student surveys

I've talked a lot throughout the year about the importance of teacher reflection. What I haven't spent as much time on is the importance of having students reflect on their learning. I mentioned it in a post on student reflection on assessment, but here at the end of the school year is an excellent time for your students to do some reflecting for their own and for your sake.

Edutopia has a great post on how to design a survey that elicits student feedback. The site suggests creating a survey to get a sense of how much and what students liked about the class and/or school year, what topics they enjoyed learning about the most, activities that helped their learning the most, when they felt frustrated and when they felt successful and respected. You can ask students what advice they'd give to incoming students about the class/grade, and see how they think they've grown throughout the year. You certainly have some additional ideas for what you might be interested in knowing from your students. And if you give a survey to students, consider giving one to parents as well. I always found it very interesting to hear what parents' perspectives were on the classroom.

The information gathered from a student survey can really help you as you begin to refine what your plans are for the following year. Even if you are teaching at a different grade level or school, some of this information will be helpful for you in your general plans for your instruction, assessment, and classroom environment.

A student survey is a great use of time in the final days of the school year.

Stand on my shoulders and reach

Somewhere up there is a star with your name on it. I might not be able to help you find it, but I've got pretty strong shoulders, and you can stand on my shoulders while you're looking for that star. You hear? For as long as you want. Stand on my shoulders and reach, man. Reach.

I recently read tennis player Andre Agassi's autobiography (a really great book, by the way). Gil Reyes, Agassi's trainer and as it turns out, the loving supportive father figure he longed for, is credited for getting Agassi in shape to maintain his professional career past age 35, which is ancient for tennis players. Most professional athletes, actually. This quote of Reyes', which comes about halfway through the book struck a chord with me. I think about how relevant it is to how we, as teachers, provide scaffolding for students' learning. And then let them go. Gil's commitment to getting Agassi where he wanted or needed to go was steadfast and strong. He taught, guided, and then let Agassi go.

Memorial Day is upon us, the school year is coming to a close. The end of the school year is bittersweet. You are exhausted. Especially if this was your first year, you may be more tired than you've ever felt before. You are mentally, emotionally, and physically drained. You are so ready for a respite. But if you're like me, you start to sense a loss towards the end of the year. These students, for whom and with whom you have worked so hard, are about to leave. We have been helping them reach all year, but it is time for them to move on.

I attended graduate and undergraduate graduations last weekend at St. Kate's, and watching students process in with proud tears in their eyes, walk across the podium to get their diplomas, celebrate with friends at the end of the ceremony, I had to fight back my own tears. Partly in pride for these wonderful students, but also with a profound sense of privilege that I get to do what I love for a career. What we do is so important. Maybe the most important. Our work is powerful. We carry many on our shoulders to reach until they are ready to go.

So here at the end of the year, consider: how did you help your students reach their stars?

the end is in sight!

It is hard to believe that there is less than a month left of the school year. You have almost made it! May and early June for first-year teachers is often the reflection phase in the cycle of teaching. You begin to reflect over the year, take stock in the successes and the failures, the changes made in management, curriculum, and instruction that influenced student achievement and development.

If you haven't done so already (and before you get settled into a well-deserved summer break), take some time to craft a new vision for teaching for next year.  Consider:

1. What was my overall impression for the year? How did I enjoy teaching, the school, the students?
2. What were my relationships like with: students, parents, administration, fellow teachers, support staff?
3. What was successful for me and for the students in my class(es) this year? Why was it successful?
4. What concerns me about the progress the students in my class(es) made this year? What else concerns me?
5. What can I try differently next year?
6. What professional development would help me as a teacher?

You probably have a list of things you want to rethink over the summer, and these reflections might help focus what you want to accomplish over the summer. Setting new goals and creating a new vision for your classroom can really help you get excited for a new school year, even when you're exhausted from the current year.

Every teacher, no matter how experienced, can benefit from continual reflection, and these questions can get you started. I have some reflecting to do myself!

** Resources:

http://edbuzz.org/djohnson/2010/06/end-of-school-year-reflections/

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/classroom-solutions/2010/05/improving-instruction-next-year

finding a teaching job

Yes, it is that time of year. For many of you readers, you have a job and are fortunate to be staying put. Some of you will have been let go due to budget cuts, and others of you may still be looking for first jobs. Or (congrats!) you just finished your student teaching and are graduating soon and beginning your first search for a teaching job.

I did an entire series of posts about the job search last spring, and here are some of the specific posts you might want to refer to if you are conducting a job search:

• Writing your resume and cover letter
• Learning about the school and district
• Thinking about your strengths and weaknesses
• Planning your attire and thinking about your body language
• Questions to ask in the interview
• Following up after an interview

If you look in the labels section of the blog and click on "job search," all the posts related to looking for a job will come up.

But I recently came across a great teacher blog that has some new posts related to the job search - The Cornerstone Blog. The blog has a series of posts including general job search information and advice, a page devoted to finding a teaching job - with some helpful hints about questions to ask in an interview and what to look for in a school, and a page of interview tips. A lot of this is information covered in the posts on this blog, but it is helpful to read it in more than one place in more than one way.

I'll be doing job search posts often in the coming months with new information to help you in your quest for a teaching job. Let me know if you have helpful tips to share!

equity consciousness

The knowledge and skills to educate all children already exist... There are no pedagogical barriers to teaching and learning when willing people are prepared and made available to children. If we embrace a will to excellence, we can deeply restructure education in ways that will enable teachers to release the full potential of all our children. 

- Asa G. Hillard

Something I've been working on lately with teachers is to think about education in terms of equity instead of equality. The difference may be subtle to some, but to me, this is a huge shift in mindset. Equity is about providing the necessary and often different support and resources to ensure that all students can achieve high standards, which is different, then, to treating all students equally.

Your school may have a data team or may even have an equity team in order to wrestle with how to put this mindset to practice in the classroom. What we know from lots of data on schools in Minnesota that your data team might be looking at is that despite our efforts, we have not made enough progress to meet the needs of students of color in our classrooms. When we hold consistent for factors such as SES, students of color continue to fair worse on assessment measures, indicating we still have much more work to be done.

So what can you do? I'll be coming back to this topic several more times in the coming months, but for now, at this point in the school year, I think reflecting on your current practices and building a habit of thinking about equity is the best place to start.

One place I go to in order to prompt my thinking about culturally responsive teaching and a focus on equity is Teaching Tolerance (a site I've mentioned before), particularly the "Reflective Thinking" section of their website. There are some really interesting activities and writings designed to help you begin thinking about equity and culturally responsive teaching. It's a good place to begin.

You, no doubt, have heard a lot about reflecting in your preparation program, perhaps in a Master's program, or in your professional development at your school. And at times it can seem like an impossible task, given the constraints of time. But maybe while your students are taking the MCAs this week, you can use a little of that downtime to think about these questions to prompt your thinking and raise your awareness of your own teaching for equity.

• How do I currently attend to gender, race, cultural and socio-economic equity in my
  classroom and school?
• Who benefits from my current teaching practices and understandings? Do all children, parents and staff benefit equally?
• What knowledge do I have currently about gender, race, cultural, and socioeconomic equity in my classroom and school?
• What assumptions am I making about gender, race, cultural, and socio-economic equity in my classroom and school?
• How do others in my current workplace understand and respond to the issues of gender, race, cultural, and socio-economic equity in their daily work?
• How have I taken account of children's perspectives and experiences on this issue? Do I know what the students understand about gender, race, culture, and class?
• How have I taken account of parents' perspectives and experiences on this issue? Do I know what parents understand about gender, race, culture, and class?
• What are the differences between how I understand the issues of gender, race, cultural, and socio-economic equity and how others I work with understand them?
• Whose interests are served by how I currently understand and practice gender, race, cultural, and socio-economic equity?
• How might I challenge my current understandings and teaching practices and bring new insights to them?
• What in my current understandings and teaching practices might restrict the possibilities I have for working more equitably?
• What would I risk by working on a daily basis to promote gender, race, cultural, and socio-economic equity in my classroom and school?

**Adapted from the Centre for Equity and Innovation, 

Melbourne Graduate School of Education.

These are difficult questions to answer, sometimes because we aren't satisfied by the answers we're able to give. As I stated in the post on Teaching Trayvon Martin, students are interested in talking about race, equity, and culture, and they need opportunities to have structured conversations about these topics with caring adults (that's you!). 

I have found that the more time and energy I spend reflecting on these questions, the more capable and confident I am at leading conversations about equity in my own teaching. The questions posed here will have a different answer on different days, and every year you teach, your experience will lead you to different conclusions about your current understandings and evolving teaching practices. The value in this practice doesn't lie in the answers, but the willingness to engage.

informational text

Take a look at the Common Core Language Arts standards, which Minnesota adopted for ELA, and you will notice the focus on complex, informational text starting in the elementary grades and continuing through the end of high school. I was just in an elementary school helping some teachers analyze some NWEA MAP strand data, and it was clear that the students needed some more instruction in comprehension of informational text. When I ask students or teachers to list the types of text they read in a given week, once they start thinking of text in a broad sense, it's clear that most of what we read is not literary fiction. And we have different strategies when we're reading a contract for a new roof than we do when we sit down with Stieg Larsson's Girl with a Dragon Tattoo.

So for this week's post, I'm going to focus on some great resources for teaching students comprehension strategies for informational text.

One of the key researchers for understanding how students comprehend informational text is Nell Duke. She wrote a great piece for ASCD called, "The Case for Informational Text," published a while ago but still very relevant. In the article, Duke (2004) suggests four things elementary teachers can do to start focusing on informational text:

• Increase students' access to informational text.
• Increase the time students spend working with informational text in instructional activities.
• Explicitly teach comprehension strategies.
• Create opportunities for students to use informational text for authentic purposes.

She goes on to describe ways to do each of these, but I'm going to give you some other ideas. I've already shared that ReadWriteThink is one of my favorite lesson plan sites, and I like this lesson developed for K-2 students around teaching students a 3-2-1 strategy, writing 3 things they learned, 2 things they found interesting, and 1 question they have after reading an article.

Have you seen Wonderopolis yet? It has some amazing informational texts on different topics, ranging from who invented the high-five to whether pirate ships have flags. Students love exploring this site, and it's great text to apply a variety of strategies as they are reading about the highly engaging topics.  This would be appropriate for elementary or adolescent readers and writers.

With informational text, the key is helping students read with a purpose. Students need help knowing that they should set a purpose for their reading, and then keep that purpose in mind as they read and take notes. We all know the three main purposes of text - to inform, to persuade, to entertain - and kids will likely be able to name these. But they also need help knowing how to read a particular piece of text for purpose. Letting them know ahead of time what they will be doing with the information is a good start. But, like everything, this takes lots of work for students to know how to do this independently. Here's a ReadWriteThink lesson plan that looks at setting purpose.

One thing about informational text that students need instruction in using are the text features. Students need to know how to use to their benefit the information from headings, captions, graphs and maps, bold words, and all the other great features of informational text. I've used the lesson plan loosely described at the Link 2 Literacy blog with some really great handouts to help draw the attention of students to text features.

One of my favorite strategies is the "Say Something" strategy when students partner up with a text and at set points in the text, each partner has the responsibility to say something about the text. They can ask a question, make a connection, clarify something, add to what's in the text, the point is that they stop and say something related to the text with their partners. I have found it to be very successful with elementary through high school students.

Have you signed up to get the weekly newsletter, "The Big Fresh" from Choice Literacy? I just love getting these and reading them on Saturday mornings. In their archives is a list of resources for nonfiction text, particularly as it relates to the CCSS. Of particular interest might be the link to the INK THINK TANK, which shares excellent nonfiction texts for students. I love the book trailers, which can help hook students on some of these excellent books. Along with that great resource are the Nonfiction Monday blogs, linked at Kidlitosphere.

Doug Fischer, who writes mostly about adolescent literacy, focused on Duke's work in his piece for ASCD, "Helping Elementary Students Read for Information." Fischer gives specific ideas for teaching strategies before, during, and after reading informational text. Speaking of Doug Fischer, he and colleague Nancy Frey have a great website at Literacy for Life.

Another go-to resource for me for adolescent literacy is AdLit.org, which has some great videos, and, even more helpful, links to handouts that accompany some great strategies for content texts.

How do you help your students read informational text?

social studies resources (including Titanic-mania!)

I haven't provided some good resources for social studies teachers lately, so I thought I would pass along some great resources for you to look through in all your spare time (ha!). Here are some of my favorites. What are yours?

The Library of Congress has some amazing resources available for teachers found on their site and their blog: Teaching with the Library of Congress. I also love the map collections there. Virginia Tech has some cool modules on US and European History on their Digital History website. Annenberg Media has created some interactive modules as professional development in historical thinking and interactives for students as well. Teachinghistory.org focuses on historical thinking, and because I believe in the power of music to tell a story and as a sense of context, the collection of posts about teaching social studies through music appeals to me. Teaching History with Technology also provides lesson plan and presentation ideas, and resources for collaborative research projects using technology. These barely scratch the surface, and are mostly history-related. I'll definitely do another post on this, as there are so many resources to share.

This is maybe a bit late, as the anniversary is this weekend, but perhaps students will still be interested on Monday! As for the centennial anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, one historian out there estimates that the only two things more written about than the sinking of the Titanic are Jesus and the Civil War. That might not be true, but what is true is that for 100 years, the Titanic and its demise has captured the attention of young and old. With the rerelease of the James Cameron blockbuster, many are obsessed all over again. The NY Times has an article with tons of links to passenger accounts and historical coverage of the sinking.  NPR's Planet Money did an interesting story about why people on the Titanic didn't panic that would be interesting to read with students. Teacher Larry Ferlazzo has an amazing list of websites for teaching about the Titanic disaster. The Library of Congress has some great resources around teaching tragedies (a la the Titanic).  History Tech has some cool iPad apps about the Titanic. There's also an interesting unit on media critical thinking posted here.  Thinkfinity has some great lesson plans linked to their page. Go to the site and type "Titanic" into the search bar and go!

And (unrelated but timely) don't forget about the TC2 Job Fair coming up on Apr 17 (next Tuesday!), open to teacher candidates prepared at the TC2 institutions, and the MN Education Job Fair on Monday, Apr 23, which is open to all MN university teacher candidates and/or alumni. Let us know how the events go!