal feedback more frequently to all students. (I hope that moving to a Standards Based Grading system will enable these things to happen organically).
My students just completed their last major essay for me, and for the first time all year I made the time to conference individually with every student. One thing I’ve been working on is being better at naming students’ strengths so they know to keep doing those things. I think this went really well in conferences, and gave many of my students a much needed boost of confidence heading into college. I also gave them one concrete next step to take in their individual development, in addition to feedback on meeting our year-long standards. I think this is a model that I need to use more.
Students will have multiple opportunities to rethink and revise their answers to large essential questions throughout each unit, and will also reflect on and revise all major work.
This was accomplished for all the major work and questions in the past couple of months.
Leadership
The Social Studies Critical Friends Group will meet once a month, and will be valuable for its participants.
Still meeting this goal.
Advisory
100% of my new advisees will either graduate or earn at least ten credits by June.
Unfortunately, one of my advisees will not meet this goal, but everyone else will.
100% of my advisees will be accepted to college, and will have a plan to pay for it or whatever else they choose to do next year.
Almost there on this goal.
Personal / Professional Development
At least once per week, I will write and publish a piece of writing about teaching social studies, be it about my practice or teaching in general.
I’ve kept this goal up, though my “publishing” has more and more taken other forms.
Every two months, I will write and publish a self-evaluation of how I am doing on these goals.
Best Compliment Ever
Two students were just comparing me and another teacher in the office:
Other student: Teacher X is cool.
My student: Steve is cool, too, but only after school.
This might be my new favorite thing a student has ever said about me!
Reflection on School Year Goals #3
At the beginning of the year, I set a number of goals for myself, one of which was to reflect on said goals every two months. My third set of reflections are in italics below.
Teaching
I will improve the way I give feedback to students. Formally, I hope to develop a system to give students feedback about writing that meaningfully a) tells students where they are, b) what they need to do to improve and c) is efficient enough that I can provide frequent and timely feedback to all students. I also need to make sure I am giving informal feedback more frequently to all students. (I hope that moving to a Standards Based Grading system will enable these things to happen organically).
Now that I’m essentially 3/4 of the way through the year, and as most of my thinking turns to school-wide structures for next year, I am more and more excited about the use of SBG to help students know where they are and what they need to do to improve. With that said, I also have become aware of some of the limitations of how I implemented SBG in my social studies class. SBG has really helped my students understand what they need to do to improve individual assignments, but they are still struggling with how to improve overall. I think a lot of this has to do with the number of goals, particularly for the year. Twelve goals for the year was too many, especially as some (Imagination, Questioning, Revision, Reflection) only come up on rare or isolated assignments. I would also rethink the goals of Sourcing and Evidence, combining and changing them to be “Selection of Evidence” and “Use of Evidence.”
I am doing a better job of more frequent informal oral feedback, but have struggled to get informal written feedback to students in a useful manner.
Students will have multiple opportunities to rethink and revise their answers to large essential questions throughout each unit, and will also reflect on and revise all major work.
This goal is getting better. Students had opportunities to workshop and revise persuasive speeches, and there is lots of time for revisions built in to our current Project Citizenship work.
Leadership
The Social Studies Critical Friends Group will meet once a month, and will be valuable for its participants.
The group gets better and better with every meeting, and the core group of ten (eight original members, and two wonderful additions) are reaching new heights together. There will be a longer post on this in the near future, and I’m planning a session for EdCamp Social Studies to share with more people.
Advisory
100% of my new advisees will either graduate or earn at least ten credits by June.
All fourteen are on pace with credits, and my advisory did particularly well on Regents, so this goal is looking very good.
100% of my advisees will be accepted to college, and will have a plan to pay for it or whatever else they choose to do next year.
At this point, nearly all have been accepted somewhere, but we have not yet started on having plans to pay for it. I think this will happen in April.
Personal / Professional Development
At least once per week, I will write and publish a piece of writing about teaching social studies, be it about my practice or teaching in general.
Back on pace, and doing more writing than I’ve done since my first year of blogging now that I’m not on Twitter.
Every two months, I will write and publish a self-evaluation of how I am doing on these goals.
Help Wanted: Existential Teaching Dilema
This evening, everyone in my critical friends group is sharing an “existential” dilema we’re struggling with about our practice. Here’s mine:
This is the question I’ve struggled with since I began planning my Government/Economics course last summer: How do I choose/balance between the following modes of praxis in a course where I’m not concerned with a massive amount of content for a state exam?
- Teaching through inquiry, which best develops students’ ability to think critically and to learn how to learn. In true open inquiry, learning a specific body of knowledge is limited or sacrificed.
- Teaching through extensive reading, watching, and research to gain the necessary cultural literacy to enter adult society and assume the responsibilities of citizenship. Given the tremendous amount of information students need, this limits the emphasis on skill development.
- Teaching students to do authentic intellectual work (which often, but not always, is through Project Based Assessments), which emphasizes the practical skills of communication and production, as well as have students engage with specific content.
Some notes towards an answer:
I recently re-read Horace’s Compromise, where Ted Sizer writes that schools should only really focus on four things:
- Helping students develop understanding, which is done by questioning.
- Helping students to gain knowledge, which is done by telling.
- Helping students develop skills, which is done through coaching.
- Helping students obtain decency
There seems to be a strong correlation between Sizer’s first three duties of an “essential” school and the three modes of praxis I struggle to balance. At the school level, I think there is a clear need to balance all three, along with ensuring all students are decent people (and given that most of my thinking right now is about macro-curriculum planning for the school I’m helping to open next fall, having that clarity is a huge help). My feeling is that a thoughtfully and intentionally structured school would be filled with classes that allow students and teachers to primarily focus on one of the three areas, to make sure that the course’s transfer goals are clear, and to decrease the cognitive load on students, allowing for maximum development.
In the overwhelming majority of schools though, there is little attention to how the entire curriculum works together. At best, there is some alignment vertically within subject areas, or horizontally across grades. It then falls to the thoughtful teacher to make an independent decision on how to address these three goals…
I’m very curious to hear how teachers, parents, and students would respond to this question.
Blog Updates
3 small new things here:
1) New design. Long overdue. Hope you like it
2) One of the things I did really like about Twitter was the ability to quickly share other good, provocative, and otherwise noteworthy articles and blogs with an audience. Since I’m no longer tweeting, I’m going to try to do more quick blog entries here pointing to other interesting reads. These posts will be under the “Good Reads” category, and have lower case titles.
3) I’m also trying to tackle more books about education. While being an active blog reader and twitterer has helped me develop professionally over the first quarter of my career, I’m embarrassed at the dearth of education books I’ve read in that time period; there are two books I’ve had on my to read list since 2004! I have a nice pile next to my bed now, both of new books and ones I’d like to re-read, and am looking forward to writing about these as I read them. Three down so far this year, and will post about them soon.
Why I’m No Longer Tweeting
It’s been a month and a half now since I’ve looked at the never ending stream of updates from the people I follow on Twitter or Facebook. And while I am thankful for the network of excellent educators I’ve connected with through Twitter, I came the conclusion that it wasn’t something I wanted to keep in my life anymore.
What follows is an explanation of why I’m making that decision. I’m not suggesting that everyone should make the decision. I’m also not deleting my accounts, so that I can still connect with people through both mediums. I’m also regularly checking my RSS reader and reading the many longer and more thoughtful edublogs I find there.
Last year, I became convinced I developed adult ADD. I felt like I was loosing my ability to concentrate on any one task for an extended length of time. Luckily, teaching is a job that rewards being aware of many different things at once, so it didn’t affect my job performance. There were times when it was a challenge for me to focus on extended conversations with my wife, though. I seriously considered going to see a psychiatrist and talking about going on adderall (which I, unlike many of my generation, never used recreational in high school or college).
I think a lot of the feelings I had could be attributed to the stress I was going through with a crazy-long commute, over finding a new job, and leaving a school I helped build. But despite a huge decrease in stress this fall, I didn’t feel completed normal.
In December, I came across the following short piece by Jonathan Safron-Foer (whose Everything is Illuminated is one of my favorite books) in The Millions:
The best book I read last year — and by “best” I really just mean the book that made the strongest impression on me — was The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr. Like most people, I had some strong intuitions about how my life and the world have been changing in response to the Internet. But I could neither put those intuitions into an argument, nor be sure that they had any basis in the first place. Carr persuasively — and with great subtlety and beauty — makes the case that it is not only the content of our thoughts that are radically altered by phones and computers, but the structure of our brains — our ability to have certain kinds of thoughts and experiences. And the kinds of thoughts and experiences at stake are those that have defined our humanity. Carr is not a proselytizer, and he is no techno-troglodyte. He is a profoundly sharp thinker and writer — equal parts journalist, psychologist, popular science writer, and philosopher. I have not only given this book to numerous friends, I actually changed my life in response to it.
In search of a potential change for the new year, I picked up The Shallows, and read it over winter break. And while I think there are some flaws in the book and its reasoning, I have to say, overall I was convinced that much of what I was feeling could be attributed to the ways in which I was using the internet in general, and Twitter in particular.
Carr accuses the Internet of “chipping away [his] capacity for concentration and contemplation” (p. 6). He described, what I found in myself when I was in the constantly updating world of Twitter:
[W]e enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it’s possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards (p. 115-116).
The book references numerous studies that have huge implications for those of us who teach using the net, with this conclusion being the most startling:
Even though the World Wide Web has made hypertext commonplace, indeed ubiquitous, research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links (p. 127).
There were many points on which I disagreed with Carr. I think his criticism of reading on the Kindle is the book’s weakest section. His claim is that by turning every word into a hyperlink, e-readers encourage distracted reading, as readers can leave at any moment to look something up with the click of a button. That has not been my experience, while reading Carr on my Kindle, or any other book. If anything, my Kindle has allowed me to take on mammoth texts I never would lug with me on the NYC subway, including War and Peace and In Search of Lost Time.
Carr also fetishizes the “deep thinking” that he associates with reading, without giving enough credence to the shallow thinking that is sometimes more desirable, like when you’re teaching a room of 34 adolescents.
But despite the flaws, Carr did convince me that the amount of time I was spending on Twitter (and, to a lesser degree, Facebook) was altering my ability to focus for extended lengths of time and to do the deep contemplative thinking and non-fiction reading I would like to do more of. And that’s what I hope to be doing moving forward.
