Listed below are some key ways in which I have expanded my philosophy and grown as an educator in the past academic year.  Please visit the following page, “Illustration of Growth,” for some specific examples of how this was achieved.

Support within Creative Expression

My ideas about how to include student creativity in my lessons have evolved drastically since I wrote my proposal for my self-designed major in my undergraduate years.  Because I have always been eager to engage with and share my creative pursuits, I assumed that students would be equally excited to work independently and show off their creations.  Over the course of the year, I learned that while some students are natural creatives, most need additional support in order to feel comfortable creating and sharing original work.  

From this experience, I learned that I need to pay special attention to demonstrating expectations for students and scaffolding activities clearly.  Now, when my class engages with an assignment in which they have some freedom of expression, I make sure to support their creativity with clear directions, exemplars, rubrics, specific feedback, and think-alouds.  When students are given the tools they need to succeed, their creative minds will shine!

Consistency and High Expectations

When I first met my mentor teacher, Ann, she told me that the most important aspect of her classroom is the structure.  I was glad to hear this, because I felt that structuring my classroom with clear routines and expectations was an area in which I needed to learn the most.  Over the course of the year, I learned that every little thing a teacher does in a classroom contributes to the structure of that classroom and the expectations the students have for themselves.  Our choice of words, our daily routines, our development of assignments, our dispositions, and our reactions to incomplete assignments or disruptive students all contribute to the sense of consistency that students need in order to feel comfortable and ready to learn when they enter the classroom in the morning.

In order to develop a sense of consistency and routine in this unorthodox year, I have done my best to give students a sense of a new normal.  This normalcy includes a consistent daily order of events, a consistent approach to student participation, a consistent reaction to students not meeting expectations, and a consistent use of a few familiar learning platforms.  In my class, Ann and I begin every day with math, before moving on to ELA, and then switching to either science or social studies for our afternoon block.  At the end of each day, we spend time in our required learning applications, ST Math and Lexia Core 5, so that students have an opportunity to work on their required minutes and ask any questions.  Students know this routine, and know when it is appropriate to ask these questions and get help with these programs. 

Together with Ann, I also have initiated a consistent approach to student participation.  With the advent of online learning, students could no longer use the systems that they knew, such as raising hands in order to speak.  Instead, we needed to develop an entirely new system for participation, which includes knowing when to stay on mute, and writing “me” once in the chat in lieu of raising hands.  We frequently remind students of these expectations in order to keep them on track and make discussion as generative as possible.

When students do not meet expectations, I know that I must always address them immediately about how to improve performance before moving on.  For example, when conducting a series of science experiments, I used a consistent rubric that could be applied to each.  After the completion of the first experiment, I noticed that students omitted the vocabulary requirement in their work.  At the start of the next experiment, I reviewed the rubric and expectations, and put a particular focus on the vocabulary requirement so that students understood what was expected of them.

Lastly, using familiar learning platforms is the most important part of structuring a classroom.  Students should be well-versed in a handful of learning platforms that can be applied to various subject areas.  For example, I have created and conducted Nearpods (an interactive presentation platform) in science, social studies, and mathematics.  We also use jamboard, the platform we use for our mid-day meeting discussions, for math, ELA, science, and social studies, in order to facilitate discussion and demonstrate visual examples.  Though these platforms were introduced to students during this digital age of schooling, I can continue to use them in an in-person setting once students have returned to school.

Focus

Over the course of this year, I have become increasingly focused in my lesson planning.  As I plan each lesson, I ask myself “why am I teaching this lesson, at this time, in this way?”  Rather than creating a lesson because I looked at the standards and had an idea, I think critically about how the lesson fits into the context of what the students already know, what skills they need to complete the assignment, and how the lesson fits in with lessons that are on the horizon for the coming weeks.  Only when I use the backwards design model and identify a couple key learning goals for each lesson, all while considering my students and their unique interests and capabilities, am I best able to help my students achieve the goals I set for each unit.