Overall, I'm pretty happy with the lesson on the life cycle of stars that I videotaped. I think that the students understand the sequence of events and the scale on which it occurs. I don't really know what else to say about the overall effectiveness of the lesson... Oh, they were pretty engaged in an activity where I had them make a kind of time line for the life cycle of the sun and then make an analogous time line for the life cycle of humans. They were working on this before lunch and when I told them to line up for lunch, all four of the kids stayed in their seats and kept working. I had to repeat myself for them to stop working and stand up. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm taking that as a good sign of interest.
I feel really uncomfortable with the rubric and assessing myself based on its parameters. That's a huge problem I have with the way things are at Holly Springs. I really have no bearing on where I stand compared to other people and where I should be. That's not completely true, as I have been assessed, but I'd like to see other people teach (besides just those in my classroom) and also see how others are evaluated so that I can calibrate my expectations to those of the evaluators and TEAM teachers. I feel like a process like that would not only expose me to a number of other teaching styles, creative ideas, and classroom dynamics, but also would help me to more objectively evaluate my own teaching on any given day. As it stands now, basically my only two criteria for the effectiveness of my lesson are: 1) did the kids answer my informal assessment questions correctly most of the time, and 2) were they active participants with a little excitement in their body language. If the answer to these two questions is "yes", then I feel like my lesson was effective. But I've had lessons where the answers were "sort of" to these 2 questions and received favorable evaluations. I just wish I had more experience with the evaluation process and was better able to apply it for my own benefit and the benefit of my colleagues, now that we're doing daily informal assessment/comment sheets for other teachers in our classroom.
That being said (sorry for the diatribe), I can recognize a couple things about this particular lesson. First, everybody is right, and I recognize it while I'm teaching as well. I talk too fast. Shocking, I know. I've heard that this is one of the more common problems, and I definitely have it. In this particular lesson I didn't stumble over my own tongue, but that has happened. It's not even nerves, either. I just want to get stuff out and fit a lot on my lesson and just cram information into their heads and I need to slow down, plan a little bit less information into my lesson, and take my time going over things and repeating them. I've started to do this, but I still notice that when I'm asked a question that isn't directly related to the lesson, or one that I may not be expecting, I kind of jump back into hyper drive and need to cut that out. The second issue is my time management. In this lesson I had two pretty good activities that were both cut a little short because I took too long on the Do Now and lectured too much. Again, this goes to slowing everything down and planning less into the lesson, but its taking some getting used to for me. On the one hand, I'm making sure my kids really understand things, which can slow me up, but on the other hand I cram too much stuff in the lesson, so I need to balance that out.
I really enjoyed watching myself teach!! I got to see myself from a different prospective. Overall, I think that my lesson was well done--but there is always room for improvement.
Overall Impression of the Lesson:
Engaging Lesson: student read out of book, constantly shared his opinion, found his own answers to his own questions, used maps, analyzed primary sources, and did a creative activity
Things I Did Well:
1. Constantly asked questions
2. Took advantage of teachable moments
3. Related lesson back to set in the mist of the lesson
4. Taught behavior as well -- "thank you -- your welcome"
5. Conversational tone
Suggestions for Improvement:
1. Make sure that I do not confuse Presidents
2. Could have gotten more out of the Venn Diagram activity comparing FRD to Eisenhower
3. I still talk too much
4. Need to pass out script and instructions for defense activity
I think that the best part of my lesson was the creative activity at the end where my student had to act as my lawyer in a blacklisting case. In his defense he had to use things that we had previously learned about. He did an excellent job and showed that he had retained most of the material we have been teaching.
The one thing that I will definitely work on is my pasuing during the lesson as I think. If I recall correctly, Mr. Amutah mentioned this to my before, but it was not until I watched myself teach that I noticed how awkward it is. I tend to pause when I am thinking of how to phrase something or when I am thinking of an example. Hopefully this month I can eradicate this habit!!
Watching the video recording of myself teach was a harrowing experience, as I spent the first forty-nine minutes wondering when I would have to experience moments of humiliation that I did not notice in vivo. I was "teaching" a session on autobiographical storytelling stemming from a moment in "Flowers for Algernon" in which the main character, formally mentally challenged himself (I'm not sure what the best term is for this), having gone an operation that drastically increased his IQ, catches himself laughing at a mentally challenged dishwasher boy who sends a stack of plates crashing to the floor in a restaurant, much to the amusement of a callous dinner crowd. Charlie, the protagonist, feeling guilty that he had been laughing with the crowd, resolves to use his scientifically gifted intelligence to the cause of the less mentally apt. The tagline of the exercise was, "And I had been laughing at him too." I wanted the students to think of a like moment in which they caught themselves laughing at someone or otherwise treating them in a demeaning way, and to describe any resolutions that came out of the incident.
Video evidence confirms a disastrous set attempt, in which I asked for a spontaneous oral introduction to such moments, with it in mind that they would turn into paper stories later in the period. The problem with this was, as Mr.
Barnes reminded me yesterday, many of us (or maybe just me) have arrived in Mississippi speaking a different language from our students, and I'm still culturally inept to the point that I cannot understand anything that has been said by one of my students on the first hearing. Add that to the problem that some of our students are natural performers--always willing to raise their hand and to have the floor, though not necessarily to any productive end--to the problem that I wasn't seeking a one word answer (e.g. What is the direct object?), and to the problem that seventh and eighth graders, not exactly versed in the violent rhetorical art of turning life into arguments, don't always have anywhere "to go" in the telling of a story, and I was left awkwardly nodding and affirming that which I didn't actually comprehend ("OK...uh...good...thank you...anyone else?"). Having failed to get what I "wanted," I improvised and told my own story, riling the kids to laughter with the story of my dad being urinating himself in the airport, with the cold turn that he called me a few weeks ago to notify me of his (relatively mild) prostrate cancer diagnosis. I was shocked then--and again in re-watching it--at the instant silence in the room, to the point that I felt guilty about using that story to set their writing assignment. I expected some laughter at the situation, as would surely have been the case in my own eighth grade classroom in the dark ages, but perhaps--and this is just a speculative theory--these particular kids empathize with real problems in a way I couldn't growing up by the green grass (even though I immensely failed at getting them to understand the definition of the word "empathy", which nearly half of them asserted was the opposite of "sympathy" on their tests). If I could re-do the set, as Dr. Monroe suggested, I would tell my story first and let that model their writing assignment, as opposed to inviting them to casually perform such a story without much thought to it. (Aside: all most all of them related a story in which a friend was injured and they laughed at that friend, feeling bad about it later)
The first part of the hour was the most interesting to re-watch, and so I will just note a few more moments in which I saw a need for improvement:
1. When I had the students reread the relevant section of "FFA", there was some somewhat muffled laughter at a struggling reader which I wish I had identified and come down upon.
2. When I had them drafting their stories, when I would kneel down to speak individually to students, there was consistent banter behind my back. I need to improve my back of the head vision. I get too fixated on content at times and let classroom management slide. It frustrates me that some students will only continue to write or improve their work if I consistently get around the room to interrogate what has been completed and where the assignment needs to go from there.
3. I need to improve at writing on the board without my back turned. It seems like a physical impossibility to write "opened-up" to the class, but the murmur creeps in when my back is turned, so I have to be better about that.
4. I need to be both harder on students for not listening to directions the first time and make sure to give clearer directions with visual accompaniment. I've quickly learned that just telling them to do something means that I will have to individually recap the assignment to every single student.
The embarrassing moment that I couldn't bear to watch never happened, that is, in this particular class that I happened to film. But there was plenty for me to improve, and I'm sure I'll catch-up on humiliation during the school year.
Friday, July 04, 2008
As I write this reflection, I’m listening to India.Arie’s song, “Video.” In truth, its lyrics are not really applicable here, but it’s laughable to think of a teacher in terms of an actor or performer. Not quite... (although I did laugh at one instance in which I heard myself sound like the monotone, slow and drab English teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: “If the sun is siiiiinking, it makes me think of a boat sinking, which is baaaad, because if the sun sinks, then the snow won’t melt.”)
My initial reaction to my lesson was, “what a relief that this lesson is so much better than my lesson on Friday!” I saw myself bounce back. I was in my element teaching this lesson on imagery, versus my muddled, over-done lesson on transition sentences. I could see that there was certainty in my delivery that was missing in that prior lesson. That might pose a problem for this self-evaluation, because every lesson I teach won’t be a topic I relish. It would have been better to film myself teaching something I am neutral about. But imagery, I love this stuff.
Strengths:
· Bellringer. I love DOL (daily oral language), and I am pretty sure it showed. The kids got into it too. They were on-task from the start. It’s a great bellringer for high levels of participation.
· Classroom management. Gave short warnings when they were “merited.”
· Set. I got seven students to speak up. I wrung description out of them, too. I got a glimpse of their imaginations (“yeah, but what does cotton candy taste like?” “raspberries...bubblegum...”). And, my favorite part of the set: students giggled. I went with the laughing instead of silencing it, because it was contained laughter. Plus, isn’t that a good sign of a good set? [I’ll admit I was a little afraid that the students were laughing at me, perhaps at the cheesiness of describing a carnival, but it was better to play along than go against the laughter!]
· Confidence. I had a grip on the subject and the students. It was fun. If I had fun, maybe they had (at least an ounce of) fun, too.
· I remembered to go over the daily agenda. I have a bad habit of usually forgetting this.
· I taught vocab words along the way: Engaging. (I should make a word wall and use periodic vocab quizzes)
· I announced how I would be grading the formal assessment (IP classwork) and wrote idiot-proof instructions on the board. As a result, the quality of the students’ work was VASTLY IMPROVED compared to when I did not give idiot-proof instructions on the board. Six students scored perfectly or almost perfectly on the assignment.
· I hammered at the objective. (I asked them, “How does this make the poem effective?” over and over and over again)
Weaknesses:
· At the start, my transitions were really choppy. I went from bellringer to set, set to preview, preview to objective like a softball player attempting ballet. I had a student pass out worksheets after we were ready to use them, causing almost a whole wasted minute.
· A persistent weakness of my lessons: imbalanced time management (instruction + guided practice > independent practice). I need to start treating IP as the most precious part of the 50 miunutes.
· I was totally surprised by how I move around the room like a maniac. I am constantly racing around the room, from the overhead, to the table by the board, to the board, to the sleeping student’s side, etc. I think it comes to the point of distraction, rather than being a good circulation tactic.
· I need to stop saying, “does that sound right?” as the way to teach grammar. My students will always say, “sure, that sounds fine.” I should have just stuck with the real reason I gave earlier (“cover up Jessica, then read it: ‘Him decided to go to Memphis,’ or ‘He decided to go to Memphis’?)
· Favoring the vocal students. I entirely (and unconsciously) skipped over Marquires, a very bright student. I think each student spoke once in class, but some definitely spoke too much. (But it’s so easy to call on students who will say something helpful to my point!!!!) This negatively affects my informal assessment – I only caught those students who are regularly afloat, and let the others pass under the radar and sink.
· Poor management of sleepy students. I entirely missed one student snoozing during GP.
· My closure was mid-delivery at the bell, and went 10-seconds past it. Not good.
I learned that giving explicit formal assessment instructions is vital to students’ performance. Writing instructions on the board is the key to their success. I also learned that it is very easy to let a handful of kids’ voices go unheard. It is too easy to neglect the quiet students. I learned that I also will not also always be catching my students nodding off, and that sometimes the best way to cope with laughing students is to just laugh with them and thereby steer the instruction back to control. I learned that IP time needs to be preserved. The only way I could have done that in this lesson would be to have smoother transitions to cut out wasted, dead time (I am glad I have the block to work with, so class-work won’t have to turn into homework very often).
I recorded myself teaching and watching what I did wasn't scary. I thought the lesson was pretty good, and the guided practice was taught relatively well. I tried to have differentiated instruction time, which I did, but I was probably talking, therefore working, a lot more than I needed to. But, none of this was surprising to me. I knew that talking too much in my class was a problem. I knew that differentiated instruction time was something I needed to focus on and have been. What I was unaware of was exactly how blind I was in my own classroom. First of all, the distraction of having my computer recording myself in the back of the classroom had a strange effect on some students. Most forgot about it, as I did, after 3 or 4 minutes. One student, LQ, was so enamored with the video that anytime I had my back to the board, which I finally understand how much of class I do, she'd wave her hand or throw something across the room. One of my two laugh out loud moments happened with the way one student reacted. TJ is an absolute rock in my class, he always pays attention, always answers questions when asked, and does relatively well on most assessments. Also has a very subtle sense of humor, which he displayed by almost exactly half way into class he turned back into the camera for what seemed like a nano-second, gave a knowing smile, and for the rest of class was his normal focused rock self. My other laugh out loud moment was when we were checking our work on an algebra, i asked a student in several different ways if 9 was the same number as 13, and she didnt answer even after 20 secondds of questioning. My biggest wake up call though was how blind i was to students talking behind my back, or sometimes even right infront of me. I have gotten somewhat good at regconizing all my students voices, but i was unaware they were adept at lip-sinking. One of my students, sitting sideways in his desk, probably lip-sinked to other students in class even longer than I was talking, which is quite a feat. I didn't know exactly how to handle it either, which is probably why I ignored it to some extent. But, if nothing else the video allowed me to gameplan for such an action in the future, so I might make my rule any non-sanctioned communication, whether it be verbal, psuedo-verbal, or note form, is not allowed in my class. So the summary, i want to decrease the percentage of time im talking increase the percentage of time students are working, decrease the amount of time my back is to the students, and decrease the amount of time students talk to each other.
His talk today was a lot of fun. I laughed, I cried (not really), it was a complete experience. I was really excited to hear that he will be in or around my school in the fall. I hope that I'll get to speak with him one on one at some point because I feel like he's the kind of guy who's always up for a good, solid conversation about stuff that really matters. Plus, I've never gotten a business card with a genie on it before- I'm taking that as a great sign!
I really enjoyed him warning Basile about touching the girls and making Amanda draw giant inches- but my favourite part was this quote (when you read it, you have to imagine that his voice starts off really fun and chuckley and then gets suddenly serious while we're all still laughing so that the last person to stop laughing feels like an idiot):
so you don't cry."
(Reaction to video taped lesson #1 on 6/26/2008)
My very first reaction was "wow, it's not that bad!" I was expecting to really hate watching myself, but it didn't end up bothering me at all. My voice was weird and I felt pretty bad that the students had to hear so much of it. I really think I would be much more effective if I could deliver a lesson in a third as many words. That way, what I do say will pack more of a punch and the students won't get confused with all the extra fluff.
I video taped myself on a review day. Since it wasn't a normal lesson, I skimped out on the set. This was a big mistake. In the past I had pretty good sets and, even though I used to think they were kinda pointless, now I'm realizing that they really do focus the kids. I also noticed that on days where I don't have a very structured plan, I tend to get pretty scattered. I'm hoping that when I've been teaching a bit longer I'll be able to "improv" better, but as of now, I really need thorough lesson plans.
The lesson I filmed took place last week when I was just beginning to realize the problem I had with assessments. Since then I've really tried to do better, but I still have issues. I don't do enough informal assessments and so when it comes time for the formal assessments, the students struggle. Then I feel crappy for not teaching them better and so I help them too much and then the assessment suddenly isn't so formal anymore. I have been working on this though, saving lots and lots of time for informal assessments. I've also tried to make formal assessments that are very structured so that I am less likely to forget them (homework questions) or be tempted to help too much (like on a quiz). I think this is something that I'm actually improving on and that makes me happy since I tend to get stuck in ruts where I just can't improve. I guess the good news is that I haven't been teaching long enough to have any ruts.
Strengths - the kids were actively involved, there was a very positive environment, I had a lot of energy, the kids seemed to learn something. I've heard people say that they watch themselves and realize that they say "like" or "um" a million times, as far as I could tell I didn't do anything like that - woo hoo! Also, as far as I can tell, I don't do the weird swishy hand move anymore (my second year said I did it a whole bunch my first day), so that's a bonus.
Overall, watching the video didn't really reveal anything that I didn't already realize I did (I usually notice stuff I do wrong as I go and remember it). It was good, however, to see what the evaluators see and where they're coming from when they grade me.
One cup of Coffee: ~ $1/day
(with gas tax, ~$3/day)
One Breakfast of Champions: ~ $2/day
(champions = teachers)
Finally getting sleep after a day of teaching, disciplining, classes, and the dreaded "LP" words (lesson planning): PRICELESS!
Some things aren't important in life. For every thing else, there is teaching.