As the semester comes to a close, I have said "we all need a break" too many times to count. What should be a joyful time of year turns into a miserable one, ready to just be done and move on.
Lately, I have been in a funk because my classroom has turned into one I despise, full of rote-memorization and regurgitation of step-by-step procedures. I do not want to build robots, I want to build thinkers, and I am not teaching just math, there should be more. When travelling down the rabbit hole of reading online, I stumbled upon an Edutopia article, 9 Brain Breaks That Teens Will Love and some reasonable ways to incorporate breaks daily. This article connected to an article written by Paige Tutt, 17 Brain Breaks Tailored for High Schoolers. Here were a few I loved.
I hope these brain breaks will bring some joy back into the classroom but also some 21st century skills, like communication, collaboration, and creativity. We all need a break once in a while from the routine of school, but why can't we take a break and still be learning and growing together?
References
9 brain breaks teens will love. (2023, November 9). Www.youtube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBjMEVbnZ4E&t=166s
9 brain breaks that teens will love. (2023, November 9). Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/video/9-brain-breaks-teens-will-love-middle-high-school Tutt, P. (2023, September 1). 17 brain breaks tailored for high schoolers. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/17-brain-breaks-tailored-for-high-schoolers/
0 Comments
The past few weeks have been challenging. It feels like there's nothing I can do to have a positive impact. Why do this? My masters in education means changing the world, so why does it feel like I am changing the world for the worst and not for the better? These feelings happen in cycles for me and when I am at the bottom, I take a moment to wallow in the misery and validate my feelings. This approach to my mental health comes from my mental health journey, where I learned how to cope with the imbalance between my head and my heart. It usually results in eating French fries and having a stream of consciousness monologue with my husband as my rubber duck. He offers me a safe space to be upset but then encourages me gently to move forward. Moving forward usually takes the form in reading and reflecting. The next term of my master's program starts in January, but I have access to the reading list ahead of time so I decided that's where I would start my journey back up the mountain. The first pitstop is picking a few articles on technology integration at Edutopia and a quick search of math technology resulted in something I had never heard of before, Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge and this aesthetically pleasing Venn diagram (sometimes it's the simple joys in being a math teacher). Now, breaking this down took a few rereads and a request in ChatGPT to summarize it, but here is my summary:
Right now, I feel like I am in the separate entities of the knowledge but no overlap. Even with the decade of experience I have, imposter syndrome feels very real but with the shift in education, it may be appropriate to realize I am beginning all over again in this new digital era. I am also reading Building Thinking Classrooms by Peter Liljedahl as part of a district high school math cohort and within the first few pages, I found myself nodding my head and coming to the sobering conclusion that no thinking is happening in my classroom. I am passively integrating technology by transferring the physical documents to digital but the repetitive, factory-model system of notes, worksheet, notes, worksheet, here's an assessment, next unit has consumed the soul and joy out of my classroom like a dementor. My innovation plan that came out of my first master's program class, teaching 21st century skills in a blended learning environment, is that intersection of technological pedagogical content knowledge. It feels like the whirlwind is taking over and I am finding myself sucked into ineffective familiarity. The struggles students have are not about thinking but about mimicking the steps I have robotically showed them to follow. Purposeful struggle is a phrase I have used before but it seems that there is reason to intentionally incorporate it into my classroom environment and expectations. Cathy L. Seeley's article on Turning Teaching Upside Down through the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development highlights how we need to shift from teachers showing students how to think first to students showing teachers how they think first. There should be more than just teaching math in my classroom, but right now not even that is happening. I have plans to use the new year, new semester, as an opportunity to transform into the space I have dreamed of, a significant learning environment where students do the thinking and the growing and I just facilitate the surroundings to help it flourish. For now, reading and reflecting, reading and reflecting, so I can move forward a better educator. References Koehler, M. (2012, September 24). TPACK explained. Tpack.org. https://matt-koehler.com/tpack2/tpack-explained/
Liljedahl, P. (n.d.). Building thinking classrooms. Building Thinking Classrooms. https://buildingthinkingclassrooms.com/ Liljedahl, P. (2021). Building thinking classrooms in mathematics, grades K-12: 14 teaching practices for... enhancing learning. Sage Publications Inc. The Parable of the Sower comes from the Bible, Matthew 13. Jesus talks about how a sower scattered seed along a path, amongst rocky places, around thorns, and within good soil. Depending upon the environment depended upon whether or not the seed could develop into a plant, sustain itself through harsh weather, or thrive in the time of harvest. While Jesus was referring to the Gospel, this can also be pertinent to creating significant learning environments for our students and even ourselves as educators. The past few months have really made me step back and reflect, realizing that I scattered the growth mindset ideas onto paths with no depth, rocky places with no nourishment, and thorns with stronger holds. There is beauty in realizing my shortcomings because now I am choosing to walk away towards cultivating the soil that is my classroom and building a space for flourishment. There are some things I have written and creating to get to this place. Through the lens of mathematics, teaching 21st century skills in a blended learning environment demands a fresh approach to the learning culture. The combination of global, uninhibited connections within a structured, safe environment has the power to transform students into who we need to make the future one to blossom in. Amplified by Piaget's cognitive learning theory, my learning philosophy explores how my perspective on education translates into the classroom for my students. We gravitate towards making sense of everything around us through experiences, connections, and patterns so providing students opportunities to start making sense of themselves and others ensures the foundation for future growth. There was compelling evidence that in order to create significant learning environments for students, I needed to create significant learning environments for myself and others to try this together. Through Dee Fink's 3 Column Table, Learning Environment/Situational Factors Outline, and Questions for Formulating Significant Learning Goals and its comparison to McTighe and Wiggins' Understanding by Design Template, I have a metacognitive plan on creating significant learning environments for teachers to learn about how to create significant learning environments. The stage was set by my growth mindset plan but it was really shaped recently when I realized it really takes a village for the rehearsals and performance to take shape and come alive. I am committed to establishing significant learning environments that foster growth mindset through active engagement, not by passive means, by seeking and sowing the soil for our collective growth. With these things working together, the back of the puzzle box is really starting to reveal the big picture. Ideas are meaningless unless acted upon and implemented, and growth only comes out of reflection and adaptation. Creating a significant learning environment focused on authentic learning first will forge a stronger path for my innovation plan to mold students, fellow educators, and myself into the strong, powerful people we are capable of becoming. References Dee Fink, L. (2003a). A self-directed guide to designing courses for significant learning designing courses for significant learning. https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2014/03/www.deefinkandassociates.com_GuidetoCourseDesignAug05.pdf
Dee Fink, L. (2003b). Creating significant learning experiences : an integrated approach to designing college courses. Jossey-Bass. Dee Fink, L. (2013). Creating significant learning experiences the key to quality in educational programs. https://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/51/11181242/1118124251-7.pdf Matthew 13 NIV - - Bible Gateway. (n.d.). Www.biblegateway.com. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2013&version=NIV McTighe, J., & Wiggins, G. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. McTighe, J., & Wiggins, G. (2009). Essential questions to promote staff inquiry and reflection (examples). https://jaymctighe.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Essential-Questions-for-Educators.pdf McTighe, J., & Wiggins, G. (2012). Understanding by design framework. https://files.ascd.org/staticfiles/ascd/pdf/siteASCD/publications/UbD_WhitePaper0312.pdf
Lately, I have realized that it requires community to build growth mindset. Personally, the last few weeks have been challenging, particularly when it comes to what is going on in my classroom.
It would be realistic to say that we all have students who simply do not care about our course or about school... or at least they give on this perception. This looks like heads down on desks, hands glued to cell phones, mouths talking about anything but the subject or talking poorly about the subject. What this really comes down to is attribution theory. Are students acting the way they do because of who they are or because of the situation they are in? It is easy to say that a student is just lazy or does not care... and it is very hard to realize that we are putting students in situations that produce the behaviors we get frustrated by the most. As the semester comes to a close, there are days where I just want to throw my hands up and stop investing my heart in caring about what other people are doing because it is exhausting having to face that they will not always (or seemingly ever) do what we want or believe they are capable of. This reflection really is a fixed mindset, something I claim to almost never have. I feel powerless, helpless, like there is no point in trying anything else because nothing will come of it. Naturally, by what I consider divine intervention, I find this infographic. Right now, I am definitely at the beginning of the road, the fixed mindset place. It feels like I am moving the opposite direction on a moving walkway, not getting anywhere. Since writing about my growth mindset plan, The Yet Mindset, I have learned that it takes more than just talking about a growth mindset to get there. It requires action to move forward into it and what I really need is to turn people around and walk against the grain with me. Developed in September this year, my growth mindset plan had an outline of steps but not how to implement the steps, picture frames but with no pictures. I also did not really have any walls to hang these pictures on. What has shifted is I am not waiting anymore for someone to build the walls while I twiddle my thumbs. I have to be the carpenter of the setting or I have to look for others who have walls built to learn from. This analogy translates directly to my professional learning, which transfers to the learning environment in my classroom. Being a part of the community built within my master's program has been the start, but since August I have joined a Building Thinking Classrooms cohort amongst high school math teachers in my district, as well as delivered professional learning opportunities for Algebra 2 teachers to move from the outdated factory model of education into innovative significant learning environments, which has began the cultivation of another professional learning network. With these groups, I have found some resources to start implementing in my classroom:
This is just a handful of resources I have available, but what does implementing them look like? It starts with my own mindset and reflection on what my classroom actually embodies versus what I think it should (but then blame the students for it not being a sparkly ray of sunshine). To really have an impact on growth mindset with my students, it starts with me creating the significant learning environment for it to grow and be reinforced. I periodically model growth mindset to my students; not a day goes by that I do not mess up an answer on the answer key or a plus or minus symbol in an example. When these mistakes do happen, I will be the first to confess that I made a mistake but show immediately how I will fix it and try to keep that experience in mind for the future. How do I give students this opportunity? The first place I see the biggest area of improvement is feedback. Using blended learning and the station rotations model, students would have access to content but also be required to go through feedback/feedforward cycles. These cycles can be teacher to student, student to student, student to teacher, or student to self. The feedback can be on explicit math content but more importantly, on the process of growing to have a better understanding of the world, strategically within the mathematics lens. Consistently investing the time for students to be a part of the conversation is necessary. I should not be doing all of the work because the ones doing the work are doing the learning. Does this exempt me from learning alongside my students? Absolutely not, but it does empower me to model for them what learning looks like, especially as they are young adults about to go out into the real world and get big jobs (like being a teacher). This has potential to shift away from grades being the key to the future but rather learning being the open door. Does this mean throwing them into the fire and just hoping they do not get burned? Does this mean throwing them into the deep end and just hoping they can swim or survive by floating? No. Supports are needed to wade into the water, get familiar with the foundations, and work towards the deep. Within my class on creating significant learning environments, I developed resources to expand my capacity to actually implement the concepts I have been reading about.
It is not enough to just say have a growth mindset and make students say "I don't know yet". I am setting the expectation for myself to create a significant learning environment where my students can thrive and embody a growth mindset through action and I am setting myself up for success by creating, finding, and joining significant learning environments for myself as a learner. It really takes a village to learn and grow.
References
Gerstein, J. (2014, July 27). The educator and the growth mindset. User Generated Education. https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2014/07/27/the-educator-and-the-growth-mindset/
Gerstein, J. (2014b, September 28). How educators can assist learners in developing a growth mindset. User Generated Education. https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/how-educators-can-assist-learners-in-developing-a-growth-mindset/ Practical Psychology. (2021, April 9). Attribution theory (examples and what it is). Www.youtube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoTBPwMeAyo
While I have never sat through the entire movie Back to the Future, I am well aware of its premise and some of the famous lines...
Being comfortable with being uncomfortable takes time, and with the help of discussion boards for my master's program, peers have really opened my eyes to seeing bigger pictures from different perspectives. I am a firm believer that we need to move away from the factory-model structure and towards innovative practices in education but that requires change. Someone mentioned the analogy of a time machine, and if you read any of my other posts, such as I Want to Be a Butterfly and New Digital Age, New Learning Culture, you will notice how I thrive on analogies. They help me connect the dots. Sometimes, it feels as though we are in the present and choose to go back in time by continuing to implement the same educational practices that we were a part of our personal experiences. But, consider this - do we choose to go back in time year after year from the present, or have we been perpetually stuck in the past and need to climb into the time machine available to us to jump forward? Past is comfortable in some regards because we can anticipate what is going to happen. The future is what scares us because we do not know if it will follow the patterns of the past (and actually I think we know it will not follow those past patterns) so when everything around us is zipping forward and it becomes overwhelming, a way to find comfort is sticking with what we know, even at the expense of others. Monica Oslo gracefully challenged my thinking by posing questions to my reply:
She also made me consider how to teach the past to understand what mistakes we made, what is cause and effect of certain events, and how we can learn from the past perspectives to move forward into the future. For me, it is more about using the tools of today and the future and the tools of the past can be used as a bridge to the here and now. We should not necessarily force students to use the past tools just because that is what we are comfortable with or "how we were taught", only using them as they were used in the past. I teach math so the tools of right now include Desmos graphing calculator and tools like PhotoMath, SymboLab, Wolfram Alpha, etc. Why not embrace these tools? There are still a number of teachers who think students should not use calculators ever. I actually was one of those teachers a few years ago because I thought WHAT! They do not know math if they type in 2+2 to get 4, the calculators will just give them the answers!!! What needs to change in my classroom (and with my mindset) is that structures can be put in place to have students use the tool but still understand HOW and WHY the produce the results they do. This could go back to visual representations and talk about the history of computation devices (i.e. abacus, slide rule, etc.) so when the technology does fail, we understand how and why it works the way it does and rely on our brains and experiences. We can then conceptualize how to create our own work without technology through a pencil and paper. We also can discern whether or not the technology is accurate. Technology must be utilized in a way that does not just generate answers. We need to have students generate questions and justify, explain, validate or discredit a resource or "answer". We need them showing their thinking with pencil and paper, through dialogue, through motion, through any medium, but also include technology as that medium. A really great video I revisit from time to time is the 3 M's.
see
There was a particular topic I asked ChatGPT to help me check my work on an equation. While at quick glance everything looked accurate, there was actually a huge error in a calculation that resulted in a way off answer that I got. I compared my work to it, was able to tell ChatGPT exactly where its error was. It "apologized" for the error, made the correction, and bam! Our results matched. I have also asked it to make me problems and an answer key, just to see what it could do, and it created what looked like an amazing worksheet but all of the answers in the key were horribly wrong! It is not about relying on the technology to do all the work for us, but how to leverage it to build our thinking further, and we need to give students the opportunities to experience this because this is the reality of society. Another example I have heard of initial resistance but eventually embrace is spell check (check out spell checker history). I know I had weekly spelling tests in elementary school but do those still happen? Honestly I have no idea but we rely on spell checker for a lot of things. Does it catch all of our mistakes? Absolutely not, especially when we misspell a word that is another word! One of my biggest pet peeves is when people use the word "loose" for the word "lose". I do not want to loose my job! Wait, what? But as thinkers and learners, we use this tool but criticize it, analyze it, and even ignore it at times because it is not always right and we know and understand the bigger picture. Technology is only as "smart" as the user, so let's give our students and ourselves the opportunity to get smarter by seeing that technology is not replacing thinking, but we can adapt it to extend our thinking and perspective beyond what we can fathom.
References
3 M’s - media method modality and their roles in educational technology use. (2018, August 24). Www.youtube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ56_tcvocY&t=1s
Minions - what?! (2013, July 27). Www.youtube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfylJy_nMbM pajak2d. (2015). Roads?! Where we’re going we don’t need roads!!! In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3AfIvJBcGo
I resonate with Piaget’s cognitivist theory, so I constantly incorporated and applied the patterns I recognize in my life and other topics by using analogies (like riding a bike in my discussion post turned blog post New Digital Age, New Learning Culture) and personal stories (like in my post on Effective Professional Learning for Math Teachers) to foster relationships and connections with my peers. Frequently, there were remarks that these perspectives enhanced others’ learning and broadened perspectives. I would also gravitate towards other analogies, but I intentionally found discussion posts or replies that held a different viewpoint than my own. Doing so allowed me to link the new perspective to my working schema. Even when I met the minimum expectations of one initial post and at least two replies, I revisited the discussion boards and replied to ideas every time a new post was submitted. These discussion posts became the foundation for some blog posts, and I intentionally incorporated my peer’s comments (with their permission) into my writing, such as in my post Being Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable. Some of the discussion board replies turned into conversations and collaboration outside of them. I have spoken with Katie Beauchene periodically since the beginning of our journey in our master's program but recently, we engaged in class individual chat conversations, text message threads, and email exchanges to elicit feedback/feedforward on resubmitted assignments, flexible seating structures, and even components of our jobs that do not directly correspond to our class assignments. Contributions have also been made between individuals through Blackboard messaging and breakout rooms. Usually, I gauge the audience of my peers by sharing my work and perspective and then leaving the door open to receive feedback and give the same for others. Something I could try to do better is take a step back and not being so eager to be the first to speak up, but rather encourage others behind the scenes to be bold. This could enrich others' learning and teach me how to have impact in the silence, connecting dots in a new way. Every term we are encouraged to use the student/faculty lounge discussion board and I find myself trying to engage with others to do the same. When they did not get answered, I reached out to the professors, instructional assistants, and my collaborative group. I also never hesitated to ask questions during class meetings and when I got answers, I posted my own reply with that information for others to reference. Usually, if I have a question, others also have a similar question or concern, but I take the initiative to speak up and be bold, ignoring the subconscious concerns of looking incompetent or oblivious. My core collaborative group has been steady since the summer with Amanda, Hillary, and Lindsey. These relationships I have built with these beautiful women are something I will cherish for the rest of my life. We have really struggled for various reasons, such as personal illness and home ownership woes, along with balancing everything else that comes with life and being in education. Our contribution to each other’s learning and ourselves has really come in the form of encouragement. We also continue to divide and conquer readings and when someone has to miss a class, our text message thread recaps the class conversations real-time. We would connect when working on assignments and discuss our different perspectives on how to meet the rubric criteria. In the in-between, we would talk about our Halloween or Thanksgiving plans, sending pictures of our kids (or in my case, my dog Bruce). This really gets to the caring component of collaboration and learning. For this term, even though my group divided readings, I still read and annotated every reading assigned, including supplemental readings, and looked to connect them more concretely to the work I am doing for individual courses but also between current courses and past courses. One specific example is my inquiry on the difference between big hairy audacious goal (BHAG) and wildly important goal (WIG). I also found direct correlations to developing effective professional learning and creating significant learning environments. This led to a major adjustment in the implementation of my innovation plan, shifting from piloting blended learning environments using the station rotations model in my classroom to inviting others to join me through professional learning cycles so we can implement blended learning environments together. As assignments were turned in, I would take the feedback and adjust my work, as well as revisit and revise components as bigger connections emerged or more details were discovered and analyzed. Something new this term I did to authentically start connecting the dots was when certain experts would show up in videos or reading, such as Angela Duckworth, L. Dee Fink, and Grant Lichtman, I would always research further what they are currently up to. Through this, I found some incredible resources that support my learning for my masters’ program but also resources that I could integrate in the classroom immediately. Just accepting what was provided in our modules has not become enough for me; the blended learning environment I have come to love has shown me to embrace the opportunities to do my work extension of thinking, even if no one requires or encourages me to. The line between the courses has been blurred because they have become so closely related. I cannot develop effective professional learning without creating a significant learning environment for those in the professional learning sessions. There is always room to grow, so I would grade myself 99/100 for both courses. This feels arrogant but definitely justified with the work I have done up to this point to continue pushing myself to learn and grow as I work towards earning my masters’ in the spring of 2024. |
My husband lovingly teases me when I reflect on my day with him and say "I learned something new today!" because he would be surprised if I didn't learn something new.
This blog is a collection of the new things I learn along the way. Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
|