Visible Teaching - Standard 8

Visible Teaching

Standard 8:

Present professional practice for the review of colleagues.

Standard Aligned Course(s):

EDU6528: Accomplished Teaching

EDU6990: Teacher Leadership Capstone

Reflection:

Before starting the Teacher Leadership program, I believed I already knew what it took to be a great leader within in my school.  I was skeptical about the growth that would happen throughout the program.  I came into this program with the thinking that I am already doing the leadership roles, I might as well have the degree to back it up.  Now I realize the amount of growth that was possible and the amount of growth that is still in my future.

The biggest take away from this program for me was the learning behind adult learning.  As a teacher, we are required to sit through countless hours of professional development.  "Adults need and want to grow professionally; they desire ongoing learning opportunities in a place nestled within their own schools so that they can improve practice" (Zepeda, 2012, p. 46).  The issue is, the professional development provided within our schools it not always designed to promote successful adult learning.  Through this program, I learned how to design and implement professional development that was both useful and engaging for my colleagues.  I was given the opportunity to present both to my department and to the entire staff.  As I was planning the professional development for both the school and my department, I knew I was aiming to answer the questions Blair brings up in Chapter 23 of Teacher Leadership The "New" Foundations of Teacher Leadership. Of the five questions Blair mentions, "How can we create school environments where each student is known and treated as an individual" (Blair, 2016, p. 200)? is the goal of our professional development. We are constantly trying to create a school atmosphere where students feel like they belong and like they are a contributing member of the community. This program helped put the importance of students belonging into perspective for me. While I knew it was important, seeing the effect of the strategies used from the professional development my colleagues and I developed cemented the idea that students want to feel known and heard. Having to plan and present professional development also forced me to think about what I would want as a learner.  Too often we are being taught strategies to use in our classrooms but the presentation is the opposite of what the presenter is saying.  “Schools and districts should be encouraged to rigorously evaluate professional development approaches themselves and, when possible, to report the findings publicly to build up the knowledge base on the topic” (Gersten, Taylor, Keys, Rolfhus, & Newman-Gonchar, 2014).  While we do not currently do a great job of reporting our findings as a school, this was something my department worked on this year and will continue to work on in the years to come.  This program gave me the time and space to think through how to present material to adults in a way that was both informative and engaging.

The second major take away from this program was the knowledge of how to plan and process a complete unit before teaching it.  Coming into this program I would plan the length of a unit and the general content that would be learned on each day but that was it.  I did not go in depth into what differentiation would occur during each lesson, I usually did not think about the formative assessments before hand, and I never started at the end of the unit.  My classroom was the classroom that Wiggins and McTighe described when they said, "we see an overemphasis on short-term content aquisition for simple recall instead of long-term understanding" (Wiggins & McTighe, 2011, p. 4). I always planned from the beginning to the end and was focused on the short-term learning instead of long-term understanding.  Through the construction on my unit plan and collaborative lesson plans, I have been able to see the value in planning units that account for differentiation and formative assessments before the day of the lesson.  This past school year, 2017-2018, I was able to use the lesson plans and unit plan that I developed in this program.  The unit plan was designed around a unit in AP Calculus.  That unit received the highest average test score this year.  Through planning out a unit, I was able to take the time to think about the different elements I wanted to include in the unit.  Discussions were one of the strategies I wanted to implement into my calculus lessons.  I believe AP Calculus students are ready for the challenge of discussing difficult math with each other and pushing each others thinking.  I quickly learned that, “Orchestrating an effective classroom discussion, however, is not as simple as just asking questions.  It requires a teacher to be purposeful in the types of questions that are asked so that the key ideas are made visible and fully explored” (Chedister & Shumway, 2016).  The desire to include more discussions pushed me to think about student thinking and the way they would approach a topic.  It also made me think about the questions I would ask before hand.  Before, I would have a general idea of the questions I wanted to ask but nothing set.  Now I know that I need a list of questions ready so that I don't have to think of them on the spot.  As I move forward, I will be using the same template to create my future units.

As I move forward into my seventh year of teaching, I plan to continue taking on leadership roles within my department.  Due to my commute, I am planning to step down from my role as department head but we are hiring two new math teachers and I hope to continue working with new teachers in a mentoring role as they join our department.  Most importantly, I plan to continue pushing my thinking about how to create professional development that aims towards a culturally responsive and inclusive classroom community for all of my colleagues and my students.

Sources:

• Blair, E. (2016). Teacher leadership: the "new" foundations of teacher education: a reader. New York: Peter Lang.
• Chedister, M., & Shumway, J. (2016, Spring). The Role of Questioning to Develop Conceptual Understanding. Volume 68(Issue 2), 21-24. Retrieved November 27, 2016, from http://www.wismath.org/resources/Documents/WMT_Spring_2016-Complete-LR.pdf#page=24
• Gersten, R., Taylor, M., Keys, T. D., Rolfhus, E., & Newman-Gonchar, R. (2014, January). Summary of research on the effectiveness of math professional development approaches. Retrieved December 4, 2016, from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED544681.pdf
• Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2011). The understanding by design guide to creating high-quality units. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
• Zepeda, S. J. (2012). Professional development: what works. New York: Routledge.

Moral & Ethical Behavior in the Classroom - Standard 1

Moral & Ethical Behavior in the Classroom

Standard 1:

Model ethical and moral behavior.

Standard Aligned Course(s):

EDU6085: Moral and Theological Issues in Education

Reflection:

I believe every student has a desire to do well in school. I believe it is the teacher’s job to help students achieve this goal and I believe moral education plays a significant role in student success. According to James, “if you want to reach your destination, make sure each step you take is in that general direction” (James, 2015, p. 6). Right now, there are many students and many teachers that are taking steps that do not propel them towards their intended final destination. Students are put into a unique situation in public high schools. They are told the path they are supposed to follow and the end goal is graduation. However, they are put into an environment where they are working with others who are from completely different backgrounds, upbringings, family situations, learning styles, etc. and expected to work well with each type of person. What is often forgotten is, coming from those different backgrounds means their knowledge of how to act in diverse situations will be different as well. Something I strive for in my classroom is,

“listening as well as talking, striving to understand points of view different from one’s own, challenging ideas and proposals rather than persons, admitting ignorance, slowing the rush to decision so as to clarify or reframe the problem or gather more information…even appreciating the principle attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”” (Parker, 2003, pp. 87-88, as cited in James, 2015, p. 7)

I want my students to feel comfortable in my classroom. I want them to know that they do not all need to agree on a topic to have a valid viewpoint. Like Nord & Haynes, I believe, “[s]chools teach morality in a number of ways, both implicit and explicit” (Nord & Haynes, 1998). It is important for teachers to be aware of this, so they can help students become the best students/persons they can.

My core religious values stem from my belief in Christianity. I did not grow up going to church, but both of my parents had grown up in church. My dad grew up Catholic and my mom grew up Presbyterian. Although I did not regularly attend church, my parents raised me in a way that aligns with many church values. They taught me to be honest, to work hard, and to help those who are in need. I was also influenced by my best childhood friends Alyssa and Emily. It was through them I was able to first learn about God. I went to vacation bible school, to the occasional Sunday school lesson, and was a part of their families’ lives. Seeing the people involved in the activities I was able to be a part of with these friends, I chose to surround myself with people who attended church and was brought to the Lord through their invitation into their community. This conviction to know God deepened when I met Peter, my boyfriend at the time, husband now, at youth group. I knew that God was a large part of his life and his family’s life and I wanted to know what Christianity was all about. As I got to know Peter and his family I realized the values of the Christian church and the values I grew up with are very similar. In Christianity, you are taught to love thy neighbor. I believe this has truly been engrained in my way of life. My parents will do anything they can to help someone out. This has translated to my life as a teacher.

As a teacher, my first goal is to help as many students as possible be successful and to meet the potential I know they have inside of them. There are definitely students I do not see eye to eye with but that does not mean there is no way to reach them. I do my best to help students realize they are capable of more than they think. I currently teach mathematics at Renton High School. I have a large number of students who come into my classroom with a preset idea of their math skills. When someone already has a preconceived notion about themselves it is difficult to change their mind. I have found that, like Wirzba says, “The test of faith is always the test of love” (Wirzba, 2013, p.39). As a teacher, I put forth a lot of effort to make sure my students know that first and foremost I care about them and their success. “To create a healthy learning environment, students need to develop the virtues of responsibility and respect for others. They must eliminate habits of laziness and sloppiness and acquire habits of self-control and diligence” (Ryan, n.d.). Although many of the students I work with initially come across as lazy and inattentive to detail, once we have built a relationship and an understanding around expectations has been built, students tend to push themselves to meet the expectations put in front of them. So, “raising teacher awareness of the importance of being both warm and demanding can certainly improve classroom relationships, which are fundamental to successful teaching and learning” (Pace, 2015, p. 40). When students know you are going to demand a lot from them, they also have to know you have their back if they struggle.

To help students know they can be successful, we do a lot of board work. Students will work on something at their table groups and then it will be time to show it on the board. From the beginning of the year, I will have a student choose a number, that number will correspond to someone in the classroom and then that person will come to the board. I am always near the board with them and the norm is that they can phone a friend, phone the teacher or write up what they have on their own paper. No matter which option they choose, they must explain the process. As the year goes on, the teacher lifeline disappears and they are only able to phone a friend or write up what they have on their own paper. This helps build confidence in their abilities. Also, when students are working, if I see a student who does not usually volunteer with the correct answer or a method not many people have used I will ask permission to show their work under the document camera. I will also do something similar with my high achieving students. If a student who is generally high achieving makes a simple mistake I will ask permission to show it to the class. This shows students that even if you make mistakes you can still be successful in math.

My goal that all students can be successful is challenged daily by what I see in my classroom. I believe, “Moral education, then, refers to helping children acquire those virtues or moral habits that will help them individually live good lives and at the same time become productive, contributing members of their communities” (Ryan, n.d.). I have had many phone conversations with parents/guardians of my students over my first five years of teaching. Many times, their values and expectations for their student are different than mine. They value their students time as a baby sitter, as a chef for the family, as a money earner for the family, as an athlete, etc. but many times they do not see their student as a student once they have left the school building. This was one of my biggest struggles my first couple of years of teaching. I had to learn the boundaries I needed to set for myself so that I could expect great work from all of my students and hold them to the high expectations I have for them. If I was assigning a large amount of homework every night I was not going to get great work from all of my students. I was only going to receive great work from the students who have the privilege to go home and study, the students who don’t have any responsibilities outside of school, the students who have parents at home in the evening to check up on them, etc. There were some students it was not physically possible to do large amounts of homework outside of school. I had to make sure I was offering time right after school, before school, and during lunch so that my students had access to help. It was a significant transition for me to realize not every family is set up the way mine was growing up. The priority in my house was school, everything else was secondary.

The second goal I have is for all of my students to feel loved, supported and known within my classroom. This goal comes from the comfort I have that God loves, supports, and knows me. I want my students to be able to know what it is like to be heard when they are struggling, rejoiced with when exciting things happen in life, and forgiven when they make a mistake. I come into each day as if it is a new day. Whatever happened yesterday, I try to forget. This way each student has a clean slate every day in my classroom. If they made a mistake yesterday, we talk about it and then move on. I also know that, “[b]eing both demanding and warm may be particularly crucial when holding students accountable or giving them critical feedback” (Pace, 2015, p. 40). I believe it is crucial for teachers to let students know they care about them before they give them critical feedback, otherwise you will lose the students trust. If you are unable to gain a student’s trust, your efforts will be futile.

To help students feel known in my classroom, I make it a point to greet students as they enter my classroom. I ask them how their day is going and wait for a genuine answer. I let them know information about my life so they know that I am also comfortable with them and trust them with what I have going on. I let them know that if they are having troubles, school or not, they can come and talk to me and I will try to help in whatever way I can. I try to model a school version of the person my mom is for me. When building relationships with students, I am trying to model positive adult interactions for them. Many of the students at my school have had experiences with adults that make them defensive. My school is an inner-city school with a high population of students who are below the poverty line. My students know that if they are hungry all they need to do is ask for a snack; they know that if they communicate what is going on in their lives I will modify or extend deadlines to help accommodate their specific situation. It has been suggested “that if students are to be adequately oriented in life, they should be educated somewhat less about its material dimensions and somewhat more about morality and those forms of community that bind us together with our fellow human beings, with the past, with our posterity, and, perhaps also with God” (Nord & Haynes, 1998). Helping students build positive adult relationships is something that will help them throughout their lives.

My goal of making students feel loved, supported and known within my classroom is challenged by the school I work in. The students who attend Renton High School are wonderful. However, there is a handful of students who have been so hurt by the school system, they shut down any time someone tries to break into their hardened exterior. “Teachers face a fundamental predicament. They must persuade students, especially those deemed underachieving, to invest time and effort in assignments. However, students may not be willing or able to do so” (Pace, 2015, p. 23). I work with students who fall into this category. I do not believe the part that says they are not able to do so, but not willing is another battle. There are students who will show up to school every twenty days so that they do not get dropped from the school: we have a 20 day drop policy. We have students who will work tremendously hard to receive a failing grade in a class. We have students who will try to get suspended so they can have a “break”, as one of my students called it. I am challenged to give students a clean slate every day. Although it is something I work really hard on, I am still challenged to do it when there are students who are consistently needing the clean slate. The other challenge comes from the lack of control I have about the future of some students. Wirzba says, “we need to reposition ourselves as persons who do not possess and control life, but continually receive and share it” (Wirzba, 2013, p. 117). I want to force students to do the work I know they are capable of. I want to make them understand that they are cared for in my classroom, I want them know they are in a safe space. Yet, there are some students who resist and I have to let go of needing to control every situation. To help students know they are loved, I need to let go of control so that I can truly show them they are cared about. This is the biggest challenge for me in regards to this goal.

My third goal is for my students to know each other and to be able to work effectively with their peers. My students know that I expect them to work hard, respect each other and the classroom, and to learn how to work with all of their peers. To work with their peers, they need to be empathetic, compassionate, and able to think about something from someone else’s point of view. Moral education has two purposes: “One purpose of moral education is to help make children virtuous—honest, responsible, and compassionate. Another is to make mature students informed and reflective about important and controversial moral issues” (Nord & Haynes, 1998). As a math teacher, I do not get to cover many controversial topics, however, I work really hard to help students gain a “certain degree of open-mindedness from their fellow citizens, a willingness to consider values and perspectives beyond their own” (Kunzman, 2105, p. 79). I believe it is important to be able to see things from multiple perspectives. Due to this, I make sure we work on tasks as teams where there is more than one way to arrive at the same answer. This gives students a chance to see that although their way is correct, their neighbor’s way is also correct. I make a point to talk about this as a class too. We talk about differing viewpoints and how we are able to live in the world easier if we are informed.

Another way I help them think about things from multiple perspectives and help them build the ability to see things from their peers, point of view, is to ask them questions that involve ethics. In the upper level math classes, we work closely with many statistical tests. We talk a lot about the way statistics can be manipulated to say what we want it to say. Some of the questions students are asked are,

“Does mathematics evolve” (Haese, Haese, Haese, Mäenpää, & Humphries, 2014, p. 337)? “Can we trust statistical results published in the media and in scientific journals? What role does ethics have to play in mathematics” (Haese, Haese, Haese, Mäenpää, & Humphries, 2014, p. 539)? “How does a knowledge of probability theory affect decisions we make” (Haese, Haese, Haese, Mäenpää, & Humphries, 2014, p. 603)?

Students are asked how the math they are doing will affect those outside of the school. If they looked at the data a different way would it affect a different group? Is there a way to make sure we are taking our biases out of the statistics we are performing? These are just a few more questions students must grapple with in mathematics. Finally, to help them get to know each other, I ask them silly questions they must talk about. I do most of my instruction in teams of four. To determine the reader for the day, I will ask students who has the most pets, who lives the farthest from school, who got up the earliest, etc. Students then talk about their answers so they are able to figure out who their reader is for that day.

There are significant challenges to this last goal. Students come in with their own biases about themselves and their peers. They make snap judgements or they have been with certain peers for many years. Trying to break the tensions and preconceived notions students come in with is by far the most challenging part of getting them to work with a diverse group of people. When asking students to share information about themselves, there is always the risk a student will refuse or not feel like they are able to share. I try to remember, “to love is not to coerce, but rather to nurture and empower creatures with the freedom to pursue their own ends” (Wirzba, 213, p. 50). Students have their own agenda. Trying to align their agenda to yours or yours to theirs becomes incredibly messy. This is another challenge this goal poses in the classroom. Trying to get my goals across to my students in a way they are receptive and willing to participate is something I am continuing to work on.

The three goals above have given me a starting place for thinking about the culture in my classroom this next school year. “To fulfill their essential role of educating young people to be full participants in a diverse world, schools must spawn development of informed, caring, and active citizens in our multicultural society” (Pace, 2015, p. 111). Helping students recognize the knowledge they can gain from getting to know those around them is something I will continue to try and accomplish. Teaching students how to be tolerant of differing viewpoints, question their own beliefs, and to looks at things from multiple perspectives will help them learn how to be an integral part of the classroom society and eventually the society outside of the classroom. I connect my ideal classroom to the garden in Way of Love. Wirzba says, “[w]hen done right, gardens are places where God’s love becomes beautiful, nutritious, and tasty” (Wirzba, 2013, p. 62). When a classroom is set up well, it becomes a beautiful site of learning and growth for students, it feeds their desires to learn and their minds with knowledge, and it is something to strive for. As this school year begins and I get to know my new students, I will be looking to move towards a well-kept garden. A place that is well nurtured, taken care of, and flourishing under the conditions it finds itself in.

Artifacts:

Religion in the Classroom Reflection
The Charged Classroom Reflection
Way of Love Reflection

Sources:

·       Haese, R., Haese, S., Haese, M., Mäenpää, M., & Humphries, M. (2014). Mathematics for the international student: Mathematics SL. Adelaide: Haese Mathematics.

·       James, J. H., Schweber, S., Kunzman, R., Barton, K. C., & Logan, K. (2015). Religion in the classroom: dilemmas for democratic education. New York: Routledge.

·       Nord, W. A., & Haynes, C. C. (1998). Taking religion seriously across the curriculum. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

·       Pace, J. L. (2015). The charged classroom: predicaments and possibilities for democratic teaching. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

·       Ryan, K. (n.d.) Moral Education - A Brief History of Moral Education, The Return of Character Education, Current Approaches to Moral Education. http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2246/Moral-Education.html

·       Wirzba, N. (2013). Way of Love: Recovering the Heart of Christianity. San Francisco: Harper One.

How Technology Impacts a Classroom- Standard 12

How Technology Impacts a Classroom

Standard 12:

Evaluate and use technology for teaching and learning.

Standard Aligned Course(s):

EDTC6433: Teaching with Technology

Reflection:

EDTC6433: Teaching with Technology revolved around the five International Society for Technology Education (ISTE) standards.  Before taking this course, if someone had talked about any of the five ISTE standards, I would have been completely lost.  This class pushed my thinking about technology and how to use it in my classroom.  I knew I should be integrating technology into my classroom but I was unsure of how to do this so that it would have the greatest impact on my students.  I was unsure of how to integrate technology when not all of my students had access to the same quality of technology.

Over the past six years at Renton High School, we have been expected to integrate a slowly growing amount of technology into our classrooms.  As we adopt new curriculum, there are online components for home and classroom use.  The difficulty comes from the lack of updated technology in our classrooms.  We have access to one cart of computers for the entire math department.  With this, it was difficult to integrate technology based lessons in the classroom.  As I progressed through my technology class, I learned new ways to integrate small amount of technology into my classroom.

Where the most learning in this class occurred for me was in my new understanding of the ISTE standards.  The five ISTE standards from www.iste.org are:

1. Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity
2. Design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments
3. Model digital age work and learning
4. Promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility
5. Engage in professional growth and leadership

ISTE Standard 1: Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity

When thinking about this standard, I was pushed to think about how to increase technology use in a low technology classroom.  Since researching technology in low tech classrooms, I have come across some helpful articles and Tedx Talks that provide partial answers and ideas.  The first resource I found to help me process how to increase technology use when technology is not readily available, is from Stanford University (https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/scope-pub-using-technology-report.pdf).  It is titled Using Technology to Support At-Risk Students’ Learning.  Through this article my desire for more technology in my classroom and ideas for how to utilize the technology currently available to me has become more profound.  This article emphasizes the idea that technology can help close the achievement gap if used correctly alongside quality teaching (Darling-Hammond, et. al, 2014).  Working in a low income, high needs school, the gap in achievement between my school and the other two high schools in the district is apparent.  I am hoping I can find a balance in my use of technology, student directed group work, and teacher time that can help my students close the gap.  Another resource I found helpful was a TedxRainier Talk by Jessie Woolley-Wilson titled Blending Technology and Classroom Learning (https://youtu.be/o0TbaHimigw).  She talked about the importance of quality education being available to all.  Her big question was how do we make that happen?  She talked about the idea of blended learning and using adaptive learning programs in classrooms.  This talked left me with the question, is there an adaptive learning program for high school math?  Currently, I have not found a program that is adaptive and designed for high school students.

ISTE Standard 2: Design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments

This standard brought about the question, how can I create authentic learning experiences in my high school math classroom that incorporate contemporary tools and align with the common core state standards? Through my research I found an article titled Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment: A Research-Based Pedagogy for Teaching Science with Classroom Response Technology by Ian D. Beatty and William J. Gerace. This article talked about using CRS (Classroom Response Systems) to perform both summative and formative assessments of students. This article has given me a renewed desire to try and use technology for formative assessments. According to the article, “An assessment-centered learning environment weaves formative assessment deeply into the fabric of instruction, providing continual, detailed feedback to guide students’ learning and instructors’ teaching.” (Beatty & Gerace, 2009) I agree that class needs to be a constant place of assessment and adjustment. Having the technology to poll students throughout the class and adjust my teaching based off of their responses will not only give them a better education but help improve my teaching and awareness of my student’s level of understanding.  Since this class, I have used Kahoot! to help assess where my students are individually and as table groups.  We have done team competitions with math when not all students have phones or computers to use.  We have also done individual competitions in the upper level classes as a review tool for the AP or IB exams.

ISTE Standard 3: Model digital age work and learning

In my school, there are new teachers who are digitally literate, teachers who have been there a while but are keeping up with the changing technological times, and teachers who are reluctant to try any technology in their classrooms.  This standard led me to the question, how can I demonstrate knowledge, and skills around mathematical technologies available to help reluctant teachers create a dynamic and interactive math classroom? As a teacher, I work hard to constantly adapt my practice to fit the needs of my students.  Currently, the shift I am making is in technology.  I am working to bring the level of technology use in my classroom up to the level of technology use my students are looking for.  This is currently still a work in progress.  In my research around creating a dynamic classroom with the help of technology, I found an article titled No Teacher Left Behind: How to Teach With Technology by James Efaw.  This article talks about the three phases of implementing technology in a school.  It says that, “the three phases are learning, practice and feedback, and continued development” (Efaw, 2005).  As I have been working to get some of the veteran teachers on board with the technology changes I have noticed the same thing as Efaw did, “one of the biggest obstacles is the negative attitude of some faculty toward having technology in the classroom” (Efaw, 2005).  One of the key points in this article is that staff must be trained in the technology we want them to use, they need to practice using the technology they were trained on and then they need to receive feedback on their implementation.  Without those three steps the implementation of technology will fail.  In my school right now, we have occasional technology trainings but they are not focused or intensive enough to set a teacher up for success.  We are also not taking the time to visit each other’s classrooms to provide feedback to teachers making it hard for consistent technology implementation.

ISTE Standard 4: Promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility
This standard had two parts for me.  The first was the look into cyber-bullying and the impact it is having on our schools.  You can see the facts from 2016 in the chart below.  While they have changed since then, this is a snapshot of what cyber-bulling looks like for our students and it is only getting worse.  Students feel like the internet is a "safe" space where what they say cannot come back and hurt them in real life.  Throughout this program, I have made it a point to continue talking with my students about the difficulty the internet is currently presenting.

The second part of standard 4 was digital citizenship as it applies to academic honesty.  One of the challenges the accessibility of the internet has presented is plagiarism.  I work with juniors and seniors in the International Baccalaureate program to write papers around mathematical concepts.  When they are writing these papers, I work with them to make sure they are being academically honest.  When prepping to work with students on their research projects, I came across the article, “Is it Cheating or Learning the Craft of Writing?  Using Turnitin to Help Students Avoid Plagiarism.”  This article is by Lynne Graham-Mathesona and Simon Star.  This article talked about how to use turnitin.com to help students recognize what is plagiarism and what is not.  As I mentioned above, in my class, students must write a math internal assessment that is worth 20% of their IB math score.  For their internal assessment, students are expected to write a paper about math.  Students are aware of how to write papers for language arts and history because they do it all the time.  Math however is a completely different story.  In their minds the rules completely change.  Through my inquiry, I have found that turnitin.com can be used to help my students understand what is going to be considered plagiarism and what is not.  This year, a student tried to use another students paper as their own and turnitin.com detected it.  We were able to then follow the proper channels to hold students accountable for doing their own work.

ISTE Standard 5: Engage in professional growth and leadership

I am constantly striving to improve my instructional practice.  I am looking for professional development that I find useful and easy to implement into my classroom.  When I started researching how I could demonstrate the effective use of digital tools and resources as a department head to foster the growth of my departments professional learning communities and as a whole department, I thought of professional development.  As a department head I am always looking for ways to help my department grow and learn in their teaching practices.  The article I found, Moving education into the digital age: the contribution of teachers’ professional development, talked about how to design professional development to be meaningful for teachers.  The article stated that, “teachers (and learning) are often treated so generically that resulting TPD is not experienced as relevant” (Twining, Raffaghelli, Albion, & Knezek, 2013) where TPD stands for teacher professional development.  I am looking for ways to help make professional development opportunities relevant and worthwhile.  This is still at the top of my list for my department.  Next school year we will be moving to 1-1 laptops for students.  As we transition to this, there will need to be professional development on Canvas and other technology based programs.  We will need to adjust our delivery of content to incorporate and utilize our new technology.

As my school moves to a 1-1 laptop program, I have a steep learning curve ahead of me.  I will be keeping this information in the front of my mind as a plan and prep for next school year.

Other Artifacts:
Web Quest
Turnitin.com Article

Sources:

• Beatty, I. D., & Gerace, W. J. (2009). Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment: A Research-Based Pedagogy for Teaching Science with Classroom Response Technology. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 18(2), 146-162. doi:10.1007/s10956-008-9140-4
• Burt, R. (2012, February 9). The Educator’s Guide to Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons. Retrieved November 20, 2016, from http://www.theedublogger.com/2012/02/09/the-educators-guide-to-copyright-fair-use-and-creative-commons/
• Darling-Hammond, L., Zielenzinski, M., Goldman, S, Using Technology to Support At-Risk Students’ Learning, 2014, Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education
• Efaw, J. (2005, January 1). No Teacher Left Behind: How to Teach with Technology. Educause Quarterly, (4), 26-31. Retrieved November 3, 2016
• Twining, P., Raffaghelli, J., Albion, P., & Knezek, D. (2013, August 5). Moving Education into the Digital Age: The Contribution of Teachers' Professional Development. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 29(5), 426-437. doi:10.1111/jcal.12031
• Woolley-Wilson, J., Blending Technology and Classroom Learning, 2012, TedxRainier

Culturally Responsive Teaching- Standard 5

Culturally Responsive Teaching

Standard 5:

Establish a culturally inclusive learning climate that facilitates academic engagement and success for all.

Standard Aligned Classes:

EDU6525: Culturally Responsive Teaching

Reflection:

I think of myself as having a decent idea of what make a successful multicultural classroom.  This has not always been the case.  Growing up in a community that lacked a significant level of diversity did not prepare me for my student teaching at Garfield High School or my first year as a teacher at Renton High School.  Through the Culturally Responsive Teaching class I have learned that although I am immersed in a multicultural environment every day, I still have a long way to go until I have a full understanding about what makes a quality multicultural education.  Throughout the quarter in EDU6525, I learned new things about myself as a White educator.  The two major areas of growth I see in myself are recognizing and making known my biases as a White educator and how to create a space of equity and access for all of my students.  This class taught me I have innate biases that I need to address and that although I am moving in the right direction, I have not quite created the equity and access in my classroom I hope for.

Biases as a White Educator

I grew up in a predominantly white community.  I was in the majority race in all of my schools and sports teams.  Even when I went to college, I was still the majority race.  I did not have much experience with a multicultural environment until my senior year of college in my student teaching placement.  At Garfield High School, I was faced with a challenge I did not expect.  I did not know how to reconcile what I knew from my upbringing with what I was learning about my students.  Banks said it best when he said, “Facing reality is the beginning of liberation.  As White Americans, we can face honestly the fact that we have benefited from racism” (Howard, G., 1996, p.329).  I had to come to terms with the fact that I had benefited from racism.  I did not think about racism being something that had an impact on my life, but getting to know my students proved otherwise.  From the “What is Culture” lecture, the visual of the cultural iceberg helped me understand more of the biases I have and the depth of the culture my students possess.  It put into perspective the fact that you see the surface parts of a person’s culture first, i.e. music, dancing, literature, food, clothing, etc.  You really have to get to know a person to understand the depth of their culture, for example, how a culture handles emotion, tempo of work, ordering of time, notions of modesty, etc.  Ruth Benedict put my feelings into words, “Culture provides us with a lens through which we view the world…and we are so close to it, we cannot see this lens through which we look.”  I did not realize the lens I was looking through.

            

Growing up in a predominantly White society, the lens I bring to my classroom comes from a stereotypical whitewashed background.   I was taught the two key points that Banks brings up when he is talking about how knowledge is constructed, "(1) the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks was the cause of the boycott; and (2) Mrs. Parks refused to give up her seat when asked by the bus driver because she was tired from working hard all day" (Banks, J.A., 1996, p. 340).  I did not realize how biased my education had been until I started interacting with my students who came from different cultures than I did.  I also did not realize how biased the education they were receiving was until I compared it to my own and found little to no difference.  This was when I knew I needed to take a deep look at the biases I possess, where they come from, and how they are impacting my students.  This class pushed that thinking even further.  From the Personalizing Cultural Diversity lecture, the Stages of White Racial Identity you used from Helms put into perspective the stages I have begun moving through since my first day of student teaching.  According to Helms there are six stages of White Racial Identity, contact, disintegration, reintegration, pseudo-independence, immersion/emergence, and autonomy.  Once aware of the impact my upbringing had on my lens I saw the world through, I began stage one.  I was aware of race and how that impacted my students and me.  It did not take long for me to begin questioning race and for it to become a thought at the forefront of my mind.  At this point, I believe I am in between stages five and six.  I think that I have abandoned the missionary quest and am working towards autonomy.  I am still learning new things every day about myself and my students.  I am also looking to continue growing in my understanding of what it means to identify with my white race and upbringing.

            

My personal biases affect my classroom every day.  As I learn my own personal biases better, I am able to communicate them to students and be held more accountable.  Thinking of ways, I can continue to grow, I am looking for ways to hold myself accountable for being transparent about my biases and how to overcome some of the barriers my biases cause.  Some tangible actions I can take are, telling students my background, letting them know where I come from, being explicit about my expectations while still giving room for student voice and input, and learning the lenses my students see the world though.  I am also planning to have other teachers look over my assessments to avoid biases, get student feedback on assessments to make sure questions aren’t biased, and work on incorporating more diversity into my lessons.  The biggest challenge for me is incorporating more diversity into my lessons.  As a math teacher, the curriculum is relatively set and not much can be done but there are some specific strategies I plan to try.  I am planning on working student cultures into the curriculum more.  Being aware of where they come from is important.  For example, I have many students who are Muslim.  Before this class I did not know that, “During the prior evening, make an intention of keeping fast the next day. On the day of the fast, rise an hour before sunrise and eat a small meal; say a prayer asking God to help you with this deed of fasting and asking Him to bless you and those around you” (Mvududu, 2008, p.1).   I will keep this in mind when planning during Ramadan.  I also plan on using more pop-culture references to help engage students.  I have done this sporadically and have gotten positive feedback when I incorporate the things their daily lives revolve around.  Finally, I am going to look at the different ways a single math problem is solved in different countries.  This will not only broaden my view of math but my students view of math.  By no means, have I overcome my biases as a White educator, but I am working towards identifying my biases every day.

Equity and Access for Students

In George I. Sanchez and Mexican American Educational Practices by Nathan Murillo, it was said, "He saw education as the primary vehicle for effecting changes in society and for progressing toward improved conditions for all its members" (Murillo, N., 1996, p. 131).  This quote is driving my thoughts around equity and access for my students.  Although this portion of the Banks book was talking about Mexican American education primarily, the idea that education can effect changes in society implies that this applies to everyone.  My classroom is currently the least diverse it is going to be.  With the increasing diversity of the United States, my classroom is going to continue to grow in diversity with every year.  The article, As Diversity Grows, So Must We, by Howard, showcased the progression schools and classrooms need to engage in as the diversity increases.  As the diversity grows, “this transformative work proceeds best in five phases: (1) building trust, (2) engaging personal culture, (3) confronting issues of social dominance and social justice, (4) transforming instructional practices, and (5) engaging the entire school community” (Howard, 2007, p.8).  As a school, we have worked on the first four stages extensively and have begun work on the fifth stage.  This year we have held forums for students to voice how they are feeling about the culture of our school.  In these forums, students are the only voices heard.  Teachers are invited to listen but not participate.  I have learned a lot about my students from what they have said at these forums.  Howard also said, “As educators in rapidly transitioning schools, we need to reexamine everything we are doing” (Howard 2007, p. 11).  I try to constantly look at how I am interacting with my students and how my students are interacting with me and the curriculum.  I try to follow the five different essentials to culturally responsive teaching as laid out by Howard, authentic and caring relationships, curriculum, shifting instructional strategies, communicating respect, and holding consistent and high expectations for all.  I also try to use the five dimensions of multicultural education Banks talks about on p. 337.  Banks and Howard overlap on many points and I am trying to align the two ideals to what I do on a daily basis.   I am trying to adopt an equity pedagogy as my mindset.  “An equity pedagogy exists when teachers modify their teaching in ways that facilitate the academic achievement of students from diverse racial, cultural, and social-class groups” (Banks, J.A., 1996, p.338).  I am constantly learning and growing as I strive for a mindset that brings equity pedagogy to life in my classroom.

            

Thinking about my classroom and how to achieve a higher level of equity and access for my students, I come back to the five dimensions of multicultural education Banks lays out on page 337 of Multicultural Education Transformative Knowledge & Action.  Over the next few years, I plan to work on the equity and access of the curriculum I present for my students.  I am going to work on incorporating the five dimensions of multicultural education.  For content integration, my first step will be to use examples and content from a variety of cultures and groups.  If I have students who have just moved to the United States I will ask them about the way they were taught and see if I can incorporate some of those methods into my classroom.  For the knowledge construction process, we are working on students constructing their own knowledge about the math content and how that connects to what they know.  For creating an equity pedagogy, I am going to continue on identifying my biases, and figuring out how to adjust my teaching to meet the needs of my students.  For the dimension of prejudice reduction, I am planning on using math showcases from other countries.  When we learn a new math concept, showing how it is done somewhere else so students can begin to see the similarities and differences between math around the world.  Finally, for empowering school culture and social structures, I want to find a way to embrace and empower the diverse backgrounds of my students within my classroom.  I am still growing and identifying how I want to incorporate the five dimensions of multicultural education but my students have given me the motivation and desire to find a way to move towards a more holistically multicultural teaching style. 

            

In order to increase the equity and access in my classroom I want to incorporate different mediums for getting information to students, I want to increase my use of varying strategies to appeal to all types of learners, and continue to build significant relationships with my students.  Dr. James Comer said, “No significant learning occurs without a significant relationship”.  Through these relationships, I will be able to figure out what my students strengths are and how to use them in my classroom.  I will also build the trust necessary for students to participate fully.  I also plan to incorporate some of the strategies from the Justice and Caring lecture, (1) Ensure all students have the opportunity to answer questions, (2) Give effective feedback that works like a dialogue conversation, and (3) Create challenging but attainable objectives for ALL students.

Artifacts from EDU6525:
Final Paper
Autobiography

Sources:

• Banks, J. A. (1996). Multicultural education, transformative knowledge, and action: Historical and contemporary perspectives. New York: Teachers College Press.
• Banks, J. A. (1996). Transformative Knowledge, Curriculum  Reform, and Action. New York: Teachers College Press.
• Howard, G. (1996). Whites in Multicultural Education:Rethinking Our Role. New York: Teachers College Press.
• Howard, G. R. (2007). As Diversity Grows, So Must We. Educational Leadership, 8-12.
• Murillo, N. (1996).  George I. Sanchez and Mexican American Educational Practices. New York: Teachers College Press.

Engaging vs. Involving- Standard 6

Engaging vs. Involving

Standard 6:
Communicates and collaborates with a variety of stakeholders.

Standard Aligned Courses:
EDAD6589: Engaging Communities
EDU6600: Communication and Collaboration

Reflection:

Prior to starting this program, I had little knowledge of the work it took to get the community engaged and involved in a school.  Growing up my parents were teachers so they were constantly involved in my school and what I was doing.  It was not until I worked at my current school that I began to realize that not all parents are as connected to school as my parents were.  I also did not realize how similar all professional development activities were.  Most professional development opportunities are run by administration and teachers are expected to sit and listen to the presentation.  "Teacher leadership is a phenomenon in which teachers daily walk on a balance beam, balancing their desire to influence ad improve the school-wide organization with their calling to teach children and see them succeed" (Blair, 2016, p.107).  Through this program, I have learned a significant amount regarding adult learning and how to design professional development so that teachers leave feeling that it applied to them and that it was useful.

EDAD6589:
This class opened my eyes to the difficult task of getting the community engaged in a school that has a bad rapport.  My high school has the stigma of having the difficult students and the trouble makers.  This makes getting the community engaged in what the school is doing extremely difficult.  When talking with my principal, she shared the many efforts put forth to get the community into the school and interacting with both the staff and students.   She has tried providing meals, child care, door prizes, and other incentives for the community to partake in the culture of the school.  Hattie talks about "nine essential practices for improved [student] outcomes:

• high expectations for all students;
• strong personal connections between students and adults;
• greater student engagement and motivation;
• a rich and engaging formal and informal curriculum;
• effective teaching practices in all classrooms on a daily basis;
• effective use of data and feedback by students and staff to improve learning;
• early support with minimum disruption to student need;
• strong positive relationships with parents; and
• effective engagement with the broader community" (Hattie, 2012, p. 171).

Seeing as the last two bullets of Hattie's list involve both parents and the community, it stands that working hard to get the community involved in the school is important.  The question I am still trying to answer is, how?

This course gave me the space to think about different ways to help get families and community members engaged in our school but kept hitting the road block of how to get them to actually participate.  One idea I came up with from this class I would like to try in the future is planning a math curriculum night.  For this night, students would be able to bring their parents to school and their parents would be able to engage in the math that their students are doing every day.  One of the biggest things we hear from parents is that the math their students are doing is "nothing like what I did in school."  As a math teacher, I know this is not true, their children are still doing the same math but the presentation looks different.  I think this would help parents and community members get an idea of what is happening in the classrooms and give them a window into what their children are doing in math every day.


Artifacts from EDAD6589:
End of Course Reflection
Community Engagement Product
Case Study

EDU6600:
At the beginning of EDU 6600 my only experiences with adult learning in my work-site, were various professional development opportunities.  There are professional development opportunities that, "make learning both an active and interactive process"(Zepeda, 2012, p. 48), but not all professional development opportunities fall into this category.  There are many activities that have a speaker up front and staff sitting and listening.  There is little to no interaction, or activity during the professional development.  There is also no differentiation at our administrator led professional development activities.  Staff sit and listen and leave feeling as if their time has been wasted.  Over the course of the year, there is some differentiation depending on the group that is presenting but when the administration is presenting, there is no variation.  "To support teachers as learners, the principal needs to ensure that there are professional development opportunities that are developmentally appropriate and differentiated based on the very characteristics of the teachers at the site" (Zepeda, 2012, p. 49).  Our required professional development days do not cater to the varying levels of staff at our school.  They are blanket activities for the entire staff.  With this method of professional development, there are always staff members who feel that the training did not apply to them, they got nothing out of it, and/or it was simply a waste of time.  I agree with Zepeda that, "Professional development needs to be situated within the school year as a proactive proccess, not as a "fix-it" intervention merely to remediated perceived weaknesses in teacher performance" (Zepeda, 2012, p. 51).  Many times my principal will use professional development as a reactive intervention instead of a proactive process.

I do not believe my thinking has changed in regards to adult learning.  As an adult learner, just like many in classes I have been a part of have pointed out, it is easy to identify learning opportunities where learning truly happened and learning opportunities where the learning fell short.  I think the reading around adult learning confirmed what I believed about myself as an adult learner and what a professional development activity should look like to gain the most buy in and most success in implementation from a staff.  I was able to use what I have learned this past October when I worked with a team to provide a differentiated professional development for my staff around culturally responsive teaching strategies.  According to Wiliam, "increasing the educational achievement of students is a national economic priority, and the only way to do that is to improve teacher quality" (Wiliam, 2011, p. 27).  The only way our teaching staff is going to improve is by learning new strategies to enhance their teaching.  This is where the adult learning strategies I have learned will come in handy.

As I briefly mentioned above, learning about adult learning could not have come at a better time for me.  A group of teachers and myself ran a staff professional development during the fall of this school year.  As I prepared for what I was going to present and how I was going to present my portion of the professional development, I though about the information I had learned about adult learning.  I also thought about the past professional development that impacted my learning and how to use strategies from those to put together a coherent and useful presentation.  The goal is to answer the following question, "How do we shift the focus of face-to-face time, at faculty meetings and elsewhere, to opportunities of learning" (York-Barr, 2006, p.199)?  Working with my team, I relayed the ideas from Professional Development What Works.  We provided four mini sessions for staff to choose from.  We chose to set it up in this way to provide staff with choices in regards to what they would be learning about.  We also chose to run our mini sessions like a miniature version of our own classrooms.  With this in mind, staff were expected to interact with each other and the strategy that was presented to them.  It was fun for me to implement my new learning about how adults learn.  Finally, we offered our services to staff as resources as they tried out and implemented the new strategies they learning in our sessions.  Like Zepeda said when talking about ways to engage adult learners, we will be using, "small-group activities through which learners have the opportunity to reflect, analyze, and practice what they have learned" (Zepeda, 2012, p. 48).

Artifacts from EDU6600:
Final Project

Professional Development PowerPoint

Stanford Hollyhock Fellowship:
During my time in the Teacher Leadership program, I have also been participating in the Hollyhock Fellowship Program run by Stanford University.  Through the Hollyhock program, I have had the opportunity to create professional development for staff that is meaningful and applicable to what they are teaching.  I was given the tools to create professional development that catered to the adult learner through SPU, and was then able to set up the professional development in a way that provided staff with culturally responsive teaching strategies that I learned through Hollyhock.  With the Hollyhock program, I gained important information about different teaching strategies that made putting together a staff training possible.  What I learned in my classes at SPU made creating professional development for adult learners something that was feasible.  Where, I would have had no idea of where to begin with putting together an all staff training before.  The combination of the two programs, has helped me understand what students and staff need when learning.  While they are not the exact same, student learning and adult learning carry many of the same characteristics.  The culturally responsive teaching strategies we use with our students, are the same strategies that work well with adult learners.

Sources

• Blair, E. (2016). Teacher leadership: The "new" foundations of teacher education: A reader. New York: Peter Lang.
• Hattie, J. (2012). Visible Learning for Teachers & Students: Maximizing impact on learning. S.l.: Taylor & Francis.
• Wiliam, D. (2011). Embedded formative assessment. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.
• York-Barr, J. (2006). Reflective practice to improve schools: An action guide for educators. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
• Zepeda, S. J. (2012). Professional development: what works. New York: Routledge.